(Picture: Getty; Foreign Service Institute)

Remember when you sat your GCSE Spanish oral?

Remember how after five years, you still only knew ‘me gustaria visitar el biblioteca’ and ‘en la fin de semana, voy al cine’ and still passed with flying colours?

The sad fact is, no one really knows any languages at school. And even sadder is the fact that apparently, it only takes up to 24 weeks to learn the fundamentals of French, Spanish and Italian.

The Foreign Service Institute has released a map ranking language difficulty, based on how long it takes an English speaker to reach ‘Speaking and Reading Proficiency’.

It takes 575-600 hours to become proficient in languages like Afrikaans, Danish, Dutch, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian and (surprisingly), Swedish.

(Picture: Foreign Service Institute)

The hardest western European language? German. That takes around 750 hours to learn.

It’s the only Category II language (taking up to 30 weeks to learn) – everything else should take less. Eastern European languages like Slovenian, Polish, Latvian and Hungarian however, are some of the hardest in the world – taking around 1100 hours to master.

The hardest languages for English speakers to master are Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese and Korean, taking 88 weeks and around 2,220 hours to learn.

So if you’re struggling with your new Mandarin Duolingo course, don’t fret. You’ve doing a million times better than most of us.

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