Why does it say five hours a day is a full-time job?

Because FSI’s own intensive programme runs about five hours of class a day plus homework, and that is a full-time occupation for a paid diplomatic student. Past that threshold the arithmetic still works and stops describing anything a person fits around a life, so the tool flags it rather than printing the number as though it were an ordinary plan.

Does studying fewer days a week just mean longer sessions?

Arithmetically yes, and the tool computes exactly that — three days a week needs roughly twice the daily minutes of six. Whether that is a good trade is a separate question the tool cannot answer: the 1993 deliberate-practice research found benefits falling off past about four hours a day, so concentrating a week into two long sessions is not equivalent to spreading it.

The total does not move, so every missed session redistributes onto the ones remaining. That is why the answer is expressed as a daily figure rather than a finish date — a date implies the plan absorbs interruptions, and it does not. Re-running this with your real days-per-week rather than your intended one usually produces a more honest number.

Tools

How much do I need to study a day?

You have a date in mind. This works out what it costs per day — and says so when the method you picked cannot get there at any pace.

Language

Languages you already speak

Beyond English. A related language can cut the total by a third.

Level you need

How you will study

The single biggest factor after the language itself — the spread between methods is wider than the spread between difficulty bands.

Months you have

Days a week you will study

How this is worked out

Total study hours do not depend on how fast you go — a language costs what it costs. So this is a division: the hours your target needs, spread across the months you have and the days a week you will actually sit down.

The hours themselves come from the FSI baseline for your language, multiplied by how much of it your target level needs, by what you already speak, and by the method you picked. The method multiplier is the one that moves the answer most, and it grows with the level — self-study is 25% overhead at A1 and 70% at C1.

The result rounds up to the next five minutes, always up. Rounding down would hand you a figure that misses the deadline.

It returns no number when the method cannot get there

Ask for C1 by app and there is no daily figure, because no quantity of app-only study reliably reaches C1. Dividing an impossible total by a number of days produces a possible-looking answer to an impossible question, which is worse than saying so. The tool names the ceiling instead.

Every tool here can decline to answer, and that is the most useful thing they do.

Common questions

Why does it say five hours a day is a full-time job?: Because FSI’s own intensive programme runs about five hours of class a day plus homework, and that is a full-time occupation for a paid diplomatic student. Past that threshold the arithmetic still works and stops describing anything a person fits around a life, so the tool flags it rather than printing the number as though it were an ordinary plan.
Does studying fewer days a week just mean longer sessions?: Arithmetically yes, and the tool computes exactly that — three days a week needs roughly twice the daily minutes of six. Whether that is a good trade is a separate question the tool cannot answer: the 1993 deliberate-practice research found benefits falling off past about four hours a day, so concentrating a week into two long sessions is not equivalent to spreading it.
What if I miss days?: The total does not move, so every missed session redistributes onto the ones remaining. That is why the answer is expressed as a daily figure rather than a finish date — a date implies the plan absorbs interruptions, and it does not. Re-running this with your real days-per-week rather than your intended one usually produces a more honest number.

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.