Why Language Learning Times are Fake

April 29, 2026 - Published

If you've been down the rabbit hole of language learning, you've probably seen this list in an article or video. Essentially, it's a list made by the US Foreign Service Institute that estimates how long it takes to learn a language. This is a very popular list to share around, because it's a nice and neat list that breaks down everything into a concrete number of hours. However, it comes with a lot of caveats that many people neglect to mention. Let's go over some of them here!

The Obvious Caveats

Just to get them out of the way, we have to go over the obvious stuff.

First of all, everyone learns at a different pace. Some people will take longer to learn a language, and others may be faster, just because of who they are.

Second of all, this list assumes that you are an English speaker learning a new language that you have no experience in. Prior experience in the new language (or a language related to the new language) will speed it up, and it cannot estimate other language relationships (e.g. the time it would take for a Russian speaker to learn Polish, or even how long it would take for a foreign speaker to learn English).

Finally, these estimates come from a US government training program. The official website notes that a "typical week is 23 hours per week in class and 17 hours of self-study." I would personally assume that most of us reading this article do not, in fact, have the resources or time for that much commitment solely to language learning! I could be wrong, though.

Still, if someone sees this list and goes, "Oh nice, I can be fluent in Spanish in just 30 weeks!" I would tell them to lower their expectations. But wait, where is fluency mentioned in the article?

The Fluency Issue

Looking a bit closer, you'll come across this line: "The following language learning timelines indicate the time usually expected for a student to reach an integrated score of 3 (Speaking + Listening) on the Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR) scale." If we look at the scale, a 3 refers to "General Professional Proficiency," and though the scale goes up to 5, none of them are titled as "fluent." Why is this? 

In my educated guess confirmed by many sources, it's because fluency doesn't exist. Or, rather, it's a loosely defined term that can't actually be fully quantified.

When you see proficiency scales like the ILR scale, those are strictly defined levels that individuals can be tested against. However, it's also somewhat flawed, since the language knowledge that can pass a test isn't necessarily the same as language knowledge that can be used in the real world (and vice versa!). Even ignoring that, fluency is a very complex subject that's a lot less straightforward than people think.

You could say that coming across as a native speaker (i.e. someone who grew up with a language) would be the main standard for fluency. However, I have a friend who grew up in a bilingual household and only used Spanish at home, meaning that he has large gaps in his knowledge despite being a native Spanish speaker, like lacking technical computing terms that he otherwise knows in English, or being unable to spell words he's only heard in speech. Even for monolinguals, you wouldn't be expected to know every word in a language, or every slang phrase, or the ability to explain complex grammar situations. Someone once mistook me as a non-native speaker just because I picked up the filler phrase, "um, how do I say," despite being a fully fluent native English speaker! Needless to say, I worked very hard to drop that habit afterwards.

It's also not uncommon for people to pick up a language for a specialized field. Imagine someone who picks up English as a second language to communicate with coworkers in a remote programming job, and can communicate completely fluently in this complex, technical field. However, this would also mean that they've never practiced to order at a restaurant in English, and putting them in that situation would leave them helpless! I've heard that these situations actually crop up a good bit for multilingual people, and it's hard to gauge someone's fluency if they're fluent in one area but not another. Even if you try to take someone's grand total amount of fluency, it's not like I could have a conversation about aeronautics despite being a native English speaker, even if I could order at a restaurant.

These types of factors make it essentially impossible to have a true definition of what fluency is, and so it's also impossible to judge how long it takes to reach fluency. 

So, what's my goal?

Personally, I think people get too worried about reaching fluency or native level speech. The Foreign Service Institute estimate for learning a language like Japanese is 2,200 classroom hours, after all, and that's only for general professional proficiency rather than native proficiency, which would be much longer.

If you are on your language learning journey right now, what you have to ask yourself is what you actually want to get out of the experience. Do you actually want to be fully fluent and native-level? That's cool, but be patient and willing to put in the work! Do you just want to have some casual conversation with native speakers even if it means sounding a bit funny? That's cool too, just don't put the pressure of 2,000 hours on yourself! Do you just want to immerse yourself in some culture and pick up on some odd words from music and conversation? Then go for it! I just don't think it's a good or healthy thing to put up unreasonable expectations from things like "becoming fluent in Spanish in just 30 weeks," as much as people tout it around.

• Vecderg