Hindi, Urdu rated among second most difficult languages to learn for native English speakers

Answer: Akhbaar Road (Representational Image)

If you are a native English speaker, Japanese, Chinese, Arabic and Korean are the toughest languages to learn - taking an average of 2200 hours to reach a certain proficiency level.

In comparison, Indian languages like Hindi, Urdu, and Bengali take half as much time, according to a list by US Foreign Service Institute.

A native English speaker can learn Afrikaans, Dutch, French, Italian, and Spanish in as little as 600 hours or 23-24 weeks. German is relatively tougher as it takes 750 hours to learn.

After devoting the above stated time a learner will reach “Speaking 3: General Professional Proficiency in Speaking (S3)” and “Reading 3: General Professional Proficiency in Reading (R3)” level.

In terms of native speakers, Chinese, which is alternatively used for its two branch Cantonese and Mandarin, is by far the world’s most spoken language. As many as 982 million people in the world speak Chinese as their first language.

Hindi, one of the official languages of the Indian government, is spoken by 460 million native speakers. Overall, 650 million people speak Hindi across the world.

English, practically the lingua franca of the world, has 375 million native speakers and about 1.5 billion total speakers. Spanish, which is widely spoken in Latin America and parts of Europe has 330 million native and total 420 million speakers.

The next biggest language in terms of native speakers is Portuguese which is regarded by 216 million people as their first language.

Languages apart from being cultural phenomena, also provide space for commercial market and employment. In 2018, the global language services industry market size reached just over $45 billion, doubling in the last nine years. It is forecasted to rise to almost $56.2 billion by 2021.