How Long Does It Take to Learn a Language? FSI Weeks and Hours, Language by Language
The US Foreign Service Institute puts it at 24 to 30 weeks of full-time class for languages close to English, about 36 weeks for German, about 44 for Russian or Polish, and 88 for Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Below is the official table, what one of those weeks contains, and what the numbers cannot tell someone learning alone.
For an English speaker, reaching professional working proficiency takes between 24 and 88 weeks of full-time study, according to the US Foreign Service Institute (FSI): 552 to 690 class hours for languages close to English such as Spanish, French and Italian, and 2,200 class hours for Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Korean.
Those figures come from the FSI page Foreign Language Training on state.gov, where the institute that trains US diplomats publishes how long its own students usually need. The table below sticks to their numbers and adds nothing to them.
FSI language categories: weeks and class hours
Four categories, ordered by how far the language sits from English. The weeks and hours are copied from the FSI page as it read on 26 October 2026; the language lists are shortened, and the FSI itself says its list of hard languages is not complete.
| FSI category | Full-time weeks | Class hours | Languages (from the FSI list) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Category I: close to English | 24-30 | 552-690 | Spanish and French (30 weeks); Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Romanian (24 weeks) |
| Category II | about 36 | 828 | German, Indonesian, Malay, Swahili, Haitian Creole |
| Category III: hard | about 44 | 1,012 | Russian, Polish, Czech, Ukrainian, Greek, Turkish, Hebrew, Hindi, Finnish, Hungarian, Thai, Vietnamese and others |
| Category IV: super-hard | 88 | 2,200 | Arabic, Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean |
What one FSI week actually contains
A typical FSI week is 23 hours in class and 17 hours of self-study, according to the same page. The class-hour column is therefore only part of the effort. Our own arithmetic from that typical week: Spanish at 30 weeks is 690 hours in class plus about 510 hours of study alone, roughly 1,200 hours in all, while Japanese at 88 weeks comes to about 3,700.
The finish line is also narrower than "learning a language". The FSI measures the time its students usually need to reach an integrated score of 3 in speaking and listening on the Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR) scale, the level of professional working proficiency. The page does not convert that score into CEFR levels, so we will not either.
These are adults in small full-time classes with trained teachers, and the FSI says plainly that the real time varies with the learner's ability, earlier language experience and hours spent in class.
What the numbers cannot tell you if you learn alone
Nobody has measured how an hour with an app, a podcast or a textbook at home compares with an FSI classroom hour. This page does not offer a conversion factor, because we do not know of one that a study backs.
What you can do is arithmetic, as long as you label it as arithmetic. At one hour a day, the roughly 1,200 hours of a Spanish course take about three years and three months; at two hours a day, a little over a year and a half. Both figures assume your hours are worth the same as FSI hours, and that assumption is the weak part.
Two things clearly move the number. The first is earlier language experience, such as a related language you already speak, which the FSI itself names as a factor. The second is how many hours a week you actually put in, because a timeline is total hours divided by weekly hours, and weekly hours are the part you control.
Start with the words of your language
Whatever the category, you need the common words before anything else works. Free lists ordered by CEFR level: Spanish, French and Italian (Category I), German (Category II), and English if English is the language you are learning. All of them are collected on the vocabulary lists page, and the words-to-fluency guide covers how many words each level asks for.
How long does it take to learn Spanish?
The FSI puts Spanish in Category I at 30 weeks, or 690 class hours, of full-time study for an English speaker to reach professional working proficiency. French has the same figure. Italian and Portuguese are listed at 24 weeks.
How long does it take to learn German?
About 36 weeks, or 828 class hours, in FSI Category II. German is the only European language in that category on the FSI list.
How long does it take to learn Japanese, Chinese, Korean or Arabic?
All four sit in Category IV at 88 weeks and 2,200 class hours, the longest timeline the FSI publishes. Mandarin and Cantonese are listed separately, and both get the full 88 weeks.
Can you learn a language in a year?
Full time, a Category I language fits inside a year: the FSI course for Spanish is 30 weeks, but those weeks are 40 hours each. At one hour a day, a year gives you 365 hours, which is less than the 552 class hours of the shortest FSI course. A year of daily study gets you a long way into a language; it does not get you to the FSI finish line.
Where MindDory fits
MindDory does not shorten the hour count, and nothing honest can promise that. It makes sure the words you meet during those hours come back before you lose them: a word you miss returns in an hour, a hard one in three days, an easy one in a week. Ten or twenty minutes a day of that is the part of the timeline that keeps the vocabulary you have already paid for.