Academic oral presentation skills: instructors' perception of the final project presentation rating plan: I. Introduction II. Main part

Category II Languages. This includes languages such as German, Indonesian, Malay, Haitian Creole, and Swahili. An estimated 36 weeks or 900 class hours are usually required for professional proficiency.

Category III Languages. These are harder languages that are significantly different from English and include Bengali, Czech, Finnish, Greek, Hebrew, Icelandic, Polish, Russian, Tamil, Thai and Vietnamese. An estimated 44 weeks or 1100 class hours are usually required for professional proficiency.

Category IV Languages. These ‘super-hard’ languages are exceptionally difficult for English speakers. This includes Arabic, Chinese Cantonese, Chinese Mandarin, Japanese and Korean. An estimated 88 weeks or 2200 class hours are usually required for professional proficiency. 

Of course, you probably aren’t aiming for professional-level proficiency just yet. Thankfully, you can master many of the basics in a much shorter time span. Many of our language courses take only a few weeks to complete and can help you build a solid foundation. 
If you’ve yet to choose a new language to learn, you might be interested in which ones are popular at the moment. Whether you want to use it for your professional development or to unlock new countries to explore, it can be useful to know some of the in-demand languages around the world. 
As you might expect, English is one of the most widely spoken ones out there. With around 339 million native speakers and 1.5 billion language learners, it’s useful for travel, work, and learning. Qualifications like the IELTS are popular around the world, taken by around 5 million people each year. 
Aside from English, there are many other languages with high numbers of native speakers, learners, and job opportunities, including: 

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  Chinese. There are around 1.3 billion native Chinese speakers, with roughly 917 million of these people speaking Mandarin. Becoming fluent in Chinese could create a variety of opportunities for you, both personally and professionally. 
  
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  Spanish. Roughly 20 countries around the world use Spanish as an official language. With over 450 million native speakers, it’s the second-most spoken native language in the world behind Chinese. 
  
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  Arabic. Arabic is a language that’s rapidly growing in terms of speakers, especially on the internet. It’s also the official language in around 25 countries worldwide and spoken in roughly 60, meaning there are so many ways and places you can use it. 
  
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  French. About 51 countries around the world speak French, placing it behind only English and Arabic in prevalence. What’s more, it’s a language that’s being spoken in many of the fastest-growing areas of the world. 
  
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  Russian. There are nearly 150 million native Russian speakers, as well over 120 million people who speak it as a second language. It’s the eighth most commonly used language globally.