Most abandoned language attempts fail at the choosing stage rather than the studying stage. Someone picks a language because it sounds impressive, discovers eight months later that they have no reason to use it, and stops. The US Foreign Service Institute has published rough guidance on this for decades based on how long its own diplomats take to reach professional working proficiency, and the spread is wide: around 600 to 750 class hours for Spanish, French and Italian, and roughly 2,200 for Arabic, Mandarin, Japanese and Korean. That difference is not a reason to avoid the harder ones. It is a reason to be honest about why you want them.
The ten options here separate along purpose as much as difficulty. Spanish is the most immediately usable for an English speaker, official in twenty countries and shares a great deal of vocabulary with English through Latin. French carries official status in around thirty countries across Europe, Africa, Canada and the Caribbean, and its written form opens a large literary and diplomatic tradition. Italian is the smallest of the three by reach and the most rewarding for anyone drawn to art, food, opera or a specific region rather than to career leverage. German has four grammatical cases and a habit of building long compound nouns, and its main draw is engineering, philosophy, and a large European job market.
The harder group asks for more upfront. Mandarin Chinese has no verb conjugation and no grammatical gender, which surprises beginners, but it demands tones and thousands of characters. Japanese runs three writing systems side by side and layers politeness levels into its grammar. Korean is the gentlest entry of the three to read, since hangul was created under King Sejong in the 1440s as a deliberately learnable alphabet, though the grammar and honorifics take much longer. Arabic presents a split between Modern Standard Arabic, used in writing and broadcast, and the regional spoken varieties people converse in day to day, so choosing it means choosing a dialect too.
Hindi and Turkish round out the list. Hindi is written in Devanagari and gives access to an enormous media culture and one of the fastest-growing economies. Turkish is agglutinative, stacking suffixes onto word stems, and it has been written in a Latin alphabet since the 1928 reform, which makes the first weeks far easier than the structure suggests.
The questions work through motive and circumstance rather than preference alone. They cover what you want the language for, how much study time you can protect each week, whether you learn better by ear or by reading, how much tolerance you have for memorization, where you are likely to travel or work, and whether you have people around you who already speak something.
The result names one language and explains why your answers pointed there, with an honest sense of the commitment involved. A recommendation you can sustain for two years beats a more impressive one you drop in March.
Possible results:
- Chinese
- Spanish
- French
- Italian
- Japanese
- Arabic
- German
- Hindi
- Korean
- Turkish
