How we compile language-learning hours and difficulty
We build one honest page per language from the US State Department's Foreign Service Institute (FSI) difficulty list — public-domain government facts — enriched with encyclopedic speaker and family data. This page explains how, what we attribute, and what we deliberately do not do.
Who’s behind this site
Hours to Learn a Language is an independent publisher operated by VentureCorp, Inc. We are not a language school, app or course provider, and we do not accept payment to change an estimate. The site answers one question: roughly how long does it take a native English speaker to learn a given language?
Where our data comes from
| Data | Source | Used for |
|---|---|---|
| FSI difficulty category, class hours & weeks (the moat) | US Department of State, Foreign Service Institute (FSI) — U.S.-government public domain | Every per-language headline and the difficulty-tier comparison |
| Native-speaker counts, language family, regions, writing system | Wikipedia ‘List of languages by number of native speakers’ (Ethnologue figures) & per-language infoboxes — licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 | The enrichment block on each language page |
Attribution. Speaker counts, language-family and region data from Wikipedia (Ethnologue figures), licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. The FSI hours/weeks figures are U.S.-government public-domain facts (not copyrightable) and are used verbatim.
Source-capture caveat. state.gov returned an empty response to our data-centre crawler, so the FSI per-category figures were captured from the canonical Wikibooks mirror (they match the State Department page verbatim). Confirm each language’s category against state.gov/foreign-language-training on an operator browser pass before publishing.
How we calculate
Each language is taken from the official FSI list with its difficulty category, class hours and weeks recorded verbatim — we never invent, round or recompute these. We then join encyclopedic enrichment (native-speaker count, family, region, writing system). The per-language headline is ‘~X hours to learn <language>’ using the FSI hours figure, citing the State Department source.
What we deliberately leave out. We name no ‘best’ app, course or tutor and rank no products — our method guides are neutral and point back to the language’s own demands. We also do not present FSI’s full-time classroom hours as a casual self-study promise; real pace varies by learner.
Independence & how we make money
Some links on this site may be affiliate links to learning partners; if you act on one we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Partners never see or influence which hours, categories or facts we publish, and no placement is for sale.
Keeping it current
FSI revises its list infrequently, so we re-run the full pull annually and re-verify each category against state.gov. Native-speaker figures from per-language infoboxes (flagged on those pages) are re-checked on publish. Current verification: June 2026.
Corrections
Spot an error? Tell us and we’ll fix it. Contact us →