I already mentioned that Swahili is hard, at least for Europeans, at least compared to European languages. And yet I am already at level 6. Actually, I am still near the start of People, the 4th topic, so why am I already level 6? Because in Duolingo, levels don’t say anything about how far you have come, just how much work you have put into it. Even that is not quite exact. Levels depend on how many XP you have gained in that language, and you get 10 XP for completing each exercise unit (estimated time: 5 minutes). But even that is not a precise measure of your effort: If you challenge yourself and move ahead fast, you will make more mistakes and therefore spend more time on completing each unit. Also, the web exercises are generally harder than the smartphone exercises.
How far you have come is measured by another variable, fluency. I have only seen that in French, probably because I have not gotten far enough in other languages before giving up. The first information about fluency came when I reached 24%, I think? May have been 22, but I clearly remember 24% because I joked that it ought to be 2.4%. I did not feel fluent in French at all, and really I wasn’t. Now at 52%, I still think the number is exaggerated, but there is no denying that I can read simple French texts for children. It is not just a jumble of words that I translate into English (or Norwegian “Nynorsk”, my mother tongue). So fluency is a thing, and it is calculated based on the size of your vocabulary and your mastery of the total acquired vocabulary. (I use “vocabulary” loosely here, to also include grammatical forms.) Regular readers may remember that I was stuck at 50% for months even though I added new words almost daily, because Duolingo reasonably assumed that I would not be able to remember them all with only 10 XP worth of repetition each day. Seems the game has now started to doubt that assumption, since it upgraded me to 51% and then shortly after to 52%.)
So in short, level shows how many exercises you have completed in that language, and fluency shows how much vocabulary (and grammar) you have gotten out of it. Once you reach a level where fluency is relevant, you should be able to get a pretty good measure of how difficult each language is for you. For instance, my 52% fluency in French has required 10572 XP so far, which lands me at level 17. If I ever get to the same fluency in Swahili, it will probably take three times as much practice, if not more. I don’t really see that happening.
Japanese, perhaps, if they actually manage to get that to beta, I might spend thousands of 5-minutes exercise on that… The time estimate is still May 15, but I believe that when I see it. Swahili may be hard, but it is written in the most basic Latin alphabet. In contrast, Japanese is written in three different scripts, none of which is so simple as an alphabet. Good luck with learning that with less than hundreds of thousands of XP… But hey, there are people who spend more time than that on just messing around in single-player games. At least language is not a single-player game. Well, not until you get married… (Just kidding! I hope.)