Bulgarian ranked 11 by difficulty of learning

The U.S. State Department, which has to train diplomats serving around the world, ranks languages by their difficulty for native speakers of American English. The department's Foreign Service Institute classifies languages in four categories, in ascending order of difficulty:

Category 1: Danish, Dutch, French, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish.

Category 2: Bulgarian, Dari, German, Greek, Hindi, Hausa, Indonesian, Malay, Urdu.

Category 3: Amharic, Armenian, Azeri, Bengali, Burmese, Czech, Finnish, Georgian, Hebrew, Hungarian, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Khmer, Lao, Nepali, Polish, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Sinhala, Tagalog, Thai, Tamil, Turkish, Uzbek, Vietnamese.
Category 4: Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean.

For more information, please visit: www.hamiltonspectator.com