How long does it take to learn a language?
It depends on the language, how many hours you put in, and what "learn" means to you. The most cited estimates come from the US Foreign Service Institute (FSI), which trains diplomats full time. Its timelines run from about 24 weeks for languages close to English to 88 weeks for the hardest ones, for a professional level of speaking and listening.
Those numbers are useful, but only if you know what they describe. Most people learning on their own will take longer in calendar time, and many do not need the level FSI trains for.
What the FSI estimates actually measure
The State Department's FSI page lists the time "usually expected" for a student to reach an integrated score of 3 in speaking and listening on the Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR) scale. Level 3 is a professional level of proficiency, well beyond getting by on a trip.
The learners are not typical. They are native English speakers in small, instructor-led classes, with a typical week of 23 hours in class and 17 hours of self-study. The page itself says actual time varies with natural ability, prior language-learning experience and time in class.
| FSI category |
Weeks |
Class hours |
Examples from the FSI list |
| I: Languages close to English |
24 to 30 |
552 to 690 |
Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch |
| II |
About 36 |
828 |
German, Indonesian, Swahili |
| III: "Hard languages" |
About 44 |
1,012 |
Russian, Hindi, Turkish, Greek, Vietnamese |
| IV: "Super-hard languages" |
88 |
2,200 |
Arabic, Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean |
Spanish and French are listed at 30 weeks; most other Category I languages at 24.
Why your timeline will look different
FSI students spend about 40 hours a week on the language, with trained teachers and a clear target. If you study on your own for half an hour a day, you log a few hours a week, without a teacher correcting you. The FSI numbers do not tell you how long self-study takes, and nobody has a reliable formula for that.
The hours also assume an English-speaking starting point. If you already speak a related language, such as Spanish before Portuguese, you will likely need less.
Turn the FSI hours into your calendar
This table is plain arithmetic, not a prediction. It shows how long it would take just to match FSI class hours at different daily amounts, without counting the 17 weekly hours of self-study FSI students also do.
| Daily practice |
Hours per year |
Spanish class hours (690) |
Japanese class hours (2,200) |
| 15 minutes |
About 91 |
About 7.5 years |
About 24 years |
| 30 minutes |
About 183 |
About 3.8 years |
About 12 years |
| 60 minutes |
365 |
About 1.9 years |
About 6 years |
| 2 hours |
730 |
About 11 months |
About 3 years |
Two things follow. First, a professional level in a hard language is a multi-year project for most self-learners, so a daily routine you can sustain matters more than a burst of motivation. Second, most goals are smaller than ILR 3, and you can reach useful milestones much sooner.
Set a milestone you can check
Instead of "learn Spanish," pick something you can test in 30 or 90 days:
- Hold a five-minute conversation about yourself with a tutor or exchange partner.
- Understand the main idea of a slow news clip or a children's show episode.
- Read one graded reader at your level without a dictionary on every line.
- Recognize your 500 most useful words when you hear them.
The 30-day language learning plan ends with a written next-month target like these. You can also build a personal language plan around your schedule.
What speeds progress up, and what does not
More hours help, but how you use them matters too. Spreading practice across days had a medium-to-large effect on second-language learning in a meta-analysis of 48 experiments with 3,411 learners (Kim and Webb, 2022). That supports a short daily session over one long weekend session.
Vocabulary size is another honest yardstick. In an analysis of English corpora, Nation (2006) estimated that understanding about 98 percent of the words in unassisted reading takes a vocabulary of 8,000 to 9,000 word families, and 6,000 to 7,000 for spoken English. That was for English, and you need far fewer words for everyday conversation, but it shows why comfortable reading of novels or news takes years.
The guide on the best way to memorize vocabulary covers the review method in detail.
What slows most self-learners down
The biggest delays are rarely about the language itself. These are the patterns that most often stretch a timeline:
- Long gaps. Weeks off mean relearning words you already knew. A short daily session prevents most of that.
- Only one kind of practice. Reading-only learners often struggle to follow speech, and app-only learners often struggle to speak. Mix recall, listening and speaking every week.
- Material that is too hard. If you understand less than about half of a clip or page, you spend the session decoding instead of learning. Step down a level.
- Never speaking aloud. Speaking is a separate skill. Saying even one full sentence a day keeps it from lagging far behind.
- Switching resources constantly. Each new course restarts at the beginning. Pick one core resource and add to it rather than replacing it.
When the answer changes
You live where the language is spoken
Daily exposure and real conversations add hours you would not otherwise get. Immersion is not automatic learning, though. People who stay in English-speaking circles abroad can progress slowly.
You need the language for work or an exam
Look up the exact level your employer or exam requires, such as a CEFR level or an ILR score, and plan backward from it with a teacher if you can.
You are learning for travel in a few months
Focus on survival phrases, numbers, listening to common questions, and speaking aloud every day. That is a realistic, narrower goal.
You keep starting and stopping
Consistency is the bottleneck, not talent. See how to learn a language daily for a sustainable routine, how to plan 15 minutes of language study for short days, or browse the language learning hub.
