Learning the language of your adopted country is a key part of integrating yourself into their customs and culture, and while there are literally thousands of languages spoken across the world, we have aggregated the ten most popular and given them a difficulty ranking out of five:
Language: | Difficulty | Popularity | Official Language* |
Mandarin Chinese | 5 | 1 (b) | People’s Republic of China |
English | 3 | 510 (m) | Australia, New Zealand, UK, USA |
Hindi | 3 | 490 (m) | India |
Spanish | 2 | 420 (m) | Argentina, Cuba, Mexico, Spain |
Arabic | 5 | 255 (m) | Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, UAE |
Russian | 4 | 255 (m) | Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia |
German | 3 | 229 (m) | Austria, Germany |
Bangali | 3 | 215 (m) | Bangladesh, India |
Portuguese | 2 | 213 (m) | Brazil, Portugal |
French | 3 | 130 (m) | France |
Japanese | 5 | 127 (m) | Japan |
* Please note that these are not full lists of of countries using these languages as their ‘official language’, but a summary of the most popular Expat destinations for each language. To see a full list of countries and their official language(s), please refer to this Wikipedia page.