Eleanor H. Jorden (2000) reported recently that the Foreign Service
Institute of the U.S. State Department “has divided the languages
of the world into four categories, depending on how many hours
of formal study each required, on the average, for an American to
achieve a designated level of oral proficiency.” Category 4 consists
of Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Arabic. They are “the most dif-
ficult [languages] for native speakers of English.…” For the aver-
age American learner, these languages required approximately four
times as long to reach a given level as a language in Category 1,
which included the languages of Western Europe.
Translator, interpreter, teacher Japanese