How Long Does It Take to Learn English?

"How many years does it take?" is a broken question. Seven years of school English often add up to about 700 hours of actual contact with the language, spread so thin that most of it evaporates. One focused hour a day gives you those same 700 hours in two years, and you keep what you learn.

So count hours: it is the one number that predicts progress. For scale, children get an estimated 12,000 to 15,000 hours of their native language before they master it (Diane Larsen-Freeman's estimate). You need only a fraction of that, because you already know how language works.

The US Foreign Service Institute has trained American diplomats in foreign languages for decades, and publishes how long each one takes: roughly 600 to 750 class hours for the languages closest to English (French, Spanish, Dutch), around 900 to 1,100 for most others (Russian, Turkish, Finnish, Thai), and about 2,200 for the hardest group (Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, Arabic). Their students learn as a full-time job: about five hours of class a day, plus homework.

To be precise about what comes from where: the hours per level in the table below are mine. I have logged my own learning for years, and my numbers agree with FSI's and with the ALTE scale. What this calculator takes from FSI is the distance between languages: the same measurements that make Thai a 2,200-hour project for an American also tell you how much harder English is for a Thai speaker than for a Dutch one. Those distances became the multipliers here, with one honest adjustment: FSI's harshest ratio is about 3.3x, and I softened it to 2x, because English surrounds you in music, movies, and the internet, an advantage no diplomat studying Thai in a classroom ever had. My own logged hours (see below) land almost exactly on that 2x.

Hours shown are for native speakers of a language close to English; the calculator above adjusts them to yours. Rule of thumb: double the estimates when the two languages are far apart, for example a Thai speaker learning English, or an English speaker learning Hungarian.

Do not imagine 600 hours of grammar exercises: people study grammar for years and still cannot order a coffee. But do not skip grammar either; a little of it, at the right moment, saves you months of guessing. The plan that works: 20 to 60 minutes of real speaking practice every day, with corrections, some grammar when the same mistake keeps coming back, plus shows and videos in English that you actually enjoy. Relaxed hours count too, and the total grows fast (music, texting, TV shows...).

Every phrase you learn makes the next one easier. Two months after I started Hungarian, I knew very little, but I used everything I knew. I would say a sentence slowly and wrong, then slowly and right, then faster, then without thinking. That is how fluency arrives: one topic at a time, long before the chart says you are finished.

One more free tool before you go: Gliglish itself. You speak out loud with an AI teacher, and it corrects you, free for 10 minutes every day. Try your first 10 minutes now; the worst case is you lose 10 minutes. And browse the other free tools to make every hour count.