Short answer
For an English speaker learning a closely related language such as Spanish or French, comfortable conversation (around CEFR B1) typically takes roughly 250–350 hours of focused study and practice. Harder languages such as Arabic, Mandarin, Japanese or Korean take approximately three to four times as long. Consistency matters far more than total hours: an hour a day beats seven hours on Sunday.
There is a usable answer to this, as long as you say what "conversational" means and which language.
Define the target
The CEFR scale is the standard, and most people mean B1 when they say conversational:
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| Level | What you can do |
|---|---|
| A1 | Introduce yourself, order food, ask very basic questions |
| A2 | Handle simple routine exchanges on familiar topics |
| B1 | Hold a conversation, handle most travel situations, explain opinions simply |
| B2 | Work in the language, follow native-speed conversation on familiar topics |
| C1 | Operate professionally with ease, understand implicit meaning |
B1 is "I can have a real conversation and it is a bit tiring". B2 is "I can use it for work".
Rough hours to B1
Based on the standard difficulty groupings used for English speakers:
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| Difficulty | Languages | Approx. hours to B1 | Approx. hours to B2 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Closely related | Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch | 250–350 | 500–700 |
| Moderately distant | German, Indonesian, Swahili | 350–500 | 700–900 |
| Distant | Russian, Greek, Hindi, Turkish, Vietnamese | 500–800 | 1,000–1,500 |
| Very distant | Arabic, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean | 900–1,300 | 1,800–2,400 |
Halve your expectations if the language shares a writing system and vocabulary with one you already know; add substantially if it does not.
What that means as a schedule
At 350 hours to B1 in Spanish:
- 1 hour a day: about 12 months
- 5 hours a week: about 16 months
- 2 hours a week: about 3.5 years
That last row is why most people conclude they are bad at languages. They are not; they are studying at a rate that cannot produce the result in a timeframe they will tolerate.
Consistency beats volume
Two hours a day for three months will take you further than the same total hours spread thinly over two years, because forgetting runs continuously and infrequent study spends most of its time re-learning.
The practical floor is about four sessions a week. Below that, progress is very slow.
What the hours have to contain
Not all hours count equally. Roughly in order of value per hour:
- Speaking with someone who corrects you. The highest-value hour available, and the one people avoid longest.
- Listening slightly above your level, repeatedly.
- Active vocabulary work with spaced repetition.
- Reading at a level where you understand most of it.
- Passive exposure - background media. Pleasant, close to worthless on its own.
An hour of conversation with correction is worth several hours of app streaks. This is the main reason tutoring accelerates language learning: it forces production, and production is where the learning happens.
The plateau
Almost everyone stalls somewhere in B1. You can communicate, so the pressure that drove early progress disappears, and the remaining gains are slower and less visible.
Getting through it takes a change of activity, not more of the same: switch from general conversation to a specific domain, start doing something real in the language, or take on an exam with a date on it.
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