Malayalam and the four language classes
The US Foreign Service Institute ranks languages by how long an English speaker needs to learn them. Score those languages against Malayalam and the ranking almost inverts.
The pattern nobody points out
The US Foreign Service Institute sorts languages by how many hours an English speaker needs to reach professional working proficiency. Run every major language in those classes against Malayalam's ten core grammatical features, and something odd appears.
Average overlap with Malayalam, by class
Mean score across every major language in each FSI class, out of ten features.
One long Malayalam word, taken apart
Long words are what make Malayalam look hard. Most of them come apart into pieces you already know.
| Malayalam | Romanised | English |
|---|---|---|
| സമയമുണ്ടായിരുന്നില്ല | samayamundayirunnilla | There wasn’t time (the whole word) |
| സമയം | samayam | Time |
| ഉണ്ടായിരുന്നു | undayirunnu | There was |
| ഇല്ല | illa | Not |
The twelve closest languages to Malayalam
| Language | FSI class | Score / 10 |
|---|---|---|
| Tamil | Class 3 | 10 |
| Japanese | Class 4 | 10 |
| Sinhala | Class 3 | 9.5 |
| Turkish | Class 3 | 9 |
| Mongolian | Class 3 | 9 |
| Korean | Class 4 | 9 |
| Burmese | Class 3 | 8 |
| Hungarian | Class 3 | 8 |
| Hindi | Class 3 | 7.5 |
| Urdu | Class 3 | 7.5 |
| Finnish | Class 3 | 7.5 |
| Bengali | Class 3 | 7.5 |
Browse by class
Class 1 — 24–30 weeks
Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Afrikaans. The easiest for English speakers, and the furthest from Malayalam.
Class 2 — 30–36 weeks
German, Indonesian, Malay, Swahili, Haitian Creole. German is the strongest European match Malayalam has.
Class 3 — 44 weeks
Tamil, Sinhala, Turkish, Hindi, Urdu, Finnish, Bengali, Mongolian, Burmese, Hungarian, Persian, Russian, Greek and more. Malayalam's own tier.
Class 4 — 88 weeks
Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Cantonese, Arabic. Rated hardest of all — and home to Malayalam's closest non-Dravidian twin.
Learn this properly, with a teacher who wrote the book
Everything on this page is drawn from Speak Malayalam: The Complete Colloquial Course — 3,297 pages, nineteen volumes, built on the spoken language rather than the textbook one. The first thirty days are free.