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How long does Haitian Creole take to learn?
Imagine French but with training wheels on. Imagine a rose without thorns. Imagine a dragon without fire. Imagine… all right, I think you get the point now!
Haitian Creole (Kreyòl Ayisyen, if you wanna get fancy) is the French you know without the hard bits. Silent letters: gone. Verb conjugation: gone. Gendered nouns: yep, you guessed it – gone! Thus, an English speaker should find Haitian surprisingly easy to learn. Your study hours will look something like this:
- Survival basics (A2) – 200
- Everyday conversations (B1) – 400
- Comfortable fluency (B2) – 750
- Near-native fluency (C1) – 1,300
Almost all of the vocabulary comes from French, which in and of itself makes the language very approachable for native English speakers, seeing as much of our language has heavy French influence. So although, to the untrained ear and eye, the words won’t be immediately recognisable, with a bit of time, things will start to look very familiar.
You should be able to find enough resources online to get you to a good level. With over 12 million speakers of the language, many of whom are in the diaspora – large communities of Haitians can be found in the US, for example – it won’t be too hard to find speaking partners. Haitians just so happen to love their language and would be more than happy to teach it to you.
Interested in studying Haitian Creole? Play around with our language learning time calculator above to see how long it’ll take you, specifically, to learn this colourful language.
