"How long to B1?" - the level most people mean by conversational - is one of the most common questions in language learning, and it has a frustrating true answer: it depends on the language, on what you already speak, and on what you count as an hour. But "it depends" is not useless if you know what it depends on. Here are the two sources almost every estimate comes from, what they really measure, and how to read them for your own case.
Source one: Cambridge's guided learning hours
Cambridge English, which runs some of the most widely taken English exams, publishes guidance on how many guided learning hours a learner typically needs to reach each CEFR level, counted from zero. For B1 it is roughly 350 to 400 hours; for B2, roughly 500 to 600; for C1, roughly 700 to 800.
Three things to know before you use those numbers:
- They are for learners of English. Cambridge's figures describe people
learning English, from many first languages. They are a reasonable model for an English speaker learning a close language, and an optimistic one for a distant language.
- "Guided" means with a teacher. They do not include homework, reading for
fun, or the hours you spend listening to podcasts. Those hours count for a lot; they just are not in this number.
- They are guidance, not a guarantee. Cambridge itself presents them as
approximate and says learners vary.
The most useful thing in the Cambridge figures is the shape: B1 sits at about half the hours of C1. The scale looks even and is not. B1 to B2 is a large step of its own, which is why so many learners feel they stall there.
Source two: the FSI categories
The US Foreign Service Institute, which trains American diplomats, publishes how long its students typically take to reach "professional working proficiency" in different languages. For English speakers, it groups them roughly like this:
- About 24 to 30 weeks (around 600 to 750 class hours): Spanish, French,
Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish.
- About 36 weeks (around 900 class hours): German.
- About 44 weeks (around 1,100 class hours): among others, Finnish, Greek,
Polish, Russian and Turkish.
- About 88 weeks (around 2,200 class hours): among others, Korean.
These are the numbers behind every "hardest languages" listicle, and they are real. They are also easy to misread:
- The target is not B1. Professional working proficiency is a much higher
bar - usually compared to somewhere around B2 to C1, though the two scales were built separately and do not map exactly.
- The students are unusual. FSI classes are full-time and small, and its
students typically study on their own on top of class, with a job depending on the result. Your evenings will not look like that.
- The list does not cover everything. For Catalan, Welsh and Irish, for
example, we are not aware of a comparable published figure, and we are not going to invent one.
What the FSI list is good for is the ratios. On its numbers, Korean takes roughly three times as long as Spanish for an English speaker, and German takes somewhat longer than Dutch. Those relative gaps are the part most likely to hold for you, too.
Putting them together, honestly
If you want a rough personal estimate, combine the two:
- Start from the Cambridge B1 figure - a few hundred focused hours - as
the baseline for a language close to English.
- Scale it by the FSI ratio for your language. A German learner should
expect somewhat more; a Polish or Russian learner, noticeably more; a Korean learner, a multiple.
- Count only hours where you were actively working - speaking, writing,
reviewing with effort, reading slightly above your level. Background listening helps, but it is not the same hour.
- Then turn it into a calendar, because that is the part you control. Two
focused hours a week and seven are not the same plan, and no estimate means much until you decide which one you are on.
This is arithmetic on published guidance, not a promise. But it is the right kind of estimate, and it is much better than a single number that does not name the language.
What actually moves the number
Speaking early. B1 is defined by what you can do - hold a conversation, explain a plan, give reasons - so recognising words is necessary and nowhere near sufficient. The skill the level tests is producing the language under a little pressure, and the only way to practise that is to do it - which argues for speaking from the first weeks rather than waiting until you feel ready.
Consistency over intensity. Short daily practice beats a weekend binge, because memory is built by coming back to things just as you are about to forget them. That is what spaced repetition is for.
Knowing where you are. Hours spent on material that is too easy are cheap; hours on material that is far too hard are mostly wasted.
How Semantix fits
Every one of our 19 languages runs a path from A1 to C1, and you can see what each level covers before you start - the Spanish B1 page, for example, or the Korean B1 page if you want to see what the same level asks of a much more distant language. A short placement test puts you at a starting point, deliberately rounding down when it is unsure.
The path offers you the next level once you have earned it, and on the Max plan you can take a mock conversation exam that grades you against CEFR criteria and gives you a report card - a useful checkpoint if B1 is your goal. Pro is $19 a month and Max $39, both with a 7-day free trial.
And because B1 is a speaking level, most of the work happens in conversation with the tutor, not in a list. Try a conversation to see what that looks like at your level today.