The U.S. Thinks It’s Harder to Learn Polish or Greek Than Swahili or Malay

04.04.2024 - 00:09 / atlasobscura.com / Mark Twain

For English-speakers, Romanian is easier to learn than German. And you’ll be speaking Swahili sooner than Polish.

How is that? Because the Foreign Service Institute says so. Located in Arlington, Virginia, the FSI is the U.S. government’s main provider of foreign affairs training, including language courses.

As the chief learning organization for the State Department, the FSI is where diplomats go to study the languages they will need on foreign postings. The Institute has a very practical approach to languages, dividing them into four categories, depending solely on how long it takes to learn them.

This map shows how the FSI judges the difficulty of European languages. Note that the Institute only teaches languages that are required for diplomatic intercourse; hence the gray spots on the map.

You won’t find any courses in Basque (the area straddling the Franco-Spanish border), Breton (in the “nose” of France), Welsh (in, ehm, Wales), or Scots or Irish Gaelic in Arlington. In the countries where those minority languages are spoken, you’ll get by with Spanish, French, and English.

English, by the way, is a “Category 0” language (also gray on the map), meaning that Americans are expected to be proficient in it. English is of course an official language in Ireland and the UK, but also in Malta (although it also has its native Maltese language, which is based on Sicilian Arabic and is the only Semitic language to have official status in the European Union).

“Category I” languages (in red on the map) are the easiest for English speakers, who should be able to reach reading and speaking proficiency within approximately 24–30 weeks (i.e. a little less than half a year of intense study).

These languages include both Germanic ones (Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish) and Romance ones (French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian). That may seem strange, since English is more closely related to the former than the latter.

However, the peculiar history of English means that it is heavily influenced by French (and Latin), especially in vocabulary. One study says that the share of Latin and French words in English is greater than that of Germanic origin (29% each, versus 26%).

German, on the other hand, might share a lot of basic vocab with English, but according to the FSI it is a “Category II” language (orange)—meaning that it would require around 36 weeks of intense study to master written and spoken proficiency.

That doesn’t quite chime with the experience of Mark Twain, who wrote that:

“(m)y philological studies have satisfied me that a gifted person ought to learn English (barring spelling and pronouncing) in thirty hours, French in thirty days, and German in thirty years. It seems manifest, then, that