Russian is not on that list
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He said the most difficult are Chinese, Korean, Arabic and Russian. Actually Russian is a hard langauge but it did not make the hardest group. The actual list is Chinese, Korean, Arabic and Japanese...with Japanese getting a special note, its the hardest language to learn for speakers of English. Thank goodness they are an ally!
They list the last category as requiring 88 weeks of study and one year in-country. (btw, each week is a full 25 hours of classroom time, so the total is 2200 hours of class room study.
Most people self studying do about 5 hours a week. So at the rate of 5 hours per week, you'll need 440 weeks (assuming no attrition)...which is why 99% of people who self study never succeed...they get frustrated at the lack of success after a few years, they don't realize they didn't have a realistic plan, and were studying at a rate that would bring them to fluency in over 8 years....
anyway so then you get the advice not to bother.
It's true, if you don't have plans to study like a madman...you might want to consider a category 1 language, which is much, much less time to learn. (Spanish being the best bet)Robert 10 May 2008, 05:09 - Report