US Diplomats Struggle With Japanese, Korean, and Chinese
The U.S. State Department classifies languages based on the amount of time its diplomats take to learn them. Category IV languages take the most time, and are also known as “Super Hard Languages”.
In this category are Arabic, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. Diplomats need approximately 2200 class hours to reach basic professional fluency.
By contrast, they need only a third of the time to reach the same level of proficiency in Category I languages. These include French and Spanish. The difference in learning time may be explained by the fact that Category IV languages have much less in common with English.
For starters, English speakers have a head start when they learn Spanish, because a large portion of Spanish vocabulary has a direct equivalent in English. For instance, the words "actor," "total," "tropical," and "perfume" are exactly the same in English and Spanish. Unfortunately for English speakers, the vocabulary of East Asian languages are much less related to English vocabulary.
To complicate things, Chinese and Japanese writing systems are not totally phonetic. This means that each time a learner sees a new word, they need to know its pronunciation, as well as recognize its written form. Learners must master about three thousand characters in order to read a newspaper.
English speakers also need to wrap their heads around the grammar of Category IV languages. While not inherently more difficult than that of Spanish or French, grammar of Chinese, Korean and Japanese is significantly different from English, which can cause headaches for learners.
