and Thai — and they take approximately 44 weeks or 1,100 class hours to learn. Arabic, Chinese Cantonese, Chinese Mandarin, Japanese, and Korean are the only languages listed in the fourth ...

Rather than an alphabet, Chinese has thousands of characters. On top of that, the language is tonal, so how you speak a word can completely change its meaning. So, why learn Chinese? For one ...

America’s State Department places the languages it teaches diplomats into four categories (see chart), with estimates of how long they take to learn them ranging from 24 to 88 weeks. What ...

It takes an average of 8 or more years to become fluent in American Sign Language (ASL). The proficiency chart below (created by American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages) shows levels of ...

When Balkema, of Conway, was getting ready for middle school, he and his parents agreed learning ... language. You need contact hours and you need it for a long period of time," she said. At the ...

The time it takes ... Similar languages are easier to learn than vastly different languages. From the perspective of English, Afrikaans and Dutch are quite similar while Arabic and Chinese are ...

Editorial Note: Forbes Advisor may earn a commission on sales made from partner links on this page, but that doesn't affect our editors' opinions or evaluations. Learning a new language requires ...

By comparison, the Welsh language takes an average of 1,040 hours of tuition, more time than is required to learn Swahili. The second quickest to learn is Portuguese at 575 hours, followed by ...