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.
- Weeks, full-time
- ~36
- Languages in tier
- 5
- Tier
- Category II
Turning the hours into study
The FSI figure is class hours to professional proficiency — convert it into a sustainable weekly pace, front-load an unfamiliar writing system, and build a daily habit. Casual self-study takes longer than the full-time estimate.
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 | — |
12-week language study planner
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Common questions
How many class hours does an FSI Category II language take?
About 900 class hours — roughly 36 weeks of full-time instruction — to reach professional working proficiency, per the US State Department's FSI.
Which languages are in FSI Category II?
5 of the FSI-taught languages sit in Category II, including German, Haitian Creole, Indonesian, Malay. The full list is on this page, with each language's own hours page linked.
Compare every difficulty tier → · A study plan for this tier → · All 75 languages ranked →
Canonical class-hours and weeks are the FSI figures for this tier, 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.