How long does it take to learn French?

You have decided to learn French. The first question is always how long it will take. The honest answer is that it depends, but plenty can still be said usefully.

Learning a language is not a number of hours you can put in a spreadsheet and tick off. How quickly you pick it up varies a lot from person to person, several factors pull in different directions, and "fluent" is not a level anyone agrees on.

What does fluency mean?

Let us assume that "learning French" means understanding most written and spoken French and being able to reply confidently in ordinary situations.

Dictionaries define fluency as speaking easily and accurately, which leaves plenty of room for interpretation. How accurate does your French need to be before it counts? Do you need to handle any subject, or only the ones that come up in your life?

Decide that before you start. It is what turns "learn French" into something you can tell whether you have achieved.

How many hours does it take?

The figures people quote come from the US Foreign Service Institute, which trains American diplomats and sorts languages by how long its own students take to reach professional working proficiency.

French is in Category I, the group closest to English. The FSI puts that group at roughly 24 to 30 weeks, or about 552 to 690 classroom hours. Those are intensive full-time conditions: around 23 hours a week in a small class with professional teachers, plus about 17 hours of homework.

Read it as an ordering of difficulty, not a schedule. It tells you French is at the easy end for an English speaker. It says nothing about what forty minutes on the train will produce.

French has one complication that Spanish does not: the gap between spelling and sound. Reading comes quickly because so much vocabulary is shared with English, but hearing where one word ends and the next begins takes longer. Expect your listening to lag behind your reading for a while. That is normal, and it is fixed by listening, not by studying.

CEFR levels

If you want a target you can actually check, use the Common European Framework of Reference — the A1 to C2 scale on every job advert. For French, the recognised certificates are the DELF and the DALF, awarded by the French Ministry of Education and administered by France Éducation International and by Alliances Françaises around the world. B2 is what most people mean by fluent and is a sensible first target.

The planning rule attached to CEFR guided learning hours is that every hour in class needs roughly two hours of your own work. That ratio is more useful than any total.

What else changes the answer

What is your first language?

The closer French is to a language you already speak, the faster this goes. Another Romance language — Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Catalan — gives you thousands of words for free. English speakers get a large helping too, because a great deal of English vocabulary came from French in the first place. Other things worth asking: does your first language use the same alphabet, and does it have any of the sounds French will ask you to make?

Have you studied another language before?

Research suggests bilinguals pick up a third language more easily than monolinguals pick up a second. You do not have to be bilingual to get part of that: if you studied a language as a teenager or an adult, you already know which methods work for you, and you already have the vocabulary for talking about grammar.

It can also get in the way. Speak both French and Spanish and you will mix up "et" and "y" for years. Psychology Today has a good piece on how a second language shapes a third.

How much time will you give it?

More practice, faster results. Progress is quick at the start, when reading ahead before class and reviewing vocabulary goes a long way. Later, class and homework alone stop being enough.

If you are serious, French has to be part of your ordinary day. Not textbooks every evening — listening to French radio on the way to work, thinking through a conversation in French while you queue, ten minutes of vocabulary on your phone. Pick whatever you will actually keep doing.

How much do you like it?

Motivation decides whether you are still at this in six months. If you like how the language sounds, if your partner speaks it, if you are attached to French cinema or French food, you will practise without thinking of it as practice. Watching a film in French counts. So does reading a recipe in French and then cooking it.

Where will you practise?

How fast you learn is tied directly to how often you get to use it. Do you know French speakers? Can you spend time in a French-speaking country? It does not have to be France: Belgium, Switzerland, Quebec, Senegal and Morocco all offer the same immersion, with different accents.

Immersion is the strongest accelerator there is. Signs, adverts, timetables, the supermarket, ordering lunch — all of it teaches you without a book being opened. If travel is off the table, make the opportunities yourself: a Tandem partner, a Meetup language exchange, or a class with conversation sessions.

Where a translator helps

A translator is not a course and will not teach you French. It removes the friction from the moments where people quietly give up. With Mate you can select a word in an article, a subtitle or a message and see what it means without leaving what you were reading, hear it read aloud, and see the article with the noun — "le pont", "la main" — so you learn the gender together with the word instead of adding it later. Anything worth keeping goes into the Phrasebook, which syncs between your Mac, iPhone, iPad and browser.

French also distinguishes "vous" and "tu", and Mate has a control for it, so you can see both versions of a sentence rather than guess which one you have been given.

So: how long?

French is at the easier end for an English speaker, the shared vocabulary is enormous, and there is no shortage of material to practise with. At an hour a day of real practice, B2 within one to two years is a reasonable expectation. Reading will get there first, listening last, and speaking follows whoever you find to speak with.