Most Difficult Languages for English Speakers

Can you name the major languages that are the most difficult for English speakers to learn?

Difficulty source: The US Dept. of State's School of Language Studies. https://www.state.gov/foreign-language-training/

Native speaker population source: Each language's Wikipedia page

Category III and Category IV are the highest difficulty tiers School of Language Studies ranking.

Note: Per the difficulty source, this list is non-exhaustive. Languages that aren't consistently taught at the School of Language Studies are not included. Only languages with more than 10 million native speakers are included.

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Last updated: March 15, 2022

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First submitted	March 15, 2022
Times taken	83
Average score	62.9%
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Difficulty Tier	Number of Native Speakers	Language
Category IV	~920 million	Mandarin
Category IV	~350 million	Arabic
Category III	~341 million	Hindi
Category III	~300 million	Bengali
Category III	~150 million	Russian
Category IV	~128 milion	Japanese
Category III	~82 million	Telugu
Category IV	~80 million	Cantonese
Category IV	~80 million	Korean
Category III	~80 million	Turkish
Category III	~76 million	Vietnamese
Category III	~75 million	Tamil
Category III	~70 million	Farsi
Category III	~62 million	Urdu
Category III	~45 million	Polish
Category III	~40 million	Ukrainian
Category III	~36 million	Thai
Category III	~34 million	Uzbek

Difficulty Tier	Number of Native Speakers	Language
Category III	~33 million	Burmese
Category III	~32 million	Amharic
Category III	~30 million	Azerbaijani
Category III	~30 million	Lao
Category III	~23 million	Tagalog
Category III	~22 million	Somali
Category III	~21 million	Serbo-Croatian
Category III	~21 million	Kurdish
Category III	~21 million	Dari
Category III	~17 million	Sinhala
Category III	~16 million	Khmer
Category III	~16 million	Nepali
Category III	~14 million	Greek
Category III	~13 million	Kazakh
Category III	~13 million	Hungarian
Category III	~11 million	Czech
Category III	~11 million	Turkmen

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