Study & writing
Language learning hours calculator
Choose how hard the language is for an English speaker and how much you study; see how many hours, months and years it takes to reach professional working proficiency.
FSI hours are intensive classroom hours with a teacher; casual app practice usually needs more time to reach the same level.
How long it takes to learn a language
The most quoted estimates come from the US Foreign Service Institute (FSI), which trains diplomats who speak English. FSI groups languages by how long its students need to reach professional working proficiency (level 3 on the ILR scale) in speaking and reading. Languages close to English, such as Spanish or Italian, take about 24 weeks or 600 class hours; French about 30 weeks or 750 hours; German about 36 weeks or 900 hours; “hard” languages such as Russian or Hindi about 44 weeks or 1,100 hours; and Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Korean about 88 weeks or 2,200 hours.
The calculator divides those hours by your weekly study time: weeks = total hours ÷ (hours per day × days per week), then converts weeks into months and years. Example: Spanish at 1 hour a day, 5 days a week is 5 hours a week, so 600 ÷ 5 = 120 weeks, or 840 days, about 2.3 years or 27.6 months.
| FSI category | Class hours | Example languages | At 1 h/day, 5 days/week |
|---|---|---|---|
| I | 600 | Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Swedish | 2.3 years |
| I | 750 | French | 2.9 years |
| II | 900 | German, Indonesian, Swahili | 3.4 years |
| III | 1,100 | Russian, Polish, Turkish, Hindi | 4.2 years |
| IV | 2,200 | Arabic, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean | 8.4 years |
What the estimate assumes
FSI students are adults in small classes with a trained teacher for about 25 hours a week, and they also study on their own on top of class time. An hour of focused lessons, speaking practice or careful reading is therefore worth more than an hour of passive listening or swiping through an app. Treat the result as the time for structured study; if much of your practice is light, expect it to take longer.
Your starting point matters too. The categories are for native English speakers. A Spanish speaker learning Portuguese or a Japanese speaker learning Korean will usually progress faster than the table suggests, and someone who already speaks a second language tends to learn a third more quickly.
Professional working proficiency is a high bar: discussing your work, following the news, holding a long conversation with few errors. Everyday conversational ability comes much earlier, often in roughly a third to half of these hours. If your goal is travel or basic conversation, plan for a smaller target and use the full figure for work or study in the language.
Frequently asked questions
How many hours does it take to learn Spanish?
FSI estimates about 600 class hours (24 weeks of full-time study) for an English speaker to reach professional working proficiency in Spanish. At one hour a day, five days a week, that is a little over two years.
What is the hardest language to learn for English speakers?
FSI's Category IV, which includes Arabic, Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese and Korean, takes the longest: about 88 weeks or 2,200 class hours, almost four times as long as Spanish.
Can I learn a language in one year?
For a Category I language, 600 hours in a year means about 12 hours a week, or under 2 hours a day. For harder languages, a year is usually enough for solid conversation but not full professional proficiency.