Free · U.S. State Department figures
FSI language difficulty calculator: hours to fluency
Pick a language and how much you study a day. The calculator uses the Foreign Service Institute's class hours (Category I–IV) to show the hours to professional working proficiency, or a rough A1–C1 estimate, and when you'd get there.
- 552–690 hCategory I: Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese
- 828 hCategory II: German, Indonesian, Swahili
- 1,012 hCategory III: Russian, Hindi, Polish, Turkish
- 2,200 hCategory IV: Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean
Every language, what the hours mean and the older 600–750 hour lists: the full FSI guide on the blog.
FSI language categories
How long FSI's English-speaking students usually take to reach professional working proficiency (ILR 3, roughly upper B2 to low C1), in full-time weeks and class hours.
| Category | Weeks | Class hours | Languages |
|---|---|---|---|
| Category I | 24 | 552 | Danish, Dutch, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Swedish |
| Category I | 30 | 690 | French, Spanish |
| Category II | ~36 | 828 | German, Haitian Creole, Indonesian, Malay, Swahili |
| Category III | ~44 | 1,012 | Albanian, Amharic, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Bengali, Bulgarian, Burmese, Czech, Dari, Estonian, Farsi, Finnish, Georgian, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Kazakh, Khmer, Kurdish, Kyrgyz, Lao, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Mongolian, Nepali, Polish, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovak, Slovenian, Tajiki, Thai, Turkish, Turkmen, Ukrainian, Urdu, Uzbek, Vietnamese |
| Category IV | 88 | 2,200 | Arabic, Chinese (Cantonese), Chinese (Mandarin), Japanese, Korean |
The CEFR goals in the calculator aren't FSI figures: they take a fixed share of FSI's hours (A1 1/8, A2 1/4, B1 1/2, B2 0.8, C1 1.2), which lands close to the hour guides for DELF/DALF and Cambridge English. For Spanish that's about 345 hours to B1 and 828 to C1.
More on each level: how long it takes to learn a language, hours to B1 and hours to C1.
Questions
Something else? Write to us.
How does the FSI calculator work?
It takes the class hours the U.S. State Department's Foreign Service Institute (FSI) lists for your language, subtracts any hours you've already done and divides the rest by your daily study time to give a rough finish date. For CEFR goals it uses a share of the FSI figure: A1 1/8, A2 1/4, B1 1/2, B2 0.8 and C1 1.2.
How many hours does FSI say each category takes?
Category I: 552 class hours (24 weeks) for Italian, Portuguese, Dutch and the Scandinavian languages, 690 (30 weeks) for Spanish and French. Category II: 828 hours (about 36 weeks), for German, Indonesian, Malay, Swahili and Haitian Creole. Category III: 1,012 hours (about 44 weeks), for Russian, Polish, Hindi, Turkish and some 35 more. Category IV: 2,200 hours (88 weeks), for Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese and Korean.
Is there an FSI Category 5?
Not on the State Department's current list, which has four categories. Older third-party charts numbered FSI's figures in five groups, with Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese and Korean in Category V at 88 weeks. Those are today's Category IV languages. Lists called the CIA language difficulty scale are the same FSI list.
Are FSI hours the same as self-study hours?
No. FSI hours are full-time classroom hours with trained instructors, about 23 a week plus about 17 hours of self-study, for adults with an aptitude for languages. Hours of apps or shows won't convert one to one, so treat the date as a benchmark and track your real hours to see how your pace compares.
Log today's session.
The calculator gives you a benchmark. LangTrack logs the hours you actually put in, by language and activity, and shows how many are left to your level.
Start tracking — it's free