If you want to become a polyglot you have to learn as many foreign languages as possible. But it is possible to spend thousands of hours on learning a very difficult language and become just a bilingual person or it is possible to spend the same amount of time on learning several easy languages and become a real polyglot.
Let's see the view of the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) on the difficulty of different languages for English speaking people. The FSI has distingished 4 levels of language difficulty:
Level 1: Languages closely related to English
Afrikaans, Danish, Dutch, French, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish
Level 2: Languages similar to English
German
Level 3: Languages with linguistic and/or cultural differences from English
Indonesian, Malaysian, Swahili
Level 4: Languages with significant linguistic and/or cultural differences from English
Albanian, Amharic, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Bengali, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Burmese, Croatian, Czech, Estonian, Finnish, Georgian, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Khmer, Lao, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Mongolian, Nepali, Pashto, Persian (Dari, Farsi, Tajik), Polish, Russian, Serbian, Sinhala, Slovak, Slovenian, Tagalog, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Uzbek, Vietnamese, Xhosa, Zulu
Level 5: Languages which are exceptionally difficult for native English speakers
Arabic, Cantonese (Chinese), Mandarin (Chinese), Japanese, Korean
Let's see the view of the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) on the difficulty of different languages for English speaking people. The FSI has distingished 4 levels of language difficulty:
Level 1: Languages closely related to English
Afrikaans, Danish, Dutch, French, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish
Level 2: Languages similar to English
German
Level 3: Languages with linguistic and/or cultural differences from English
Indonesian, Malaysian, Swahili
Level 4: Languages with significant linguistic and/or cultural differences from English
Albanian, Amharic, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Bengali, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Burmese, Croatian, Czech, Estonian, Finnish, Georgian, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Khmer, Lao, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Mongolian, Nepali, Pashto, Persian (Dari, Farsi, Tajik), Polish, Russian, Serbian, Sinhala, Slovak, Slovenian, Tagalog, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Uzbek, Vietnamese, Xhosa, Zulu
Level 5: Languages which are exceptionally difficult for native English speakers
Arabic, Cantonese (Chinese), Mandarin (Chinese), Japanese, Korean
