Here’s Exactly How Many Hours You Need To Learn A Language
There are jobs that require individuals to speak multiple languages fluently, and fortunately, landing such a job often involves comprehensive language training, such as the one offered by the US Foreign Service Institute for diplomats. As language learning experts, FSI researchers are well aware of the amount of time required for their future foreign service officers to learn a new language - any language.
So, how many hours of language learning does it take to become fluent?
Let's imagine for a moment that you are about to become an American diplomat and it's your first day at the FSI.
Intro data: you are native English speaker and you have never touched that old [French / German/ Swahili ] dictionary on a dusty shelf.
Your future: you will reach what they call the “professional working proficiency”, or level 3 (out of 6) in the ILR (Interagency Language Roundtable), in record time. To be more clear, you will be quite at ease in speaking with natives without them being annoyed by your accent and grammatical blunders.
In how many hours will you get from there to here?
Different languages take different time to learn
The languages we are discussing are inherently different. However, before delving into a discussion of the semantic and phonetic differences between Slavic and Romance languages, let's establish that we are only interested in how they differ from English.
Surprisingly, these differences are not as significant as you might think. In fact, to illustrate this point, the FSI has grouped world languages into four categories based on their level of "exoticism" from an English speaker's perspective. Here they are:
Category I, or the easy-peasy
Romance languages – Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian
North Germanic languages – Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Dutch
Category II, or the exotic blend
German
Malay languages – Malay and Indonesian
Swahili
Haitian Creole
Category III, or where you find the most of languages
Baltic and Slavic languages – Russian, Ukranian, Polish, Serbo-Croatian, Bulgarian, Czech, Slovak, Slovenian;
Hellenic languages – Greek, Makedonian;
Uralic languages – Estonian, Finnish, Hungarian;
Semitic languages – Hebrew, Amharic;
Indian languages – Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, Sinhala
Somali, Georgian, Armenian, Turkish, Kurdish, Azerbajani, Turkmen, Khmer, Vietnamese, Thai… et cetera
P.S. This group includes many more languages that are not listed here. You can always check the full (but not exhaustive) list of category III languages on the Foreign Service Institute webpage.
Category IV, or “the red zone”
Arabic
Asian languages: Chinese, Japanese, Korean
Are you wondering how all of this is related to your goal of becoming a bilingual US diplomat? It's more relevant than you might think.
How many hours to learn a language from each group are needed?
Now that we have covered the categories, let's take a look at the findings of the study. As a future diplomat, you will need to spend approximately 600-700 hours at the Federal Service Institute to achieve working proficiency in any language from category I. However, to reach the same level of proficiency in category II languages, your time investment will need to increase by 1/3, meaning you will need to devote at least 900 hours to learn German and other languages in this category.
Unfortunately, things get even more challenging with category III languages. You will have to put in around 1100 hours of study before being able to hold an engaging conversation with a Russian KGB officer. And if you are passionate about learning Japanese, which falls under category IV, be prepared to invest 2200 hours of your life to achieve the same level of fluency.
Where did these differences come from?
When creating this chart, FSI considered various cultural and linguistic factors of each language.
It takes only 600 hours to learn a language that is similar to English, such as French, Spanish, Portuguese, and other Romance languages. This is because they all originated from Vulgar Latin around 12-15 centuries ago, and thus shares a significant part of its vocabulary.
On the other hand, it is much more challenging to find similarities between English and Chinese due to their vastly different linguistic and cultural backgrounds.
Let’s go further.
Writing system is also important.
Note that all languages in categories 1 and 2 use the same Latin script. However, this is not the case for languages in the third category. Slavic languages use the Cyrillic script, Greek uses the Greek alphabet, and Semitic languages use an abugida.
In the fourth category, we depart from the usual writing system altogether and come to what is called logography. Obviously, you will have a hard time learning a whole new writing system and then developing your reading proficiency to the point where you can at least read posts on Chinese social media platforms.
This is where the drastic gap of 1100 hours between categories 3 and 4 comes from.
How many hours a day do you have to study the language?
The total amount of hours needed to learn a language is very handy when estimating how much time it will take to learn, but it's important to remember that there are only 24 hours in a day. So, can you really learn Spanish in just 25 days? Well, if you don't need to sleep...
When FSI published this study, they not only provided the total number of hours required but also the total number of weeks needed to become fully bilingual. The assumption was that you would study for 25 hours per week, which equates to approximately 3.5 hours per day or 5 hours from Monday to Friday, leaving the weekend free for monolingual activities.
These are pretty severe conditions, n’est-ce pas?
However, it's important to consider our tendency to forget 60% of newly learned words after just one hour, unless we use special strategies to memorize them. It's also important to consider our tendency to switch to our first language when we struggle to access information or explain something complex, as well as our natural inclination to procrastinate.
In other words, to truly become proficient in a new language, it's essential to fully immerse yourself in regular language learning activities.
Amazing 20/80: how many hours you need to learn the most spoken languages?
Now, let’s say you want to quickly learn a new language and become a happy bilingual individual. With all the FSI data at hand, which language makes the most sense to learn?
According to Ethnologue, the first category includes three out of the ten most spoken languages in the world. Let me refresh your memory on these statistics:
As you can see, Chinese is the second most spoken language with almost a billion native speakers and an additional 200 million who learned it as a second language. However, it will take you 2200 hours to reach a solid proficiency level. Hindi and Urdu, which are often counted together, come in as the third most popular language. However, their writing systems are completely different from each other. To learn a language from category II, such as German or Russian, you would need a solid 1100 hours.
Now let’s do a simple math.
Learn 3+ languages instead of just one within the same time
For the time needed to learn Chinese alone (2200 hours), you could learn two other languages from category 3, such as Hindi and Russian (1100 hours each). Alternatively, you could become fluent in three languages from category 1: Spanish, French, and Portuguese. And you would still have around 400 hours to spare! You could use that time to start learning a new language or improve your proficiency in these three. So, what would you choose: three languages or just one?
Moreover, with these three languages, you would be able to communicate fluently in 70 countries and territories, while Chinese would only open doors in five.
Isn’t it a clear example of how the Pareto Law applies to language learning? With just 20% of the effort, you can achieve 80% of the results. You could waste an enormous amount of time learning one hard language or spend four times less time studying an easier one that would give you the freedom to travel the world.
The only thing you need to do is to be smart about language learning.
