How long each language takes

Current NFATC programme baselines for reaching an integrated ILR 3 in speaking and listening, and what those hours actually go on. Categories II–IV print hour totals; Category I values are this site’s transparent weeks×23 derivations. Ordered by hours, not by popularity.

• How long does it take to learn Italian?

  The current NFATC page lists Italian at 24 weeks; using its typical 23 class hours per week, this site derives 552. Why the pronunciation is a gift and the input is the constraint.

• How long does it take to learn Portuguese?

  The current NFATC page lists Portuguese on its 24-week schedule, from which this site derives 552 class hours. But the choice between Brazilian and European Portuguese changes the difficulty more than any other decision on this site.

• How long does it take to learn Dutch?

  The current NFATC page lists Dutch at 24 weeks; using its typical 23 class hours per week, this site derives 552. The grammar is close to English; getting anyone to speak it back is the hard part.

• How long does it take to learn Swedish?

  The current NFATC page lists Swedish at 24 weeks; using its typical 23 class hours per week, this site derives 552. Learning it also opens much written Norwegian and Danish.

• How long does it take to learn Norwegian?

  The current NFATC page lists Norwegian at 24 weeks; using its typical 23 class hours per week, this site derives 552. It is a practical route into Scandinavian with two written standards.

• How long does it take to learn Danish?

  The current NFATC page lists Danish at 24 weeks; using its typical 23 class hours per week, this site derives 552. Reading is friendly to Germanic-language speakers; listening is harder.

• How long does it take to learn Romanian?

  The current NFATC page lists Romanian at 24 weeks; using its typical 23 class hours per week, this site derives 552. It is a Romance language with cases and suffixed articles.

• How long does it take to learn French?

  The current NFATC page lists French at 30 weeks; using its typical 23 class hours per week, this site derives 690. Why the vocabulary is nearly free and the listening is not.

• How long does it take to learn Spanish?

  The current NFATC page lists Spanish at 30 weeks, transparently 690 class hours at its typical class schedule. What that benchmark means and where English speakers actually get stuck.

• How long does it take to learn German?

  The current NFATC page lists German at 828 class hours, between Spanish’s derived 690 and the 1,012-hour category. Why the words feel familiar and the sentences do not.

• How long does it take to learn Indonesian?

  No tones, no cases, no gender, no verb conjugation, no obligatory plural marking, and a Latin alphabet with regular spelling. The current NFATC page still lists Indonesian at 828 class hours — about 20% above Spanish's derived 690 — while the public timeline does not break down why.

• How long does it take to learn Swahili?

  The current State Department training page lists Swahili at 828 class hours to integrated oral ILR 3. No tones, Latin alphabet, regular spelling, and a noun-class system that reaches into every word in the sentence.

• How long does it take to learn Russian?

  The current NFATC page lists Russian at 1,012 class hours — about one and a half times Spanish and less than half of Mandarin. The alphabet takes a week; verbal aspect takes years.

• How long does it take to learn Greek?

  The current NFATC page lists Greek at 1,012 class hours — the same category as Russian, about one and a half times Spanish. You already know hundreds of Greek words; almost none of them are the ones you need.

• How long does it take to learn Polish?

  The current NFATC page lists Polish at 1,012 class hours — the same category 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.

• How long does it take to learn Turkish?

  The current NFATC page lists Turkish at 1,012 class hours. It is almost perfectly regular, has no grammatical gender and few irregular verbs — and it is still about one and a half times Spanish, because regularity is not the same as familiarity.

• How long does it take to learn Hebrew?

  The current NFATC page lists Hebrew at 1,012 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.

• How long does it take to learn Vietnamese?

  Vietnamese uses the Latin alphabet and has no verb conjugation, cases or grammatical plural marking. NFATC lists 1,012 oral class hours but publishes no skill breakdown; this page examines the sound system without assigning it a share.

• How long does it take to learn Thai?

  Thai has no conjugation, no plurals, no cases and no gender. It also has five tones, its own alphabet and no spaces between words; the current NFATC page places it at 1,012 class hours.

• How long does it take to learn Hindi?

  The current NFATC page lists Hindi at 1,012 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.

• How long does it take to learn Finnish?

  Fifteen cases, no gender, no articles, no future tense, and no relation to any language you are likely to know. The current NFATC page places Finnish at 1,012 class hours.

• How long does it take to learn Hungarian?

  Hungarian is surrounded by Indo-European languages and related to none of them. The current NFATC page places it at 1,012 class hours; the difficulty is almost entirely in how a sentence is built.

• How long does it take to learn Czech?

  The current NFATC page lists Czech at 1,012 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.

• How long does it take to learn Ukrainian?

  The current NFATC page lists Ukrainian at 1,012 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.

• How long does it take to learn Persian?

  Persian is Indo-European, has no grammatical gender, no cases and largely regular verbs — and the current NFATC page still lists it at 1,012 hours. Its Arabic-derived script leaves out the short vowels, but the public timeline does not break down where those hours go.

• How long does it take to learn Chinese (Mandarin)?

  The current State Department training page puts Mandarin Chinese at 2,200 class hours to integrated ILR 3 in speaking and listening — the top category, alongside Arabic, Japanese and Korean. What that means at 30 minutes a day, and where learners actually stall.

• How long does it take to learn Japanese?

  The current NFATC page places Japanese in its 2,200-hour Category IV and gives no extra numerical penalty. What that benchmark means, and the three walls learners actually hit.

• How long does it take to learn Korean?

  The current State Department training page lists Korean at 2,200 class hours to integrated oral ILR 3. The alphabet takes an afternoon; almost everything after that is where the time goes.

• How long does it take to learn Arabic?

  The current State Department training page lists Arabic at 2,200 class hours to integrated oral ILR 3. But the figure leaves open a choice most guides never mention: which Arabic you are actually learning.

• How long does it take to learn Cantonese?

  The current NFATC page lists 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.

Looking at this the other way round? The hardest languages and the easiest, across the 30 languages with scenario pages.

These baselines come from a programme whose current page describes a typical week as 23 class hours plus 17 hours of self-study, which is almost certainly not how you plan to learn. The calculator adjusts them for your target level, the languages you already speak, and how you actually study. It covers all 31 modelled languages, including Malay, which does not have a separate scenario page.