Not as hard as you'd think — at least compared to what most people assume.
The US Foreign Service Institute, which has trained American diplomats since 1947, ranks languages by actual classroom hours needed to reach professional proficiency. Persian sits in Category III (~1,100 hours) — the same tier as Russian, Hindi, and Turkish. Arabic, Mandarin, Japanese, and Korean are in Category IV, requiring roughly 2,200 hours — literally double.
The reason comes down to something linguists call "linguistic distance." Persian's phonology and script are quite different from English, which pushes it out of the "easy" tier. But its grammar is comparatively simple and regular — no grammatical gender, no complex case system, no irregular root-based verb conjugation like Arabic has. That combination is exactly why it lands in the middle, not at the very top.
I wrote a more detailed breakdown of the FSI categories and what "linguistic distance" actually means here: [Languages]
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