FluencyClock
How long does a language actually take?
A free calculator built on the US Foreign Service Institute's published class-hour data — adjusted for the level you want, the languages you already speak, and how you really plan to study.
Difficulty is not a gradient
The Foreign Service Institute publishes four hour bands, not a ranking. Everything inside a band costs the same — Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean and Arabic are one figure, and no published data separates them. The steps below are what that looks like.
Spanish to Mandarin is a factor of 3.7. That ratio is the most robust thing here: it survives every assumption you might dispute about class hours or endpoints, because the same assumptions apply to both. The full table, or your own numbers.
Built to be argued with
Most answers to this question are a number with no working shown. Here is the working.
Real published baselines
600 class hours for Spanish, 2,200 for Mandarin — the State Department's own figures for reaching professional proficiency, not someone's guess.
Your method, priced honestly
FSI hours are intensive classroom hours. An app is a different activity, and the gap widens the higher you aim. We charge for that instead of pretending it away.
It will tell you when to stop
Some plans cannot reach some levels at any hour count. No app alone reaches C1. We say so rather than quoting a very large number that implies it is merely slow.
Credit for what you already speak
A Spanish speaker learning Portuguese is not starting where a monolingual English speaker starts. Every other calculator we found ignores this.
Every coefficient sourced
One published figure, four judgement calls. The judgement calls are labelled as such, with the reasoning, on a page you can check.
Free options included
Our recommendations always include something that pays us nothing, because a shortlist that never does is an advert.
Start with a language
What the hours actually buy you, where learners stall, and how long it takes at the pace you can realistically keep.
How long does it take to learn Chinese (Mandarin)?
2200 FSI class hours to professional proficiency
FSI puts Mandarin Chinese at 2,200 class hours to professional proficiency — the top band, alongside Arabic, Japanese and Korean. What that means at 30 minutes a day, and where learners actually stall.
ReadHow long does it take to learn Japanese?
2200 FSI class hours to professional proficiency
FSI puts Japanese in its hardest band and singles it out as harder still than the rest of it. What 2,200+ class hours means in practice, and the three walls learners actually hit.
ReadHow long does it take to learn Korean?
2200 FSI class hours to professional proficiency
FSI puts Korean at 2,200 class hours — its hardest band. The alphabet takes an afternoon; almost everything after that is where the time goes.
ReadHow long does it take to learn Arabic?
2200 FSI class hours to professional proficiency
FSI puts Arabic at 2,200 class hours — its hardest band. But the figure assumes a choice most guides never mention: which Arabic you are actually learning.
ReadHow long does it take to learn Russian?
1100 FSI class hours to professional proficiency
FSI puts Russian at 1,100 class hours — roughly twice Spanish, half of Mandarin. The alphabet takes a week; verbal aspect takes years.
ReadHow long does it take to learn Greek?
1100 FSI class hours to professional proficiency
FSI puts Greek at 1,100 class hours — the same band as Russian, roughly twice Spanish. You already know hundreds of Greek words; almost none of them are the ones you need.
ReadHow long does it take to learn German?
900 FSI class hours to professional proficiency
FSI puts German at 900 class hours — a band of its own between the Romance languages and the hard ones. Why the words feel familiar and the sentences do not.
ReadHow long does it take to learn French?
750 FSI class hours to professional proficiency
FSI puts French at 750 class hours — the top of its easiest band, and longer than Spanish. Why the vocabulary is nearly free and the listening is not.
ReadHow long does it take to learn Spanish?
600 FSI class hours to professional proficiency
FSI puts Spanish at 600 class hours to professional proficiency — its easiest band. What that means at 30 minutes a day, and the three places English speakers actually get stuck.
ReadHow long does it take to learn Italian?
600 FSI class hours to professional proficiency
FSI puts Italian at 600 class hours — tied with Spanish at the bottom of its easiest band. Why the pronunciation is a gift and the input is the constraint.
ReadHow long does it take to learn Portuguese?
600 FSI class hours to professional proficiency
FSI puts Portuguese at 600 class hours — its easiest band. But the choice between Brazilian and European Portuguese changes the difficulty more than any other decision on this site.
ReadHow long does it take to learn Dutch?
600 FSI class hours to professional proficiency
FSI puts Dutch at 600 class hours — tied with Spanish at the easiest end. The grammar is the friendliest in Europe for an English speaker; getting anyone to speak it back to you is the hard part.
ReadHow long does it take to learn sign language (ASL)?
Nobody can source an answer, and the pages that give you a number are guessing. Here is what the evidence actually supports about learning American Sign Language, and why the hour figures you have seen are unattributed.
ReadHow long does it take to learn Latin?
No institution publishes an hour figure for Latin, and the honest reason is that almost nobody is trying to do the same thing with it. Reading Caesar and reading Tacitus are years apart, and neither involves speaking.
ReadHow long does it take to learn Polish?
1100 FSI class hours to professional proficiency
FSI puts Polish at 1,100 class hours — same band as Russian, but with a Latin alphabet you can read on day one and a sound system that takes far longer than the reading does.
ReadHow long does it take to learn Turkish?
1100 FSI class hours to professional proficiency
FSI puts Turkish at 1,100 class hours. It is almost perfectly regular, has no grammatical gender and no irregular verbs to speak of — and it is still twice Spanish, because regularity is not the same as familiarity.
ReadHow long does it take to learn Hebrew?
1100 FSI class hours to professional proficiency
FSI puts Hebrew at 1,100 class hours. The script runs right to left and mostly leaves the vowels out — but the harder cost is a vocabulary built from three-letter roots rather than from words you can look up as units.
ReadHow long does it take to learn Vietnamese?
1100 FSI class hours to professional proficiency
Vietnamese uses the Latin alphabet and has no verb conjugation, no cases and no plurals. It is still marked harder than the rest of its FSI band, and the reason is entirely in the sounds.
ReadHow long does it take to learn Swedish?
600 FSI class hours to professional proficiency
FSI puts Swedish at 600 class hours — tied with Spanish. Learning it also gives you most of written Norwegian and Danish for free, which no other language on this site does.
ReadHow long does it take to learn Norwegian?
600 FSI class hours to professional proficiency
FSI puts Norwegian at 600 class hours, tied with Spanish. It is arguably the easiest way into Scandinavian — and it is the only one of the three that asks you to pick between two official written standards.
ReadHow long does it take to learn Danish?
600 FSI class hours to professional proficiency
FSI puts Danish at 600 class hours, tied with Spanish. Reading it is the easiest thing on this site if you know any Germanic language. Hearing it is the hardest thing in its band, and the gap between those two is the whole story.
ReadHow long does it take to learn Thai?
1100 FSI class hours to professional proficiency
Thai has no conjugation, no plurals, no cases and no gender. It also has five tones, its own alphabet, and no spaces between words — and FSI marks it harder than others in its band.
ReadHow long does it take to learn Hindi?
1100 FSI class hours to professional proficiency
FSI puts Hindi at 1,100 class hours. It is a distant relative of English, which shows up in the grammar and almost never in the vocabulary — and the language you learn is not quite the one people speak.
ReadHow long does it take to learn Finnish?
1100 FSI class hours to professional proficiency
Fifteen cases, no gender, no articles, no future tense, and no relation to any language you are likely to know. FSI marks Finnish harder than others in its 1,100-hour band.
ReadHow long does it take to learn Hungarian?
1100 FSI class hours to professional proficiency
Hungarian is surrounded by Indo-European languages and related to none of them. FSI marks it harder than others in its 1,100-hour band, and the difficulty is almost entirely in how a sentence is built.
ReadHow long does it take to learn Czech?
1100 FSI class hours to professional proficiency
FSI puts Czech at 1,100 class hours. Seven cases and a sound English has no name for are the famous obstacles — the underrated one is that the language everyone speaks is not the language textbooks teach.
ReadHow long does it take to learn Ukrainian?
1100 FSI class hours to professional proficiency
FSI puts Ukrainian at 1,100 class hours, the same as Russian. It is a separate language with its own alphabet variant, seven cases, and a vocabulary that overlaps Russian in some registers and Polish in others.
ReadHow long does it take to learn Romanian?
600 FSI class hours to professional proficiency
FSI puts Romanian at 600 class hours, tied with Spanish. It is a Romance language that kept a case system, took a quarter of its vocabulary from Slavic neighbours, and attaches its articles to the end of the noun.
ReadHow long does it take to learn Indonesian?
900 FSI class hours to professional proficiency
No tones, no cases, no gender, no verb conjugation, no plurals, and a Latin alphabet with regular spelling. FSI still puts Indonesian at 900 hours — half again what Spanish costs, for reasons that only appear later.
ReadHow long does it take to learn Cantonese?
2200 FSI class hours to professional proficiency
FSI puts Cantonese at 2,200 class hours — the same as Mandarin, listed separately. Six tones, no standard written form for the spoken language, and far fewer learning materials than its difficulty deserves.
ReadHow long does it take to learn Persian?
1100 FSI class hours to professional proficiency
Persian is Indo-European, has no grammatical gender, no cases and largely regular verbs — and FSI still puts it at 1,100 hours, because it is written in an Arabic-derived script that leaves out the short vowels.
ReadHow long does it take to learn Swahili?
900 FSI class hours to professional proficiency
FSI puts Swahili at 900 hours — the easiest African language it teaches, and the only one in its middle band. No tones, Latin alphabet, perfectly regular spelling, and a noun-class system that reaches into every word in the sentence.
ReadHow long does it take to learn Tagalog?
1100 FSI class hours to professional proficiency
FSI puts Tagalog at 1,100 class hours. The alphabet is Latin, the spelling is regular, and a third of the vocabulary is recognisable from Spanish and English — and its verb system reorganises the sentence in a way nothing in Europe does.
ReadBefore you trust the number
The questions worth asking about any estimate like this one.
Find out what it really takes.
Free, no account, and it will tell you when your plan cannot get you there.