Free tool
Pick a language to get a real timeline. Each estimate starts from official U.S. Foreign Service Institute study hours, then adjusts for your native language and how much you study a day, then shows when you'll reach each level, from tourist basics to professional fluency.
Reaching professional working proficiency in a new language takes roughly 600 to 2,200 hours of study, depending on how far it sits from your native language, according to the U.S. Foreign Service Institute. FSI rates Spanish and French near 600 to 750 hours and Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean near 2,200. This free calculator maps those hours to CEFR milestones for 48 languages.
The base figure for each language is the FSI study-hour estimate: the classroom hours a native English speaker needs to reach professional working proficiency (roughly CEFR C1). Earlier levels (A1 through B2) are scaled down from it using standard CEFR effort ratios, so you can see that conversational ability arrives long before full fluency.
On each language's page you can set your native language (a related language and shared script cut the time) and your daily study time, which turns the hours into weeks, months and years. The numbers are estimates, but they're honest about one thing: steady daily contact, especially reading, is what moves the timeline.
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It depends on the language, your native tongue, how much you study and what "learn" means. The U.S. Foreign Service Institute estimates 600 to 750 hours for the easiest languages (Spanish, French, Italian), rising to about 2,200 hours for the hardest (Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean), to reach professional proficiency. Conversational ability comes far sooner, often in a few hundred hours. Pick a language above for its own timeline.
The Foreign Service Institute groups languages by the classroom hours a native English speaker needs for professional working proficiency. Category I (around 600 to 750h) covers most Romance and Germanic languages; Category II (around 900h) German and Indonesian; Category III (around 1,100h) Slavic, Turkic, Greek, Finnish and more; Category IV (around 2,200h) Arabic, Mandarin, Japanese and Korean.
Conversational ability (CEFR B1) usually arrives at roughly 40 to 45% of the hours needed for full proficiency, often a few hundred hours. For an easy language at an hour a day, that can be under a year. It comes much sooner than "fluent" because everyday conversation relies on a few thousand high-frequency words you can build quickly through reading and listening.
Consistency and real context. A little every day beats long gaps, and meeting the language in real sentences builds vocabulary and grammar faster than isolated drills. Extensive reading with audio is one of the most efficient methods. Lingo7 lets you read real books with parallel translation and native-narrated audio.