Full-time class weeks for a native English speaker to reach professional working proficiency. Source: US Foreign Service Institute. Red: the FSI's hardest category. The FSI flags Japanese as harder still within it.
S = subject, V = verb, O = object. "I eat rice" is SVO; Japanese, Korean, Turkish, Hindi and others say the equivalent of "I rice eat". Speaker counts are rounded estimates and vary widely between sources.
Every learner hears more than they can say. The difference between learners is how long they let that gap stay open.
English
English · Latin
Spoken by more people as a second language than as a first: non-native speakers outnumber native ones by roughly three to one.
English is the language people most often want to practise out loud and least often get to. Classrooms teach grammar; what is missing is the unrehearsed half - being asked something you did not prepare for and answering it before you have translated it in your head.
The hard part of English is almost never vocabulary. It is speed, contractions and the fact that native speakers do not pronounce half of what they write. Fifteen minutes of live conversation does more for that than an hour of exercises.
Advice that keeps coming up: Say up front that you are practising. Almost nobody minds, most people slow down, and a surprising number will offer to swap - their language for yours.
Hello: Hello · 1.5 billion including second-language speakers · FSI baseline
Español
Spanish · Latin
Spoken natively in about twenty countries, with accents that differ as much as Scottish and Texan English.
Spanish is the second most-spoken first language on earth and spread across twenty countries that do not sound alike. Practising with one random speaker after another is the fastest way to stop being thrown by an accent you were not trained on.
Subjunctive, speed, and the gap between the textbook Spanish of a course and the actual Spanish of a person in Bogotá or Buenos Aires. The second is only fixable by talking to people.
Advice that keeps coming up: Use the country filter deliberately. Colombian and Mexican Spanish are the gentlest starting points; Argentine and Chilean Spanish will humble you, which is also useful.
Hello: Hola · about 500 million first-language speakers · FSI 24 weeks
Português
Portuguese · Latin
Roughly four in five speakers live in Brazil, which is why the Brazilian accent is the one most learners actually meet.
Portuguese has two major varieties that sound markedly different, and Brazil alone accounts for the large majority of speakers. Random matching exposes you to both without you having to choose in advance.
European Portuguese swallows vowels in a way Brazilian Portuguese does not, so learners trained on one often cannot follow the other at first. Nasal vowels take a while for everyone.
Advice that keeps coming up: Brazilian speakers are among the most encouraging partners on the platform for a beginner. Start there, then try Portugal once you are comfortable.
Hello: Olá · about 260 million, most of them in Brazil · FSI 24 weeks
Français
French · Latin
More French speakers now live in Africa than in Europe, a shift that keeps growing.
French is spoken natively across Europe, West and North Africa, and Canada, and those varieties differ enough that learners trained only on Parisian French get stuck the first time they meet a Québécois or Ivorian speaker.
Listening. French written down and French spoken aloud are nearly different languages - liaison, elision and a lot of silent letters. Reading well tells you nothing about whether you can follow a conversation.
Advice that keeps coming up: Ask your match to repeat things rather than switching to English. Most French speakers would far rather slow down than give up on the language.
Hello: Bonjour · about 300 million across five continents · FSI 30 weeks
Deutsch
German · Latin
Puts the verb second in main clauses and sends it to the very end in subordinate ones, so listeners often wait for the meaning.
German rewards conversation practice more than most languages because so much of the difficulty is structural - where the verb lands, which case a preposition takes - and structure only becomes automatic through use.
Cases and word order under time pressure. You can conjugate perfectly on paper and still freeze when a sentence has to come out in real time.
Advice that keeps coming up: Germans are famously direct about corrections and this is genuinely a gift. Ask to be corrected and you will get exactly what you asked for.
Hello: Hallo · about 95 million first-language speakers · FSI 36 weeks
Русский
Russian · Cyrillic
Its six grammatical cases let word order move around for emphasis without changing who did what to whom.
Russian works as a lingua franca across a dozen countries, so a Russian-language match may be in Kazakhstan, Georgia, Latvia or Tel Aviv. That range is exactly what makes it worth practising live.
Cases, verbs of motion, and aspect. All three are things you can know cold and still get wrong at conversational speed.
Advice that keeps coming up: Russian speakers tend to open reserved and warm up considerably once a conversation has somewhere to go. Give it more than thirty seconds.
Hello: Привет · about 255 million including second-language speakers · FSI 44 weeks
Türkçe
Turkish · Latin (since 1928)
Switched from Arabic to Latin script in 1928 in a single sweeping reform. Builds long words by stacking suffixes onto a root.
Turkish is agglutinative - meaning gets stacked onto the end of a word - which is unlike anything most learners have seen and only becomes intuitive with live use.
Building and parsing long suffixed words at speed, and vowel harmony, which native speakers do without thinking and learners have to compute.
Advice that keeps coming up: Turkey's very late peak means European and Middle Eastern learners can find partners well past midnight.
Hello: Merhaba · about 85 million · FSI 44 weeks
العربية
Arabic · Arabic
Lives in two registers: Modern Standard Arabic for news and writing, and local dialects for everything else. Learners often need both.
Arabic is really a family of spoken dialects sitting under one written standard, and no course can prepare you for all of them. Talking to actual speakers from different countries is not optional here - it is the only way the language becomes usable.
The distance between Modern Standard Arabic, which is what gets taught, and the dialect anyone actually speaks. A learner with three years of MSA can still be lost in a Cairo conversation.
Advice that keeps coming up: Pick a dialect and use the country filter to stay near it. Egyptian is the most widely understood across the region; Gulf and Levantine are the next most useful.
Hello: مرحبا · about 400 million across more than twenty countries · FSI 88 weeks
فارسی
Persian · Perso-Arabic
Known as Farsi in Iran, Dari in Afghanistan and Tajik in Tajikistan, where it is written in Cyrillic.
Persian is spoken across Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan and by large communities in North America and Europe, and its speakers are some of the most patient, conversation-hungry partners a learner can find.
The colloquial language shortens and reshapes almost every common verb, so the Persian you read and the Persian you hear sound like two different languages at first.
Advice that keeps coming up: Iranian evenings run late - the busiest hours are around 10pm to 2am Tehran time, which lines up with European afternoons and American mornings.
Hello: Salam · about 110 million including Dari and Tajik speakers · FSI 44 weeks
हिन्दी
Hindi · Devanagari
In everyday speech it is largely mutually intelligible with Urdu. The two diverge most in formal vocabulary and in writing.
Hindi is spoken by hundreds of millions of people who are online in the evening and very willing to talk, and it is a language where the spoken register drifts a long way from the formal one.
Everyday Hindi is heavily mixed with English and with Urdu vocabulary, so the pure textbook version can sound stilted. Only conversation teaches you which register fits where.
Advice that keeps coming up: Do not worry about the script. Voice chat sidesteps it entirely, which is why so many learners make faster progress speaking than reading.
Hello: Namaste · about 350 million first-language speakers · FSI 44 weeks
বাংলা
Bengali · Bengali
A 1952 movement to defend it is the reason UNESCO marks 21 February as International Mother Language Day.
Bengali is the sixth most-spoken language in the world and badly under-served by chat platforms, so both learners and native speakers looking for a conversation in it find the supply thin everywhere else.
Two distinct registers - the literary form and the spoken one - plus regional variation between Bangladesh and West Bengal that surprises learners.
Advice that keeps coming up: Bengali speakers are concentrated in Dhaka and Kolkata but the diaspora in the UK and the Gulf is large, so matches come from further afield than you would guess.
Hello: Nomoshkar · about 235 million · FSI 44 weeks
اردو
Urdu · Perso-Arabic (Nastaliq)
Pakistan’s national language and a native language for only a minority there; it is the shared second language of a country of many.
Urdu and Hindi are close enough in speech that learning one gives you most of the other, and Urdu is the shared language across Pakistan even where it is nobody's mother tongue.
Register. Formal Urdu leans on Persian and Arabic vocabulary that everyday speech does not use, so learners often sound far more literary than they intend.
Advice that keeps coming up: Pakistani late-night traffic is heavy, so if you are in Europe or the Americas your evening lines up well with theirs.
Hello: Assalam-o-Alaikum · about 230 million including second-language speakers · FSI 44 weeks
Bahasa Indonesia
Indonesian · Latin
Chosen as a unifying national language in 1928. For most of its speakers it is a second language alongside a regional one.
Indonesian is widely considered one of the easiest major languages for an English speaker to start speaking - no tones, no cases, no verb conjugation - which makes it unusually rewarding to practise conversationally from week one.
The gap between formal Indonesian and the casual, slang-heavy version people actually speak, which no textbook covers well.
Advice that keeps coming up: Because the grammar is simple, you can hold a real conversation far earlier than in most languages. Start talking sooner than feels comfortable.
Hello: Halo · about 200 million including second-language speakers · FSI 36 weeks
Italiano
Italian · Latin
Standard Italian is younger as a common spoken language than most people assume; many Italians grew up speaking a regional language at home.
Italian has far more learners than it has native speakers online, so finding a real conversation partner is genuinely competitive - and Italians are among the most expressive speakers you will be matched with, which makes listening practice enjoyable rather than a chore.
Speed and regional variation. Standard Italian is taught; what you meet is Roman, Neapolitan or Milanese Italian at full pace.
Advice that keeps coming up: Italian rewards attempting it badly. Speakers respond warmly to effort in a way that makes the first stumbling conversations much easier than they should be.
Hello: Ciao · about 65 million · FSI 24 weeks
日本語
Japanese · Kanji + hiragana + katakana
Writes with three systems at once and changes its verbs depending on who you are talking to.
Japanese has enormous learner demand and comparatively few native speakers on international platforms, which makes every real conversation valuable. It is also a language where politeness level changes the grammar, so context matters more than vocabulary.
Choosing a register in real time, plus listening speed. Reading kanji is a separate skill that voice chat lets you set aside completely.
Advice that keeps coming up: Offer an exchange explicitly - most Japanese users on the platform are here to practise English, so a straight swap is an easy sell.
Hello: こんにちは · about 125 million · FSI 88 weeks
한국어
Korean · Hangul
Its alphabet was designed on purpose, under King Sejong in the 15th century, so that ordinary people could learn to read quickly.
Korean has one of the fastest-growing learner populations in the world and a native-speaker base that is very active online late at night, which makes matching straightforward if your hours line up.
Speech levels and honorifics - the same sentence has several forms depending on who you are talking to, and getting it wrong is more noticeable than a grammar slip.
Advice that keeps coming up: Say you are learning at the start. Korean speakers will usually pick a comfortable register and stay in it rather than switching around you.
Hello: 안녕하세요 · about 80 million · FSI 88 weeks
中文
Chinese · Chinese characters
Mandarin uses four tones plus a neutral one, so the same syllable can carry several unrelated meanings.
Mandarin is tonal, which means text practice is close to useless for the part that actually breaks comprehension. Voice is not a nice extra here; it is the whole skill.
Tones under pressure, and the gap between careful textbook Mandarin and fast conversational speech.
Advice that keeps coming up: Ask your partner to correct your tones specifically. Most learners are corrected on vocabulary and left to fossilise bad tones for years.
Hello: 你好 · about 940 million first-language speakers · FSI 88 weeks
Sources: US Department of State, Foreign Service Institute language difficulty rankings; speaker estimates rounded from commonly cited figures such as Ethnologue; Swain (1985) on comprehensible output; MacIntyre et al. (1998) on willingness to communicate. Historical notes: the Turkish alphabet reform (1928), the Indonesian Youth Pledge (1928), the promulgation of Hangul (1446), and UNESCO's International Mother Language Day (proclaimed 1999).