How long will it actually take?
Built on the US Foreign Service Institute's published class-hour data, then adjusted for the level you actually want, the languages you already speak, and how you plan to study. It will sometimes tell you your plan cannot get you there. That is the useful part.
How this is worked out
Every estimate is one multiplication. The FSI baseline for your language — 600 hours for Spanish, 2,200 for Mandarin — is multiplied by the share of it your target level needs, by a discount for languages you already speak, by a multiplier for how you study, and by a penalty for the handful of languages FSI marks as harder than their band.
Only the first number in that chain is published. FSI states the baseline; everything applied on top is ours. The level factors are normalised against Cambridge’s published guided-learning bands and every one lands inside its range. The method multipliers, the related-language discounts and the within-band penalty are estimates, marked as such in the code and in the caveats under every result.
The calendar figure is then just division: total hours over the hours a week your pace supplies. That part is arithmetic and carries no assumptions beyond the ones already made — which is why the hour count, not the finish date, is the number worth arguing about.
The full methodology, coefficient by coefficient, including which are published and which are ours.
It will tell you your plan does not work
Ask for C1 by app and it does not return a large number — it says the method tops out around B1 and stops. A long project and an impossible one look identical when both are printed as hours, and they call for opposite responses: one needs patience, the other needs a different method. Most calculators in this category always return a figure, which is why they are useless at exactly the moment you most need an answer.
Every tool here can decline to answer, and that is the most useful thing they do.
Common questions
- Why does this give a bigger number than other calculators?
- Two reasons, both deliberate. We treat FSI’s 600 hours as reaching C1 rather than something lower, which is the conservative reading of a conversion no standards body has ever published — and it makes our figures larger. And we apply a method multiplier that most calculators skip entirely, which is the single biggest factor after the language. An overestimate fails safely; someone who budgets too little abandons the language and concludes they are bad at languages.
- Are the FSI hours real, or an internet myth?
- Real, published, and routinely misquoted. The US State Department runs a language school for its diplomats and publishes how many class hours its own students need per language. What gets lost in quotation is that those are class hours rather than total study time, in full-time small-group instruction, reaching professional working proficiency rather than conversational ability. All three of those assumptions inflate the figure relative to how it is usually used.
- Why does it ask what languages I already speak?
- Because the effect is large enough to change decisions and is almost never modelled. Spanish takes roughly 30% off Portuguese; it takes nothing at all off Japanese. Leaving the field blank gives you the figure for someone starting from English alone, which is the right default and is wrong for a lot of people. The discount is capped so listing five Romance languages cannot make Italian look nearly free.
- How accurate is this?
- It is a model, built by one person, whose baseline is published and whose other factors are estimates. The most defensible thing in it is not any absolute number but the ratios: Mandarin costs roughly 3.7 times Spanish, and that relation survives every assumption you might disagree with, because the same assumptions apply to both. Treat the absolutes as planning figures with a wide spread and the ratios as solid.
- Why are there no course links on this page?
- So that it can be posted to Reddit and other communities without being an advertisement, and so that the recommendations it produces are believable. Affiliate links appear only on the course and comparison pages, which is enforced by a test rather than by intention. It also means the matching rules can be checked: they were written before any merchant existed, and the ranking code cannot read commission rates.
Sources
Everything this tool rests on. The FSI baseline is published; the factors applied on top of it are ours and are marked as estimates.
- Foreign Language Training — US Department of State, Foreign Service Institute
The class-hour bands every estimate on this site starts from, and the definition of the proficiency they lead to (ILR Speaking-3 / Reading-3).
- FSI Language Difficulty Ranking — fsi-language-courses.org
Which languages sit in which band. The State Department publishes the categories as an image, so per-language assignment comes from independent reproductions that agree with each other and with the official hour bands.
- Guided learning hours — Cambridge English
The shape of the curve between CEFR levels. Cambridge publishes cumulative hours per level (A2 180–200, B1 350–400, B2 500–600, C1 700–800, C2 1,000–1,200); our level factors are normalised against the C1 band and every one lands inside its published range.
- ILR scale — Wikipedia
That no official ILR-to-CEFR crosswalk exists. Published academic tables place ILR 3/3+ at C1; others put C1 nearer ILR 4. We take the lower reading, which makes our estimates the more conservative of the two.
- Zhongwen Shuiping Kaoshi (HSK) — Wikipedia
That Hanban's claimed one-to-one HSK-to-CEFR equivalence was rejected by CEFR bodies and is disputed by the German and French associations of Chinese-language teachers, who place old HSK 6 nearer B2–C1 than C2.
This tool is free and carries no ads or affiliate links. It is funded by commission on some course links elsewhere on the site — which pages, and how that is kept out of the recommendations.
If you got something out of this and are not going to buy a course, you can buy me a coffee instead. Entirely optional, and it changes nothing about what the calculator tells you.