Spanish, French, Italian or Portuguese: picking one

Spanish is the slow one. The US Foreign Service Institute trains diplomats in 60 languages and publishes how long each takes, and on its timetable Spanish needs 30 weeks while Italian needs 24. French is 30 too. Portuguese is 24. All four sit in Category I, the easiest group for an English speaker, and inside that group the language most English speakers assume is the easy one comes last, tied with French.

That six-week gap says nothing about which of these four you will still be studying in March.

What the 30 weeks actually measures

FSI's page gives hours as well as weeks. Category I is 552 to 690 class hours. A typical FSI week is 23 hours in class plus 17 hours of self-study, so a student is doing 40 hours a week of nothing else. The finish line is an integrated score of 3 for speaking and listening on the Interagency Language Roundtable scale, a professional working standard: handling a meeting, not ordering coffee.

The students are selected, full-time and taught in groups capped small. Nobody reading this is doing 40 hours a week. Divide by whatever you have and the ratio between languages survives, but the absolute number stops meaning anything. The target is also high, so if you want a dinner conversation on holiday you are aiming well below ILR 3, and the differences between these four shrink as the target drops. The ranking describes the average student across many cohorts.

Where the six weeks goes

The gap is not spread evenly across the language. It concentrates in one place: the distance between how a word is spelled and how it is said.

Seymour, Aro and Erskine (2003) tested foundation reading in English and 12 other European orthographies, published in the British Journal of Psychology. Their finding: "children from a majority of European countries become accurate and fluent in foundation level reading before the end of the first school year. There are some exceptions, notably in French, Portuguese, Danish, and, particularly, in English."

French and Portuguese are the two named exceptions among the four you are choosing between. Italian and Spanish are not named, because both are close to one letter, one sound.

That study is about children reading their first language, so take the underlying property rather than the result: orthographic depth is a fact about the writing system, and it holds regardless of who is reading. A deep orthography makes you learn the spelling and the sound as two separate facts.

Italian freddo is said the way it looks, and once you know the five vowels you can say any Italian word on sight.

Spanish charges you about five rules and then stops. The five vowels never change value, so the e in pero is the same e as in café. H is always silent, so hablar starts on the a. Qu and gu before e or i hide the u, so guerra is said "gerra". A written accent shows up only when the stress breaks the default pattern, which is why hablo and habló are two different words on the page and two different words in the mouth. Learn that list in an afternoon and you can read a Spanish newspaper out loud, correctly, without knowing what any of it means.

French charges you three rules that each break the letter-to-sound link differently. Final consonants are usually silent, so ils parlent ends in a mute ent and sounds identical to the singular il parle, and petit stops on the i. Those silent consonants come back when the next word starts with a vowel, which is liaison: deux on its own ends on the vowel, but deux ans is said "deu-zan" with a z that is written nowhere near where you hear it. French also has four nasal vowels, /ɛ̃ ɔ̃ ɑ̃ œ̃/ as in brin, son, sans and brun, and each is spelled with a vowel plus an n or m you never pronounce as a consonant. So bon is one nasal vowel and no n, while bonne is an oral vowel and a real n. Three letters can be one sound: eaux is a single "o".

European Portuguese does something harsher. Unstressed vowels reduce until they are barely audible, and in ordinary speech they drop out entirely. Telefone has four syllables written and gets said closer to "tlfón", with the first two vowels gone and the last one shrunk to almost nothing. That produces consonant clusters that appear nowhere in the spelling, so the word you memorised on the page arrives in your ear with its middle gone.

That is where French and Portuguese spend the extra weeks. Notice it splits the four differently from FSI: Portuguese is a hard spelling system that FSI still rates at 24 weeks, and Spanish is an easy one rated at 30.

What the ranking leaves out

FSI measures one thing. Five others decide whether you finish.

Whether you will hear it. Six weeks of FSI class time is about 138 hours, at 23 class hours a week. Two hours a week with a person who speaks the language covers that inside 18 months, and you would be doing them anyway. Count the occasions in your calendar: colleagues, in-laws, a city you go back to, a show you already watch. A language with two occasions a week beats a language with none by more than the entire FSI gap.

Which variety you are learning. Spanish in Madrid and Spanish in Mexico City differ in pronunciation and in everyday vocabulary. Portuguese splits harder: learners of Brazilian Portuguese often struggle with European Portuguese at first. Pick the variety before you pick the material, because the material picks a variety whether you notice or not.

What a tutor costs. italki advertises a band on its Spanish and French pages: tutors "cost between $4 to $60 per hour." A band that wide decides nothing, so we read the live trial prices off all four directory pages. On 22 August 2026, 21 Spanish trials ran from $5 to $25 with a median of $12, and 20 French trials ran from $5 to $25 with a median of $10. On 23 August 2026, 20 Italian trials ran from $5 to $44 with a median of $12, and 20 Portuguese trials ran from $5 to $70 with a median of $10. All four medians land between $10 and $12, so price is not a reason to pick one of these over another. The advertised $4 floor is rare, and the top of each range is an outlier.

How many tutors there are. On 23 August 2026 italki listed 2,346 Spanish tutors, 1,274 French, 822 Italian and 400 Portuguese, so Portuguese has about one sixth the choice of Spanish. That is what bites when you want a tutor free at 8pm on a Tuesday, and it is a bigger practical difference than the prices.

The first two weeks. Italian gives you readable, sayable words on day one, and that early traction is worth something real if your history is a pile of abandoned attempts. French pays worst at the start and evens out later, because the spelling system is the part you front-load.

A choice you can make today

This takes about 20 minutes.

1. Write down the occasions. For each of the four, list the times in the next 12 months you would actually use it. Names and dates, not "I like Italy". Fewer than three occasions across 12 months and that language is out.
2. Listen to two minutes of each. Play a news bulletin or podcast in each remaining language for two minutes, without subtitles. You are testing one thing: can you hear where the words end? If a language is soup after two minutes, that is the orthographic depth and the vowel reduction arriving early. It is survivable, and it is information.
3. Read ten words out loud. Take ten words from a headline in each language, say them, then check against a text-to-speech reading. Count how many you got right. Italian and Spanish should score high immediately. French and Portuguese should not. Your own score matters more than the average.
4. Book one trial lesson in the leader. Open the italki page for that language, sort by price low to high, and pick the cheapest trial from a tutor who has reviews. Budget $10 to $12, which is the median trial price in all four of our samples. Treat anything over $15 for a first 30 minutes as paying for a reputation you cannot judge yet. Book it this week.
5. Then stop comparing. Write the language on a piece of paper with today's date, and do not revisit the decision for 90 days. Switching costs more than picking the second-best one.

If two languages tie after step 1, take the one with more occasions. If they still tie, take Italian, because the fast early traction breaks the tie and nothing else in the data does.

Where this advice does not apply

Ignore all of it if you have a reason: a partner's family, a job, a move, a country you are already booked into. A reason beats a ranking every time, because the reason supplies the occasions and the ranking supplies six weeks.

Ignore it too if you already speak one Romance language. Once you have Spanish, Italian is close enough that FSI's beginner timetable stops describing you, and the overlap works in both directions.

And if you have started and stopped three times, look at the method before the language. Changing language gives you the feeling of having fixed something, and it leaves whatever ended the last three attempts exactly where it was.

Where our own app sits

Verbamor is an iOS app, and it teaches all four of these. It exists for one part of the problem: keeping what you meet in a lesson. Record or import a real lesson and it transcribes it, pulls out the words and phrases that were in it, and builds a card for each one you keep, with an example sentence, an image and two recordings of that sentence, scheduled by FSRS.

The two recordings are the part that touches this post. Take a French card for ils parlent. The front plays the sentence with a tone where that word should be, so you have to produce the silent ent ending out loud before you have seen it written. The back plays the same sentence complete, so you hear what the spelling was hiding. That is the spelling-to-sound gap, worked twice per card.

What it does not do is teach you the language. There is no course and no beginner path, so on day one, with nothing recorded, you have an empty app. It has no free tier: Explorer is US$19.99 a month and Native is US$129.99 a year, about $10.83 a month, with a 7-day trial on the annual plan only. If you have not chosen a language yet, you do not need it yet.