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Hours to Learn a Language, by FSI Difficulty Tier
Every FSI difficulty tier, side by side, with the canonical class hours and weeks a native English speaker needs to reach professional working proficiency — and how many languages sit in each. Click any tier for the full language list, or use the calculator to pin down a specific language. Figures are the published US State Dept FSI numbers, used verbatim.
Find a language tutor →| Difficulty tier | Canonical class hours | Weeks (full-time) | Languages | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Category I | ~600-750 | ~24-30 | 12 | Afrikaans, Catalan, Danish |
| Category II | ~900 | ~36 | 5 | German, Haitian Creole, Indonesian |
| Category III | ~1100 | ~44 | 53 | Albanian, Amharic, Armenian |
| Category IV | ~2200 | ~88 | 5 | Arabic, Cantonese, Japanese |
Class hours and weeks are the canonical FSI figures, from the US State Dept FSI list (public domain), used verbatim and last verified June 2026. How we compile and re-verify this data. Speaker counts, language-family and region data from Wikipedia (Ethnologue figures), licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.
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