Is Afrikaans Hard To Learn? (Helpful Content!)

Afrikaans is generally considered to be a relatively easy language for English speakers to learn. It is in the Germanic language family making it closely related to English, making it relatively simple to learn. That said, learning languages is never easy and will take time, so you’ve got to be ready for persistence and commitment.

If there were an “easy” language for English speakers to learn, then, it would be Afrikaans.

Afrikaans, for English speakers, is relatively straightforward, and you’ve got about the best leg up you possibly could in learning the language.

That said, you’re still going to have a struggle on your hands at times.

Let’s find out more.

How difficult is Afrikaans to learn?

For an English speaker, Afrikaans is relatively easy to learn.

It’s very closely related to English and the two languages share many grammatical and lexical similarities, which will mean you’ve got a big leg up starting out as an English speaker learning Afrikaans.

You’ll have an inherent understanding of much of the way the language is structured, and though you’ll still have to learn it, it will come a lot more naturally to you than it might to someone who spoke an unrelated language.

As mentioned, what binds English and Afrikaans, among other things, is the language family into which both languages are grouped.

Afrikaans and English are both Germanic languages, meaning they are very closely related.

That said, this doesn’t always mean learning the language will be a breeze, and learning languages is never easy.

As closely related as English and Afrikaans are, you are still learning an entirely different language.

This is going to take time and study, and you won’t see results in the blink of an eye.

It’s perhaps always better to say that one language is relatively easy to learn.

There are, obviously, highly varying levels of ease when it comes to learning a language.

Afrikaans is easier than, say, Japanese, but that still doesn’t make it easy.

Elements of Afrikaans are still going to be tricky for you.

Given its close relationship with Dutch, all the potential difficulties of Dutch will come with Afrikaans.

Pronunciations can be more than a little tricky at first, and some find the word order very tough to get to grips with.

Again, learning a new language is a complex, lengthy process for which there is no shortcut, however easy the language might be to learn compared with others.

Just how long can you expect it to take, then?

How long does it take to learn Afrikaans?

There are a couple of ways you can look at this question, so let’s first consider how much studying you can expect to do in order to get to a level of fluency and confidence with the language that you might be able to conduct yourself in the language.

The FSI ranks languages based on how difficult they are for English speakers to learn, and thus how much time you’ll have to spend studying to be able to speak them.

FSI = Foreign Service Institute

According to this scale, Afrikaans is a category one language, meaning it is among the easiest languages for an English speaker to learn.

Timescales for languages of this scale are around 600-750 hours of study before you can get to the point that you’re able to speak the language confidently.

But the initial study is only the first part of learning a language.

Once you’ve gotten to that point, in order to become fully fluent in the language you’ll then need to spend years immersed in and speaking it every day.

This can vary in time but given Afrikaans’s relative similarity to English, within a couple of years you could be at the point of more or less fluency.

This, again, will vary from person to person, but within five years virtually anyone should be fluent.

Is Afrikaans more Dutch or German?

Afrikaans is far more Dutch than German—an estimated 95% of its vocabulary is ultimately Dutch, so this gives you an idea of just how similar it is to German.

If you weren’t aware, Afrikaans is a language that evolved from the Dutch vernacular used in the Dutch Cape Colony in South Africa.

Indeed, most linguists consider Dutch to be, at least in part, a creole of Dutch—meaning a kind of dialect.

It is, however, a distinct language, and hardly German at all.

Is Afrikaans a dying language?

Some claim that Afrikaans is a dying language, but at the moment this is not a position that is easy to defend.

The number of speakers is in slow growth, and while some claim that will soon turn to decline, there’s again no particular reason to believe this.

There are currently anywhere from 15 to 23 million Afrikaans speakers across South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

While the language is not as widely spoken as it once was and some claim that, in the long term, it may not survive, it is at no immediate risk of extinction.

Afrikaans is an interesting language to learn, then.

Despite being primarily spoken in the far reaches of Africa, it is more closely related to English than many European languages are.

This certainly makes learning it much easier than it would be to learn other languages, but again, it’s important to stress that learning a language is never easy. It will take time, and you’ll struggle while doing so.

Once you get there, though, the rewards are more than worth it.

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