Catagory Four Language - Japanese

According to the U.S. Department of State's Foreign Service Institute, Japanese is one of the most difficult languages to learn. The Institute, which oversees the training of U.S. diplomats, catagorizes languages into four groups, from Category 1 (easiest to learn) to Category 4 (most difficult). Japanese is a Category 4 language—one of four—the others being Arabic, Chinese, and Korean. Here is the complete breakdown for the major languages:

Category 1

To attain "professional" proficiency: 24 weeks of full-time study

• Danish


• Dutch


• French


• Italian


• Norwegian


• Portuguese


• Romanian


• Spanish


• Swahili


• Swedish

Category 2

To attain "professional" proficiency: 32 weeks of full-time study

• Bulgarian


• Dari


• German


• Greek


• Hindi


• Hausa


• Indonesian


• Malay


• Urdu

Category 3

To attain "professional" proficiency: 44 weeks of full-time study

• Amharic


• Armenian


• Azeri


• Bengali


• Burmese


• Czech


• Finnish


• Georgian


• Hebrew


• Hungarian


• Kazakh


• Kyrgyz


• Khmer


• Lao


• Nepali


• Filipino (Tagalog)


• Polish


• Russian


• Serbo-Croatian


• Sinhala


• Thai


• Tamil


• Turkish


• Uzbek


• Vietnamese

Category 4

To attain "professional" proficiency: 88 weeks of full-time study

• Arabic


• Chinese


• Japanese


• Korean