These are the hardest languages to learn for English speakers

Learning a new language is always going to be a big commitment. Unless of course, you're a supremely gifted individual.

Interestingly, some languages take longer for English speakers to pick up than others; that's according to a report from America's Foreign Service Institute (FSI), which teaches languages to diplomats.

By estimating how long it takes to learn each language to a 'professional working proficiency', the report has placed a number of the world's languages in four categories from the easiest to the hardest to learn.

However, these estimates assume that the learner is on a FSI course, and therefore has a "very good or better aptitude for classroom learning of foreign languages".

It still makes for a fascinating insight into how much time it takes to master another tongue.

Danish

Dutch

French

Italian

Norwegian

Portuguese

Romanian

Spanish

Swedish

Category 2: 36 weeks to learn

German

Haitian creole

Indonesian

Malay

Swahili

Category 3: 44 weeks to learn

Albanian

Amharic

Armenian

Azerbaijani

Bengali

Bulgarian

Burmese

Czech

Dari

Estonian

Farsi

Finnish

Georgian

Greek

Gujarati

Hausa

Hebrew

Hindi

Hungarian

Icelandic

Kazakh

Khmer

Kurdish

Kyrgyz

Lao

Latvian

Lithuanian

Macedonian

Mongolian

Nepali

Pashto

Polish

Russian

Serbo-Croatian

Sinhala

Slovenian

Slovak

Somali

Tagalog

Tajiki

Tamil

Telugu

Thai

Tibetan

Turkish

Turkmen

Ukrainian

Urdu

Uzbek

Vietnamese

Category 4: 88 weeks to learn

Arabic

Chinese

Japanese

Korean

HT Quartz

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