How long it takes to learn German — NoaLingua

The figure, and where it comes from

The Foreign Service Institute has been teaching languages to American diplomats since 1947 and measuring how long each takes. German sits in Category II — on its own, between the Category I languages at 600 to 750 hours and Category III — at about 900 class hours, roughly 36 weeks of full-time study, to General Professional Proficiency.

That position is informative in both directions. German is meaningfully harder for an English speaker than Spanish or French, by something like a third. It is also dramatically easier than Japanese, Korean or Chinese at about 2,200 hours. If you are choosing between languages, that spread is worth more than any opinion about which is more beautiful or more useful.

The assumption inside it that nobody quotes

The 900 hours are classroom hours in an intensive programme — around 25 hours a week of instruction, with three to four hours of individual study a day on top. The real investment behind the published figure is therefore larger than the figure, and it happens under conditions almost nobody reading this has.

This cuts both ways, which is why it is worth stating rather than skipping. It means 900 evening hours will not reproduce the FSI result exactly. It also means that measuring yourself against "36 weeks" while studying part-time will make you feel like a failure when you are simply doing it at a different rate.

At three hours a day

Around ten months to the band, if the hours are real and the material is at the right level. This is roughly what an intensive learner achieves.

At one hour a day

About two and a half years. This is the honest shape of the thing for somebody with a job, and it is a perfectly good outcome.

At twenty minutes a day

Seven years or so on paper — and this is where the arithmetic stops meaning much, because forgetting between sessions eats a large share of each one.

The milestones that arrive much earlier

General Professional Proficiency means handling a meeting, an argument and a newspaper in German. Very few people reading this need it, and the things they actually want come far sooner.

Ordering, asking directions and holding a slow, patient conversation arrive somewhere around 100 to 200 hours. Following a German crime series with a translated line on screen comes soon after, helped enormously by the fact that the genre repeats its vocabulary every episode. Following it without the second line is the leap, and it typically lands somewhere past 400 hours — which is also where most people say the language starts feeling real rather than studied.