How Long Does It Take to Learn English?

There are two types of people when it comes to language-learning expectations...

I happened to find this Reddit conversation last night. OP, the "original poster" (colored in pink), asks if it's worth his time to learn a language for the sake of traveling. The top comment (in blue) says "Why not? You can use language apps for 15-minute lessons, which is better than wasting your time on social media". In a reply to Blue, another commenter (in red) says 15 minutes isn't enough and that he studies for 3 hours a day.

I'm not trying to embarrass anyone, and I know that Blue isn't trying to give anyone the wrong idea, but his comment tells me that he has never learned a foreign language.

Most people in America think in the same way as Blue—that you can learn a language in just 15 minutes a day, and you can skip some days if you're busy, so maybe let's say 1 hour per week. Duolingo's marketing team has spent a lot of money to convince us of this idea! But can you really learn English with just 1 hour a week?

As I said in the Immersion, Input, and Output lesson, there are a lot of ways to learn a language. But it depends on what you define as "learning a language". Do you mean conversational fluency or just a few simple phrases? And some methods are much slower than others.

If OP follows Blue's advice, he might become somewhat fluent in 100 years.

I'm guessing that you want to learn English faster than that, so let's talk about what to expect when you're learning English and the mindset that is required.

The Right Expectations

If we're going to establish the right mindset for learning English, we need to start with a clear understanding of what it means to learn a language.

This might seem like a straightforward thing, but people think about this in different ways.

Do you want to spontaneously create new sentences in English whenever you want? Or do want to just get by (the absolute minimum required for beginner-level communication) with a few specific phrases or individual words?

You can watch a short video and tell your friends, "I'm fluent in (a few words of) English! 😎". However, if you're on English Tea Break, you probably want to actually learn English, not just a few simple phrases like, "There are many books in the library". When would you ever need that phrase anyway!?

Language-Learning Liars

Unfortunately, we need to talk about some of the dishonesty in the language-learning communities.

If you've been learning English or any other language for a significant amount of time, it should come as no surprise to you that the "Learn a Language in 30 DAYS!!" videos and courses are misleading (or, lies, if you want to be more blunt).

Influencers have made various definitions for what it means to learn a language. The ones who are trying to sell something to you will usually make extraordinary claims that you can learn a language with 0 effort, only 15 minutes a day, and in only 4 weeks.

They define "learning a language" as "being able to say a few words in that language".

Personally, I would not use that definition. I believe it's scammy and dishonest. At English Tea Break, we say that you've "learned a language" when you understand 95% or more of what you hear and can speak comfortably, smoothly, and quickly enough with native speakers in their own language.

These influencers are able to impress people by speaking a few pre-rehearsed sentences (they practice before recording the video) in another language with a decent accent. However, when you learn that language and watch those videos again, you might notice that they make grammar mistakes and that their accent is quite poor. At that point, you'll understand that their zero-effort methods aren't as useful as you once thought.

English Learning Time Table

There are no "hard" languages or "easy" languages. There are only languages that are similar and dissimilar to your own. The ones that are more different from your native language are going to feel "harder", meaning they'll take longer to learn.

For English speakers, languages like Spanish, German, and French are considered "easy" because they're pretty similar to English. Japanese, Chinese, and Korean are considered "hard", but that's only because they're very different from English.

For Japanese speakers, they already know the Chinese writing system, so they might consider Chinese to be an easy language! And if you're Japanese, then English would be hard for you.

So we can see that English is hard for Japanese people, and Japanese is hard for Americans. It's important to keep this idea of equality in mind.

The "Foreign Service Insitute" in America trains government employees in various languages and they have a table on their website that gives an idea of how long it takes Americans (native English speakers) to learn those languages.

Since language difficulty works both ways, we can reverse the table. If English speakers can learn Japanese in 88 weeks, then that means Japanese speakers can learn English in approximately 88 weeks as well.

However, I believe the numbers in their table are very wrong. The table assumes an average of 5.7 hours of study per day, but at that rate, I would expect much longer durations to reach fluency.

For example, their table is saying an English speaker could learn French in 30 weeks; basically half a year. I studied for 10 hours a day and it took a full year to call myself "fluent". I'm not a slow learner, but as I said, everyone has a different definition of "fluency".

I would recommend that we triple the numbers shown in the table to get a more accurate estimation of how long it takes to become fluent in English. I'll rebuild the Foreign Service Insitute's table with durations that I believe to be more realistic.

Find your native language in the table below, and that will give you an idea of how long it will take to learn English. The table below will also assume 5.7 hours of study per day.

Category 1: 72 weeks

(1.4 years and 1,656 hours of study)

Category 1b: 90 weeks

(1.7 years and 2,070 hours of study)

Category 2: 108 weeks

(2 years and 2,484 hours of study)

Category 3: 132 weeks

(2.5 years and 3,306 hours of study)

Category 4: 264 weeks

(5 years and 6,600 hours of study)

So, if Arabic is your native language, you can expect to invest 5 years of rigorous study to become fluent in English. That's a long time and a lot of work, so let's talk about some strategies for making this stuff easier.

This table assumes that you're studying for 5.7 hours on average each day. But what does “5.7 hours a day” really mean? It’s not just sitting with a textbook! We'll talk more about this in the next lesson.

Goal Setting

We'll talk in depth about setting an English goal for yourself soon, but I want you to start thinking about it a little now that you've seen these numbers.

Now that you've seen the duration required for someone from your background to learn English, what thoughts are going through your head? Does it seem too long? Maybe it's shorter than you expected?

What makes you want to learn English in the first place? Maybe your reason for learning is a little bit urgent and you don't have years to study! That's okay :)

I'll show you some strategies that will allow you to study for much more than 5.7 hours a day so you can reach English fluency faster than these tables show. But first, let's talk about the mindset required for The English Tea Break Method. These tips will help you stay motivated and productive throughout your English journey.