Which is the hardest language to learn?

While some attempts have been made, it is very difficult to determine the most difficult language. A learner's native language is very important when learning a new language as an adult, thus rendering universal rankings of difficulty meaningless. A native English speaker will learn Dutch much more easily than a Japanese native would. The closer the native language is to the target language, the easier language acquisition will be. 

The Foreign Service Institute (FSI) of the US Department of State compiled a list with 63 languages and after analyzing their difficulty for English native speakers. There are three categories of languages:

Category I: Languages closely related to English (23-24 weeks)

• - Dutch
• - French
• - Italian
• - Norwegian
• - Portuguese
• - Spanish 
• - Swedish
• ...

(30-36 weeks)

• - German
• - Indonesian
• ...

Category II: Languages with significant linguistic and/or cultural differences from English (44 weeks)

• - Czech
• - Greek
• - Hindi
• - Polish
• - Persian
• - Thai
• - Turkish
• - Vietnamese
• - ...

Category III: Languages which are quite difficult for native English speakers (88 weeks)

• - Arabic
• - Cantonese
• - Chinese (Mandarin)
• - Japanese
• - Korean

So of the 10 languages I set out to learn 6 are in Category I (German, English, French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese), 3 are in Category III (Chinese, Japanese and Korean) and I guess Russian must be in Category II, though I didn’t find it in the FSI’s list.

What are the most spoken languages?

There are a few ways you can measure use of language. Mandarin Chinese (1) has by far the most native speakers with more than one billion natives, followed by Spanish (2), English (3), Hindi/Urdu (4), Arabic (5), Bengali (6) and Portuguese (7). However, when secondary speakers enter the equation, the ranking looks something like this: 

1. Mandarin Chinese (1.12 billion)
2. English (480 million)
3. Spanish (320 million)
4. Russian (285 million)
5. French (265 million)
6. Hindi/Urdu (250 million)
7. Arabic (221 million)

In other words, if you learn any or all of these seven languages, you can communicate with a lot of people. If you can reach them, that is. The most used language in business is still English and the most used languages by the internet population are the following:

1. English (295.4 million)
2. Chinese (110.0 million)
3. Spanish (86.0 million)
4. Japanese (67.1 million)
5. German (55.3 million)
6. French (33.9 million)
7. Korean (31.3 million)
8. Italian (30.4 million)
9. Portuguese (29.4 million)
10. Russian (22 million)

Coincidentally, these are exactly the ten languages I’m studying and that I want to master until I’m 30. I’ve always wanted to be able to communicate with as many people as possible in their language. Somehow I intuitively chose the ten most used languages in the  internet. Do you think it’s more useful to learn the most spoken languages as opposed to the ones I learn? I will write more about why you should learn languages and which languages are best to choose in another blog post.