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How long does Afrikaans take to learn?
Little-known fact: Afrikaans is one of the easiest languages for English speakers to learn. I know, it’s kinda hard to believe, considering its name and relative obscurity (outside of South Africa, at least). Studying Afrikaans will involve the following commitment hours:
- Survival basics (A2) – 120
- Everyday conversations (B1) – 250
- Comfortable fluency (B2) – 500
- Near-native fluency (C1) – 900
Very doable, right? And why’s that? Well, Afrikaans is like the illegitimate child of Dutch and English (where said child took more than 80% of its DNA from its Dutch parent). And all three of these languages are Germanic, meaning that they have a lot of vocabulary in common.
But where Dutch has some awkward grammar – verb conjugation, gendered nouns, all that scary, migraine-inducing malarkey – Afrikaans said, “Nope, we’re not doing any of that!” The result: a language that, after only a few short weeks, you’ll be able to converse in on a rudimentary level.
It won’t all be sunshine, lollipops, and rainbows, though. Afrikaans, having evolved in South Africa, has a bunch of loanwords from the native languages of the region. They certainly won’t look familiar, so be aware of that. But it’s all very manageable; nowt too taxing.
Studying Afrikaans comes with a bonus, too. You get Dutch for an 80% discount. The languages are so similar, they’re considered mutually intelligible. I’d say that’s a win!
If you wanna know how long it’ll take you, specifically, to learn Afrikaans, have a play about with our language calculator above. That’s what we built it for 🙂