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 listening, a level somewhere around B2 to C1.
| FSI category | Examples | Class hours (approx.) |
|---|---|---|
| I | Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Romanian, French | 552–690 |
| II | German, Indonesian, Malay, Swahili, Haitian Creole | 828 |
| III | Russian, Polish, Greek, Turkish, Hindi, Hebrew, Finnish, Hungarian, Vietnamese, Thai | 1,012 |
| IV | Arabic, Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean | 2,200 |
FSI students study full-time in small classes, about 23 hours of class a week plus 17 hours of self-study, 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 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 690 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.
