694: FSI Levels Nov 1, 2016

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Suppose that you're a native English-speaker and you have exactly 575-600 hours on your hands, which would be the best choice of languages to start to learn? The Foreign Service Institute has ranked languages by how difficult it would be to learn from an English-speaking background into 5 levels, level 5 being the hardest. If you continue supposing from before, you'd likely want to learn a Romance language, or a few select North Germanic (e.g. Swedish or Danish) and West Germanic (e.g. Dutch or Afrikaans) because they all have fairly similar grammar and vocabulary, though not German nor Icelandic as even since they're related in many ways, they have complex grammar. This categorization does not take into account certain things like phonetics, but even if it did, the categories are rough estimations, and could not apply to all people with their different brains and experiences.

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