Terms of Service

FluencyClock is a free website. There is no account to open, nothing to buy from us, and no subscription. Most of what a terms page normally covers therefore does not apply.

There is one voluntary tip link, to Buy Me a Coffee. It buys nothing — no feature, no removal of anything, no priority. That contract, if you use it, is between you and Buy Me a Coffee under their terms, and nothing on this site changes according to whether you have used it.

Using the site means accepting what follows.

What the estimates are

This is the part that matters.

The hour figures here are estimates built from published data — principally the Foreign Service Institute's class-hour figures for its own diplomatic students — adjusted by a documented model for your target level, study method, and the languages you already speak. How we test shows the whole calculation and every source it rests on.

An estimate is not a prediction about you. Learning outcomes depend on aptitude, prior experience, study quality, consistency and circumstance, none of which a calculator can see. Nothing on this site is a guarantee that any method, product or amount of study will get you to any level. Where the model concludes a method cannot reach a target at all, it says so plainly rather than returning a number — that honesty runs in both directions.

Use the output to compare options and set expectations. Do not use it as the basis of a commitment — a visa deadline, a job offer, a course purchase — without your own judgement.

Affiliate links

Some links to courses and apps earn a commission if you buy through them, at no extra cost to you. Some — Anki and Language Reactor among others — earn nothing and appear anyway because they are the right answer for certain people.

The calculator contains no affiliate links. Recommendations come from matching rules written before any merchant was added, and the ranking code has no access to commission rates; a test enforces this by rewriting every payout and checking the output is unchanged.

We are not party to what you buy

If you buy from a merchant linked here, that contract is between you and them. Pricing, delivery, support, cancellation and refunds are theirs to honour, under their terms. We do not sell, resell or fulfil anything and cannot intervene in a dispute.

Merchant details on this site — prices, commission terms, what a product covers — are recorded with the date they were checked and go stale. Confirm anything that matters on the merchant's own site before paying.

Acceptable use

Do not attempt to disrupt the site, gain unauthorised access to it, or scrape it in a way that degrades service for other people.

The calculator, the model behind it, and the writing on these pages are ours. Quote and link freely with attribution; do not republish pages wholesale.

No warranty

The site is provided as is. It may contain errors, sources may move or change, and it may be unavailable at times. Anything found to be wrong will be corrected — that is the point of publishing the sources — but no warranty of accuracy or availability is given.

Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, we are not liable for any indirect, incidental or consequential loss arising from use of this site, from reliance on its estimates, or from any dealing with a merchant linked here.

Governing law

No governing law or jurisdiction is specified here, and that is deliberate.

Most terms pages name one. This site is run by one person, sells nothing, has no accounts and takes no payments, so there is no operating entity whose home jurisdiction would be the honest answer — and naming one anyway would be inventing a fact in a legal document.

What that means in practice: if a dispute ever arose, which court and which law applied would be decided by ordinary conflict-of-laws rules rather than by a clause here. For a free site with no contract of sale, that is a narrower gap than it sounds.

If this changes — an entity is formed, or a commercial arrangement requires it — a jurisdiction will be named here and the date above will change. This is not legal advice, and if you are relying on this site for anything consequential you should not be relying on this page either.

Changes

These terms may change; the date at the top changes with them.

Contact

Questions: kevin.fan@large.net, or the about page.