Category 1: Languages most like English
French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish, Dutch, Norwegian, Afrikaans, etc.
Weeks to Achieve Goal: 24
Class Hours to Achieve Goal: 600
Category 2: Languages with significant differences from English
Albanian, Amharic, Azerbaijai, Bulgarian, Finnish, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Khmer, Latvian, Nepali, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Tagalog, Thai, Turkish, Urdu, Vietnamese, Zulu, etc.
Weeks to Achieve Goal: 44
Class Hours to Achieve Goal: 1,100
Caegory 3: Languages that are exceptionally difficult for native English speakers
Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Korean
Weeks to Achieve Goal: 88*
Class Hours to Achieve Goal: 2,200
SOURCE: State Department {vbar} * Second year is in the country
Elizabeth Chang, a Magazine copy editor, writes regularly for The Post.
