Euronews published a long article about language learning: they listed how difficult the different languages are. There are four categories based on the list of Foreign Service Institute (FSI). Their criteria included complexity, resources available to the learner, student's motivation and hours devoted to study each week. The easiest languages are Romance languages like Spanish, Italian and French, and Continental Scandinavian languages, Swedish, Norwegian and Danish. It only took 23-24 weeks (575-600 class hours) to learn, while the second category (for example German) needs an estimated 44 weeks (1100 class hours). Hungarian is in the third, hard languages category. The tongues in this category also need 1100 hours to learn, but FSI says, they have significant linguistic and/or cultural differences to English so it might take more time than that. The final category, labelled "Super-hard" languages, contains only four tongues: Arabic, Japanese, Korean and Chinese.

The apropo of the article was given by one of their Hungarian colleagues, who tried to teach some Hungarian words to the others. Watch the video below, but before you start to laugh, try to pronounce these worlds yourself:

https://www.facebook.com/euronews/videos/10155578142928110/