In this article
The U.S. Department of State sorts the languages it teaches diplomats and other U.S. government employees into four categories by how long a native English speaker usually needs to reach professional proficiency. Spanish and French take 30 weeks of full-time study. Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese and Korean take 88 weeks.
This is the list most articles mean when they call a language hard. We checked it against the State Department's own page on October 24, 2026, and against an archived copy from December 31, 2023. The class hours and the list of hard languages have both changed, and most copies online still show the older version.
Key figures
30 weeks
Spanish and French, the easiest group for English speakers (Category I)
About 36 weeks
German, Indonesian, Malay, Swahili and Haitian Creole (Category II)
88 weeks
Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese and Korean (Category IV)
7 languages
dropped from the Category III list since the 2023 version
The four FSI language categories
| Category | Typical time | Class hours | Languages |
|---|---|---|---|
| Category I: close to English | 24 to 30 weeks | 552 to 690 | Danish, Dutch, French, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish |
| Category II | About 36 weeks | 828 | German, Haitian Creole, Indonesian, Malay, Swahili |
| Category III: hard languages | About 44 weeks | 1,012 | Albanian, Amharic, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Bengali, Bulgarian, Burmese, Czech, Dari, Estonian, Farsi, Finnish, Georgian, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Kazakh, Khmer, Kurdish, Kyrgyz, Lao, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Mongolian, Nepali, Polish, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovak, Slovenian, Tajiki, Thai, Turkish, Turkmen, Ukrainian, Urdu, Uzbek, Vietnamese |
| Category IV: super-hard languages | 88 weeks | 2,200 | Arabic, Chinese (Cantonese), Chinese (Mandarin), Japanese, Korean |
The timelines describe the State Department's own students: adults studying full time, about 23 hours a week in class plus 17 hours of self-study. The goal is a score of 3 on the Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR) scale in speaking and listening, roughly the level needed to work in the language. The department notes that the real time varies with a learner's aptitude, earlier language study and time in class.
What changed since 2023
An archived copy of the same page from December 31, 2023 shows a different version. It is the one most websites still quote.
| December 2023 page | October 2026 page | |
|---|---|---|
| Published by | Foreign Service Institute, School of Language Studies | National Foreign Affairs Training Center, Directorate of Language Studies |
| Proficiency goal | Speaking 3 and Reading 3 on the ILR scale | An integrated 3 in speaking and listening on the ILR scale |
| Category I class hours | 600 to 750 | 552 to 690 |
| Category II class hours | 900 | 828 |
| Category III class hours | 1,100 | 1,012 |
| Category IV class hours | 2,200 | 2,200 |
| Languages listed in Category III | 47 | 40 |
Seven languages are no longer on the Category III list: Icelandic, Sinhala, Somali, Tagalog, Tamil, Telugu and Tibetan. The page does not say why, and it already described that list as not exhaustive, so their absence does not mean they became easier.
The new hours follow from the 23-hour class week: 24 weeks is 552 hours, 36 weeks is 828 and 44 weeks is 1,012. Category IV still says 2,200 hours, although 88 weeks at 23 hours a week would be 2,024.
Why some languages take longer
The State Department describes Category III as languages with significant linguistic or cultural differences from English, and Category IV as exceptionally difficult for native English speakers. The usual reasons are a new writing system (Arabic script, Chinese characters, Japanese kana and kanji), tones that change a word's meaning (Mandarin, Cantonese, Vietnamese, Thai) and grammar far from English.
The list only measures distance from English. A Spanish speaker learning Portuguese, or a Hindi speaker learning Urdu, starts much closer than an English speaker does.
What the list means for interpreting
An ILR 3 is general professional proficiency. Interpreting in a courtroom or a hospital also takes interpreting technique, legal or medical vocabulary in both languages, and, where one exists, a passed certification exam. See what a certified court interpreter is and the state court interpreter certification guide.
AMS schedules interpreters in every Category IV language: Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese and Korean.