Easiest languages to learn for English speakers

Every list on this subject cites the same source and almost none of them shows it. The US State Department has to decide how many weeks of training a diplomat gets before a posting, so it publishes a ranking of 59 languages by the time a native English speaker needs. Its top group is the actual answer to the question, and it has nine names on it, not one.

What is the short answer?

Nine languages, and seven of them tie. The Foreign Service Institute of the US Department of State groups the languages it teaches into four categories by the time a student usually needs to reach a set proficiency, and labels Category I “Languages close to English”. It lists Danish, Dutch, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian and Swedish at 24 weeks each, and French and Spanish at 30 weeks. At the 23 class hours a week the same page describes, that is 552 class hours for the first seven and 690 for the last two.

Two things about that list surprise most people. German is not on it: the language English is most closely related to sits one tier down, at about 36 weeks. And Spanish, the language English speakers choose more than any other, is at the slow end of the easy group, six weeks behind Italian and Portuguese. The page gives no reason for either, and this page will not invent one. What it will do is show the whole table, because the ranking only means something once you can see what sits below it.

The US State Department's Foreign Service Institute lists nine Category I languages as closest to English, budgeted at 24 to 30 weeks and 552 to 690 class hours: Danish, Dutch, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian and Swedish at 24 weeks, and French and Spanish at 30 (state.gov, read 12 September 2026).

Which nine languages are easiest, and how long does each take?

The nine split evenly by ancestry: four Germanic languages, which share English's basic grammar and everyday vocabulary, and five Romance languages, which share the large part of English vocabulary that came in through French and Latin. The FSI does not rank within the category beyond the two week counts, so the honest reading is a tie at 24 weeks with French and Spanish slightly behind, and not a podium.

One detail is worth knowing before you repeat these numbers. The class hours are exactly the week counts multiplied by 23: 24 times 23 is 552 and 30 times 23 is 690. An earlier edition of the same table, which most articles still copy, converted the weeks at 25 hours and printed 600 to 750. If a source gives you 750 hours for Spanish or 600 for Italian without a retrieval date, it is quoting the superseded page. The week counts are the durable figure.

What is the full ranking, from easiest to hardest?

The page names 59 languages across the four categories, and the distribution is lopsided in a way that matters for anyone choosing. Nine languages are close to English. Five, including German, sit in a middle tier. Forty are classed as hard, at about 44 weeks, and the page says in the same breath that this list is not exhaustive. Exactly five are called super-hard, at 88 weeks, and every one of them uses a different writing system from English.

The Foreign Service Institute budgets 2,200 class hours over 88 weeks for its five super-hard languages, Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese and Korean, roughly four times the 552 hours it allows for the fastest Category I languages (US Department of State, read 12 September 2026).

Read the bottom of the table against the top and the shape of the ranking is clear. The step from Category I to Category II is small, about 138 to 276 hours. The step to Category III adds another 184. The step to Category IV more than doubles the budget. Distance from English is not a smooth slope; it has one cliff, and it is the writing system plus a vocabulary with no shared roots.

Are the easiest languages the ones people actually study?

Partly, and the exceptions are instructive. The 2024 Duolingo Language Report, drawn from the company's own learners between October 2023 and September 2024, ranks the ten most studied languages worldwide as English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Italian, Korean, Chinese, Portuguese and Hindi. Set English aside, since this page is for people who already have it, and cross the remaining nine with the FSI table: four are Category I, one is Category II, one is Category III, and three are Category IV.

The Duolingo report adds one detail that matters for an English speaker in particular: Spanish is the most studied language in 33 countries, including the United States, and French in 16. So the world's default second language for English speakers is in the easy category but at its slow end, while two of the languages the report singles out, Japanese steady in fifth place since 2021 and Chinese up from ninth to eighth, both cost four times as many hours. Nobody is choosing by the table. Nor should they, entirely; but they should know what they are choosing.

How long will Spanish, Italian or French really take me?

The FSI figure is a class-hour budget for full-time students, and the hours do not change when the schedule does; only the calendar does. Below is the same 552 and 690 class hours divided by four ordinary schedules, assuming study every single day, which nobody manages, so read the rows as floors rather than forecasts. The 552 column covers Danish, Dutch, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian and Swedish; the 690 column covers French and Spanish.

The 690 class hours the State Department budgets for Spanish is 30 weeks at its full-time pace, about eleven months at two hours a day, and about three years and nine months at half an hour a day.

Two caveats belong next to those rows. First, the FSI target is an integrated score of 3 on the Interagency Language Roundtable scale, which is the standard for running a meeting in the language, not for ordering dinner; most learners are aiming lower and will get there sooner. Second, the published week counts describe a week of 23 hours in class plus 17 of self-study, so a 24-week language is closer to 960 hours of total effort than to 552. The full argument about what the hours measure is in how long it takes to learn a language.

Why does the easy list look the way it does?

The FSI page describes Category I only as “languages close to English” and does not elaborate, but the list explains itself. English is a Germanic language whose vocabulary was rebuilt over centuries by French and Latin, so it sits with one foot in each family: Danish, Dutch, Norwegian and Swedish share its grammar and its most common words, while French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian and Spanish share the longer, more formal words English took from Latin. A learner of any of the nine already knows a large share of the vocabulary on sight and reads the same alphabet from the first day.

What the ranking cannot tell you is which of the nine will be easiest for you, because that depends on what you can practise. A language you can hear and speak every day will beat a nominally easier one you study alone from a book, and the FSI programme these figures come from is built on exactly that: more than half of every training week is classroom time, spent producing the language out loud and being corrected on the spot. The hour budget assumes that mix. A learner who supplies only the reading half should expect to need more of the calendar, not less.

Frequently asked questions

Related research

The same table read for its hours rather than its ranking, alongside the ILR proficiency scale and Cambridge's guided-learning-hours figures, is how long does it take to learn a language. One Category III language costed for one country, with the MLA enrollment census, is what learning Hebrew costs an American. The same question turned around, how hard English is for speakers of these languages, is answered from the linguistic-distance and EF EPI data in is English hard to learn.