How long does it take to learn a language?

What does it mean to "learn" a language?

The word "learn" is doing a lot of work in that question. When most people say they want to learn a language, they mean they want to get by in ordinary situations: understand most of what they read and hear, and answer without long pauses.

"Fluent" is just as loose. It covers two different things, ease and accuracy, and they do not arrive together. Speaking fluently usually means speaking comfortably with a limited number of mistakes, not speaking perfectly.

The three things that decide how long it takes

1. Motivation. Are you learning this because you want to, or because someone expects you to? People who want to find ten minutes a day. People who feel obliged do not.
2. Time. How many hours a week, and how focused are they? An hour of real attention beats three hours of scrolling with a textbook open.
3. Background. How close is the language to one you already speak? Have you learned a foreign language before? Do you already know what a subjunctive is? All of that shortens the road.

Is there a number?

There is one number that gets quoted more than any other. The US Foreign Service Institute trains American diplomats, and it groups languages by how long its own students take to reach professional working proficiency. Category I languages, the ones closest to English — Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish and so on — take roughly 24 to 30 weeks of full-time class, about 552 to 690 classroom hours. The hardest group, which includes Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Korean, takes about 88 weeks or 2,200 hours.

Those figures describe adults studying about 23 hours a week in small classes with professional teachers, plus another 17 hours of homework. They are a useful ordering of difficulty. They are not a promise about your evenings.

Pick a target you can actually check

"Fluent" is not a finish line you can see. A level in the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) is. The scale runs A1 to C2, and B2 — able to hold a conversation on familiar and unfamiliar topics without much strain — is a sensible first target for most people. It is also the level most universities and employers ask for.

Once you have a target, the plan gets easier to write. Four questions are worth answering honestly.

• How much time will you give it every day? Every day, not three long sessions at the weekend. It does not have to be study: reading the news, listening to music, writing three sentences about your day all count.
• Can you spend any time in the country? Immersion is still the fastest accelerator there is. Even a week gives you dozens of small, real conversations — ordering food, buying a ticket, asking where something is — and a lot of vocabulary you would never have looked up.
• Who will you speak with? You cannot learn to speak without speaking. A classmate, a friend, a tandem partner. Tandem pairs you with native speakers who want to learn your language, and Meetup lists language exchanges in most cities.
• How high a priority is this really? It is worth being honest before you set a goal, rather than after you miss it.

Where a translator fits in

A translator is not a course, and it will not teach you a language. It is useful for the specific moments in between: looking up a word in the sentence you actually met it in, checking whether a phrase is formal or casual, and hearing how something is supposed to sound.

With Mate you can select a word on a page or in an app and get the translation without leaving what you were reading, hear it read aloud, see the phonetic transcription, and see the noun's gender in languages that have them. Words you want to keep go in the Phrasebook, which syncs between your Mac, iPhone, iPad and browser, so the list you build while reading at your desk is on your phone on the bus. The free Basic style covers all 248 languages; the Advanced and AI styles, which are better at idioms and register, are part of Mate Pro.

So, how long?

For a Category I language, at an hour a day of genuine practice, B2 is a realistic target somewhere between one and two years, and you will be having useful conversations long before that. For a language in the hardest group, multiply by three or four. Both of those numbers move a lot depending on the three factors at the top.

The more useful question is not how long it will take, but what you will do tomorrow.