How hard is it to learn Spanish?
When you look at the scale of all languages around the world, learning Spanish is about as difficult as learning French, Italian, or Portuguese.
Surprisingly, a few other languages were also considered at the same level — Afrikaans, Norwegian, Swedish, and Dutch included.
According to the US STATE DEPARTMENT, there are some similarities in learning specific languages when one is a native English speaker. All it takes is a little bit of time and effort, and you can be proficient in no time.
Spanish (and the other languages Web Watch mentioned) are all considered relatively EASY, with an average of about 24 weeks worth of time, and around 600 class hours of learning to become proficient.
More difficult languages, which can take up to 44 weeks and over 1100 hours of learning include Polish, Hindi, Russian, Thai, Hebrew, and Serbian.
And then we get to the crazy difficult languages like Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. These languages don’t use the traditional alphabets English speakers are used to seeing, adding to the challenge. To become proficient on one of these languages, you’re looking at more than 1-1/2 years worth of effort, and 2,200 hours of learning.
Yeah, that’s a lot of studying just to be able to read the iPod instruction manual in its native language.