I’ve been studying Arabic for about 10 months now and had some thoughts that I wanted to post about.  It’s challenging, but I didn’t know how challenging it was exactly when compared to other languages even though I knew it was on the more challenging end of the spectrum.  Turns out someone has measured (or attempted to) the amount of “class time” a native English speaker would need in order to learn a language.  In general, I’ve found my language ability improves most when I complement time in the classroom with time practicing with native speakers (which I think would be a more useful measure of time in tandem with “class time”).

The data for the chord diagram below was retrieved from a language wiki site that used a study from the Foreign Service Institute.  The number of class hours for each of these languages communicates more a scale of difficulty than the exact number of hours it would take to speak a language (as not all learners are equal).  In general, this seemed to be a pretty comprehensive list of world languages so I thought it could look nice in a chord diagram.

Link to data

In real terms though, being able to speak with millions of additional people is fantastic and I would encourage all to pursue such an endeavor.  As for measuring my ability to communicate globally in percentage terms perhaps viewing language learning in the context of world language use is a scale reserved for those with unique skills in language acquisition.