The US State Dept FSI estimates the class hours to reach professional proficiency in 75 languages — from ~600 hours to ~2,200. Look up yours, compare difficulty tiers, and plan your study. Real State Department numbers, used verbatim.
Get the verbatim FSI class-hours answer for any language — or open the study-hours calculator · see all 75 ranked
FSI groups every language it teaches into four tiers by the class hours a native English speaker needs to reach professional working proficiency — from ~600 to ~2,200. Pick a tier for its full language list.
One sortable table of every FSI-taught language — official class hours, writing system and language family, hardest first. Real State Department numbers, no scores of our own.
See the full ranking →Pick a language to see roughly how many class hours and weeks the FSI estimates it takes to reach professional proficiency — or browse the full A–Z index. Open the study-hours calculator →
Turn the FSI hours for your language into a realistic 12-week study schedule. Free.
Every hours figure is the US State Department Foreign Service Institute’s published estimate — never invented, rounded or recomputed. Public-domain government data.
Each language page cites the FSI list, and speaker/family enrichment is attributed to Wikipedia (Ethnologue figures, CC BY-SA 4.0).
We re-check every category and figure against state.gov on each yearly refresh — most recently June 2026. How we compile this data →
Plan & compare: see all 75 languages ranked from hardest to easiest, compare every difficulty tier side by side, build a study plan by tier, or read the 75-language data study. All figures trace to the US State Dept FSI list.
Turn the FSI hours for your language into a realistic 12-week study schedule. Free.