Anywhere from about six months to many years. That's the honest answer to "how long does it take to learn a language", and it sounds like a dodge until you see what it depends on. It comes down to three numbers: how far the language is from the one you already speak, which level you'd call "learned", and how many hours a week you actually put in. Not the hours you planned on Sunday evening. The ones you did.
A quick benchmark to hold on to: an English speaker who wants to hold everyday conversations in Spanish (roughly B1) needs something like 350 to 400 hours of real study. At half an hour a day, that's about two years. At an hour a day, about one. The same goal in Japanese takes several times longer. Everything below explains where those numbers come from and which of them you can change.
How long does it take to learn a language to each CEFR level?
The most useful published figures come from Cambridge English, which estimates the guided learning hours (time with a teacher) needed to reach each CEFR level from zero.
| CEFR level | What you can do | Cumulative guided hours (approx.) |
|---|---|---|
| A1 | Introduce yourself, handle simple exchanges | 90–100 |
| A2 | Shop, ask directions, talk about your routine | 180–200 |
| B1 | Get by alone when traveling, tell a story, give opinions | 350–400 |
| B2 | Real conversations with native speakers, follow the news | 500–600 |
| C1 | Work or study in the language | 700–800 |
| C2 | Near-complete command | 1,000–1,200 |
Three caveats. These figures are for learners of English, so they're a reasonable guide for languages close to your own and optimistic for distant ones. They count classroom hours and assume you study on top. And they're averages: someone who already speaks two languages will beat them, and someone who studies once a week will not.
The shape of the table matters more than the exact numbers. Each step is longer than the last. A1 to A2 is about a hundred hours; C1 to C2 is several hundred. That's why so many people feel they stopped improving somewhere around B1. They didn't stop. The steps got longer. (If the letters are new to you, here are the CEFR levels explained in plain English.)
Why some languages take three times longer
The US Foreign Service Institute, which trains American diplomats, groups languages by how long its English-speaking students need to reach "professional working proficiency" in speaking and reading, a level somewhere around B2 to C1.
| FSI category | Examples | Class hours (approx.) |
|---|---|---|
| I | Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Romanian, French | 600–750 |
| II | German, Indonesian, Malay, Swahili, Haitian Creole | 900 |
| III | Russian, Polish, Greek, Turkish, Hindi, Hebrew, Finnish, Hungarian, Vietnamese, Thai | 1,100 |
| IV | Arabic, Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean | 2,200 |
FSI students study full-time in small classes, about 25 hours of class a week plus homework, and many already know another language. So don't read these as your personal timetable. Read them as a ratio: for an English speaker, Japanese takes roughly three to four times as long as Spanish. The reasons are the usual suspects: shared vocabulary or the lack of it, grammar that works like English or doesn't, unfamiliar sounds, and new writing systems. Our piece on the easiest languages to learn goes through them language by language.
If your first language isn't English, the categories shift. A Spanish speaker learning Portuguese, or a Czech speaker learning Slovak, starts with a head start no list for English speakers will show.
How long does it take to learn Spanish?
For an English speaker, Spanish is about as friendly as languages get: around 600 FSI class hours to professional level. In everyday terms, expect conversational B1 in about a year at an hour a day, or about two years at half an hour.
How long does it take to learn Japanese?
Japanese sits in the hardest FSI group at about 2,200 class hours, and the FSI flags it as usually harder than the others even within that group. Pronunciation is the easy part. The grammar is unlike English but fairly regular. The writing system is the long road: two syllabaries you can learn in a few weeks, then a little over 2,000 everyday kanji. Basic conversation within a year of steady work is realistic. Reading a newspaper comfortably is a project measured in years.
What it looks like in calendar time
Hours are abstract. Days are not. This is the Cambridge estimate turned into a calendar, for a language close to English, assuming the minutes are real study and not an app left open while you scroll something else.
| Daily study | Hours per year | Reaching B1 (~375 h) | Reaching B2 (~550 h) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 15 minutes | ~90 | about 4 years | about 6 years |
| 30 minutes | ~180 | about 2 years | about 3 years |
| 1 hour | ~365 | about 1 year | about 18 months |
| 2 hours | ~730 | about 6 months | about 9 months |
Two things soften the top row. Life adds exposure no table counts: a series in Spanish, a week in Lisbon, a coworker from Kraków. And fifteen minutes a day is how most adults with jobs and children actually learn; it beats an ambitious plan that dies in March. Just be honest about the timescale, and ignore anyone who promises fluency in a month. What's realistic in three months is a fairer question, and the answer is more than nothing.
What actually makes you faster
Daily beats weekly. Thirty-five minutes a day and four hours on Saturday add up to roughly the same total. The daily version wins because memory fades between sessions, and seven short reviews beat one long one.
Review at the right moment. You forget new words on a fairly predictable curve, so the efficient move is to review each one just before it slips. That's how Qlango's short lessons work: spaced repetition brings every word back right before you'd forget it, so the ten minutes you did on a Tuesday are still paying off a month later. If you're curious about the mechanics, here's how spaced repetition works.
Listen far more than feels necessary. Hours of audio you mostly understand (learner podcasts, slow news, a series you've already seen in English) do quiet work that drills can't.
Speak early, and badly. Ten minutes of clumsy conversation shows you exactly which words you're missing. Grammar exercises never will.
Learn the frequent words first. A few thousand common words carry most everyday speech. The rare ones can wait. Nobody needs "shoehorn" in week three.
Have a date. An exam booked for May, a trip in August, dinner with in-laws who don't speak English: a deadline turns "someday" into a schedule.
What slows people down
Switching method every three weeks, for one. Every new app, textbook or system comes with a honeymoon and a fresh start at lesson one, and the fresh start is the problem. Long breaks are the other big one. A two-month gap doesn't just cost two months; you'll spend the first weeks back relearning what you already had.
Then there's learning about the language instead of learning it. Reading grammar explanations you'll never use feels productive and mostly isn't. Use the language, even badly, and look things up when you need them.
Finally, expecting progress to feel like progress. Somewhere between A2 and B2 you'll go weeks without noticing any improvement, and then one evening you'll follow a conversation at the next table without trying. That pattern is close to universal, and it's the best reason not to quit in the flat part.
Pick a level you'd genuinely be happy with, do the arithmetic once, and then stop doing arithmetic. Choose a language from the full list of languages and levels and do one short lesson today; the clock only starts when you do.
