How Many Hours Does It Take to Learn a Language?

Every figure on this page comes from one source, the class hours the U.S. Foreign Service Institute publishes for its full-time students, put through one method, so the numbers here match our calculators and guides exactly.

How we get from FSI class hours to your hours

FSI students study full time: 23 hours a week in class with a teacher and another 17 hours on their own, aiming for professional working proficiency (ILR 3). We take FSI's class hours for a language, multiply them by 1.5 to account for studying alone without a teacher, and count the result as the hours from zero to B2, the upper-intermediate CEFR level. Because ILR 3 is above B2, that's a cautious estimate rather than an optimistic one.

A few languages in the table aren't on FSI's current list: Afrikaans, Catalan, Icelandic, Pashto, Sinhala, Somali, Tagalog, Tamil and Telugu. We place each in the category of its closest listed relatives and mark it as an estimate.

Hours by FSI category

Within Category I, French and Spanish sit at the top of the range: FSI gives them longer courses than Italian, Portuguese or the Scandinavian languages.

Hours to learn each language

Turning hours into a date

Hours only become a plan once you know how many you can put in each week. At 30 minutes a day, done on 90% of days, you put in 3.15 hours a week. At an hour a day, 6.3. Divide the hours above by your weekly number and you have a count of weeks. The Time to Fluency Calculator does that arithmetic for you, and the CEFR level calculator works it out from whatever level you're at now.

For what these hours feel like in practice, why the same total plays out so differently depending on how you schedule it, and worked examples from each category, read the main guide: how long it takes to learn a language.