Random language generator
Spin to pick a language
Press Spin to land on one of 16 languages.
On the wheel · tap to remove
About this tool
Spin a wheel of 16 major world languages. Each result names the language family and one fact worth knowing, and the table below says roughly how long it would take you to learn it.
- Languages
- 16
- Families
- 11
- Scripts
- 8
- Weeks to learn
- 24–88
Every language on the wheel
How long would it take you?
Weeks of full-time classes an English speaker needs to reach professional working proficiency, as estimated by the US Foreign Service Institute. Distance from English, not difficulty in general: a Hindi speaker would find the order very different.
| Language | Family | Script | FSI weeks |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Germanic | Latin | n/a for English speakers |
| Spanish | Romance | Latin | 24 |
| Portuguese | Romance | Latin | 24 |
| Italian | Romance | Latin | 24 |
| French | Romance | Latin | 30 |
| German | Germanic | Latin | 36 |
| Swahili | Bantu | Latin | 36 |
| Hindi | Indo-Aryan | Devanagari | 44 |
| Russian | Slavic | Cyrillic | 44 |
| Turkish | Turkic | Latin | 44 |
| Vietnamese | Austroasiatic | Latin (with tone marks) | 44 |
| Bengali | Indo-Aryan | Bengali | 44 |
| Mandarin | Sino-Tibetan | Chinese characters | 88 |
| Japanese | Japonic | Kanji + two kana | 88 |
| Korean | Koreanic | Hangul | 88 |
| Arabic | Semitic | Arabic | 88 |
After the spin
A first week with a new language
Enough to find out whether you like it before you buy a course.
Days 1–2
Learn to read it
If it has its own script, start there. Hangul and Cyrillic can be read slowly within a weekend; Devanagari and Arabic take longer. Kanji and Chinese characters are a long project, so start with pinyin or kana.
Day 3
Ten survival phrases
Hello, thank you, please, sorry, yes, no, how much, where is, I don’t understand, goodbye. Say each aloud, along with a native recording.
Days 4–5
Numbers and sounds
Count to 20 and learn the sounds English does not have: tones in Mandarin and Vietnamese, the rolled R in Spanish and Italian, vowel length in Japanese.
Days 6–7
One real thing
A children’s song, a menu, a street sign on a map, a short video with subtitles. If you want a second week, you have your answer.
Curious where a language is actually spoken? Every country guide lists its official and widely spoken languages, and the Random Country Generator will hand you one at random.
Step by step
How to use the random language generator
- 01
Take off what you already speak
Every language starts on the wheel. Tap a name in the panel beside the wheel to remove it; it is struck through and its slice disappears. Tap again to put it back.
- 02
Add any language that is missing
Type a name into “Add a language” and press Add. Tagalog, Polish, Yoruba, Welsh, Sign Language: anything you would genuinely consider. Each added language gets a slice of the same size as the rest.
- 03
Spin
Press Spin in the middle of the wheel or the button under the result card. Every language on the wheel has the same chance.
- 04
Read the result
The card shows the language, its family, and a line on where it is used. Copy result puts the name on your clipboard.
- 05
Keep the history
Every spin is logged with its family and time. Copy the log, or download it as a text file or a CSV, which is useful when a whole class spins one each.
To start over, press “Restore the original sixteen”. That puts every removed language back and clears the ones you added. Nothing is saved between visits.
After the spin
Turning a random result into a language you keep
A spin is a good way to break a tie between languages you are equally drawn to, and a poor way to commit to two years of study. The useful middle ground is to treat the result as a trial: one week, a few minutes a day, then a real decision.
Before the week starts, answer three questions about the language the wheel gave you.
- Where would I use it? A trip, a partner’s family, a job, films, games, books. Languages with a concrete use survive the hard middle months; languages learned “for the brain” usually do not.
- What is the first month going to feel like? The learning-time table above is a rough guide. Spanish and Italian give quick early wins. Arabic and Mandarin ask for weeks of groundwork in sounds and writing before sentences come.
- What can I learn from? All sixteen languages have plenty of courses, textbooks and podcasts for English speakers. For a language you added yourself, check before the trial starts.
At the end of the week, the question to ask is not “was it easy?” but “do I want to do another week?”. If the answer is no, spin again. If the answer is a reluctant yes, that is usually the language.
The first three months
A realistic plan for your first 90 days
Most people who start a language stop within the first few weeks, usually because the plan was too ambitious, not because the language was too hard. Thirty minutes a day that actually happens beats two hours a day that lasts a week. This outline works for any language on the wheel.
Days 1 to 14: sounds and survival
Learn the writing system if it is new to you, and the sounds that do not exist in English. Learn greetings, numbers to twenty, “please”, “thank you”, “I don’t understand” and “how do you say…?”. For tonal languages such as Mandarin and Vietnamese, spend more of this time on listening than on reading.
Days 15 to 45: the core 300 words
A few hundred of the most common words cover a large share of everyday speech in any language. Learn them with a spaced-repetition flashcard app, a few new ones a day. Add the handful of verbs you need to talk about yourself: be, have, want, go, like, can. Start listening to slow podcasts or children’s programmes, even when you understand little.
Days 46 to 90: real conversation
Book a conversation with a tutor or a language exchange partner, ideally once a week. It will be awkward and short, and it is the point at which most learners feel the language become theirs. Keep a list of words you reached for and did not have, and learn those next.
At day 90, take stock honestly. If you are looking forward to the next session, keep going and set a goal for six months. If you dread it, the wheel is still here, and three months of any language is never wasted: you will read the next one’s grammar faster.
Two finalists
When the choice is between two languages
A common situation: you have narrowed it down to two, say Spanish and Japanese, and cannot choose. Remove everything else from the wheel, so only your two finalists are left, and spin. Then pay attention to your reaction, the same trick the yes or no wheel relies on. Relief tells you something. So does the urge to spin again.
If the reaction tells you nothing, three tie-breakers help:
- Which one could you use in the next twelve months? A planned trip, a colleague or a community nearby is worth more than any ranking.
- Which one has media you already enjoy? Films, music, games and football commentary are free, endless practice material.
- Which one would you study on a bad day? Enthusiasm on a good day is easy. The language you will open on a tired Tuesday is the one you will learn.
Language families
What the family on the result card tells you
Every result shows a family. Languages in the same family descend from a common ancestor, so they share grammar patterns and a good deal of basic vocabulary. That matters for learners: a second language from a family you already know is far cheaper than a first one from a new family.
Half the wheel belongs to one giant family, Indo-European, which runs from Iceland to Bangladesh. The labels on the cards are its branches:
- Germanic: English and German. Their everyday words are close cousins: house and Haus, water and Wasser, hand and Hand.
- Romance: Spanish, French, Portuguese and Italian, all descended from Latin. Learn one and the others become much easier to read.
- Slavic: Russian, which shares the branch with Polish, Czech, Ukrainian and others.
- Indo-Aryan: Hindi and Bengali, descended from Sanskrit-era languages of the Indian subcontinent.
The other half come from families with no proven link to English at all:
- Sino-Tibetan: Mandarin and the other Chinese languages, plus Tibetan and Burmese.
- Semitic: Arabic, alongside Hebrew and Amharic, part of the wider Afro-Asiatic family.
- Turkic: Turkish, related to Azerbaijani, Kazakh and Uzbek.
- Japonic and Koreanic: Japanese and Korean. They share a lot of grammar structure and vocabulary borrowed from Chinese, but linguists have not shown that they descend from a common ancestor.
- Austroasiatic: Vietnamese, related to Khmer, the language of Cambodia.
- Bantu: Swahili, one of hundreds of Bantu languages across central, eastern and southern Africa, within the Niger–Congo family.
A practical consequence: an English speaker who already knows some French will find the learning-time estimates for Spanish, Italian and Portuguese pessimistic. Someone who already reads Hindi will find Bengali’s script far less daunting than the table suggests.
Writing systems
The eight scripts on this wheel
For many learners the writing system decides how hard the first month feels. These are the scripts the sixteen languages use.
| Script | Languages on the wheel | What it is like to learn |
|---|---|---|
| Latin alphabet | English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Turkish, Vietnamese, Swahili | Nothing new to learn for an English reader, though accents and extra letters matter. |
| Cyrillic | Russian | 33 letters, several of which look Latin but sound different. Most learners can read it within a couple of weeks. |
| Arabic script | Arabic | Written right to left, letters join and change shape by position, short vowels usually left unwritten. |
| Devanagari | Hindi | An abugida: each consonant carries a default vowel, changed with marks. The line along the top joins the letters of a word. |
| Bengali–Assamese script | Bengali | Also an abugida with a top line, related to Devanagari but with different letter shapes. |
| Chinese characters | Mandarin | Thousands of characters, each a syllable with meaning. Simplified forms in mainland China and Singapore, traditional in Taiwan and Hong Kong. |
| Kana and kanji | Japanese | Two syllabaries, hiragana and katakana, plus kanji borrowed from Chinese, used together in the same sentence. |
| Hangul | Korean | An alphabet of 24 basic letters grouped into syllable blocks. Famously quick to learn: a day or two for the basics. |
Two languages changed script within living memory. Turkey switched from the Arabic alphabet to a Latin one in 1928, which is why modern Turkish looks familiar on the page even though its grammar is nothing like English. Vietnamese uses a Latin alphabet with many accent marks, developed by missionaries in the 1600s and made standard in the twentieth century in place of a script based on Chinese characters.
Sound can be a bigger hurdle than writing. Mandarin is tonal: the same syllable said with a different pitch pattern is a different word, and standard Mandarin has four tones plus a neutral one. Vietnamese has six in its northern standard. Neither is impossible for an English speaker, but both reward listening practice from the very first day.
Your first two words
Hello and thank you in every language on the wheel
A classic classroom game: spin, then say hello and thank you in the language that comes up. Spellings are common romanisations, not the native script.
| Language | Hello | Thank you |
|---|---|---|
| English | Hello | Thank you |
| Spanish | Hola | Gracias |
| French | Bonjour | Merci |
| German | Hallo | Danke |
| Mandarin | Nǐ hǎo | Xièxie |
| Japanese | Konnichiwa | Arigatō |
| Korean | Annyeong haseyo | Gamsahamnida |
| Arabic | Marhaban | Shukran |
| Hindi | Namaste | Dhanyavaad |
| Portuguese | Olá | Obrigado / Obrigada |
| Russian | Zdravstvuyte | Spasibo |
| Italian | Ciao | Grazie |
| Turkish | Merhaba | Teşekkür ederim |
| Vietnamese | Xin chào | Cảm ơn |
| Swahili | Habari / Jambo | Asante |
| Bengali | Nomoshkar | Dhonnobad |
A few notes so nobody is caught out. Portuguese speakers say obrigado if they are male and obrigada if they are female; the word agrees with the speaker, not the listener. Russian zdravstvuyte is the polite greeting, and friends say privet. Korean annyeong haseyo is polite, and close friends drop it to annyeong. In Swahili, jambo is widely understood but is more of a tourist greeting in Kenya; locals tend to open with habari, “what news?”.
For the next step, the random country generator and the country guides list the official and widely spoken languages of every country, which turns “say hello in Swahili” into “and where would you hear it?”.
For groups
Ways to use the wheel in a class or club
- Language of the week. Spin on Monday. Each day add one word, one fact about where it is spoken and one song or short video. Remove the language from the wheel afterwards so the class works through all sixteen.
- Research cards. Each student spins once and makes a one-page card: the family, the script, the number of countries where it is official, and three phrases. Download the history to keep track of who got what.
- Heritage languages. Add the languages spoken at home by students in the room before spinning. It turns the wheel into a way to invite someone to teach the class a greeting, rather than a list chosen by somebody else.
- Script challenge. Spin, then try to write your name in that language’s script. Hangul and Cyrillic are good for this because they can be learned quickly.
Everything runs in the browser, with nothing to install and nothing stored. The wheel works on a projector, an interactive whiteboard or a phone passed around the room.
Before you start
Three beliefs that put people off, and what is actually true
“It is too late, adults cannot learn languages”
Children who grow up with a language usually end up with a native accent, which adults rarely achieve. But adults learn faster at the start: they can read, use a grammar explanation, and build on the languages they already know. Millions of people learn a new language to a high level as adults. An accent is not a failure; it is the sound of someone who learned.
“I am not good at languages”
Everybody reading this learned at least one language fluently. Differences in aptitude are real but modest, and they matter far less than hours spent and how those hours are used. People who believe they have no talent often had a poor experience at school, where language classes are short, infrequent and heavy on tests.
“You can only really learn by moving there”
Living in a country helps, but plenty of people live abroad for years and learn little, because they work and socialise in their own language. Plenty of others learn at home with a course, regular conversation practice and media in the language. What matters is how much real use of the language fits into an ordinary week.
FAQ