Category II: ~900 class hours
The Foreign Service Institute groups languages by the estimated time a native English speaker needs to reach professional working proficiency. Category II requires 900 hours and 36 weeks of study, and includes five languages: German, Haitian Creole, Indonesian, Malay, and Swahili.
These languages are moderately distant from English in grammar, vocabulary, and phonetic structure. German shares Germanic roots and familiar grammatical concepts with English, while the others represent different language families entirely. Despite their linguistic distance, Category II languages present fewer structural obstacles than more distantly related languages, making them learnable within a moderate timeframe for English speakers seeking professional competency.
Languages in this tier
| Language | FSI hours | Writing system | FSI harder? |
|---|---|---|---|
| German | ~900 hrs | Latin | — |
| Haitian Creole | ~900 hrs | Latin | — |
| Indonesian | ~900 hrs | Latin | — |
| Malay | ~900 hrs | Latin | — |
| Swahili | ~900 hrs | Latin | — |
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Canonical class-hours and weeks are the FSI figures for this tier, from the US State Dept FSI list (public domain), verified June 2026. How we compile this — confirm against state.gov on an operator pass. Speaker counts, language-family and region data from Wikipedia (Ethnologue figures), licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.