How long until I actually speak this language?

To reach B2 — comfortable on most everyday and work topics — an English speaker needs roughly 600 to 700 hours for Spanish, Portuguese, Italian or French, around 900 for German, and about 2,200 for Mandarin, Japanese, Korean or Arabic. Those are guided study hours with good instruction; the same content self-taught with little speaking practice typically takes considerably longer.

A1 and A2 cover survival language: introductions, ordering, simple routine exchanges. B1 is independence — you can handle most situations while travelling and describe experiences. B2 is where work and study in the language become realistic. C1 is fluent and precise use including implicit meaning, and C2 is near-native command. Most people who say they want to be "fluent" are describing B2.

Because the amount of language each level covers grows. On the Cambridge guided-hours scale, zero to A1 is about 100 hours, A1 to A2 about 150, A2 to B1 about 200, B1 to B2 about 300 and B2 to C1 about 400. The intermediate plateau people describe is largely this: the same weekly effort now buys a smaller visible jump.

On the thresholds used here, about 1,500 active words puts you at A2, 2,500 at B1, 4,000 at B2, 8,000 at C1 and 10,000 or more at C2. Coverage is heavily front-loaded: the most frequent couple of thousand word families account for the majority of everyday conversation, so the first 2,000 words do more work than the next 6,000.

Passive vocabulary is what you recognise when you hear or read it; active vocabulary is what you can produce when you need it. Passive is typically several times larger. Since the level thresholds here are stated in active words, testing yourself with recognition — "do I know this word?" — will place you a level or so higher than you really are.

Whatever you can hold every day beats a bigger number you cannot. Up to about 20 minutes is a light, sustainable load; 20 to 60 is demanding but workable if you split it into two sessions; past an hour of app time daily, most people stop within weeks. If your deadline demands more than that, move the deadline or lower the target level.

The Foreign Service Institute groups languages by the time its students need. Spanish, Portuguese, French and Italian sit in the easiest category; German is a step up; Russian, Greek, Hindi and similar are harder again; and Arabic, Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese and Korean are the hardest, needing roughly four times the hours of the easiest group. Japanese is often singled out as the hardest of all for an English speaker.

No. Adults learn grammar and vocabulary faster than children do, because they can use explicit rules, transfer patterns from languages they already know and study deliberately. What genuinely gets harder with age is a native-sounding accent, and that is a cosmetic ceiling rather than a functional one — adults reach full working fluency routinely.

They work well for what they are: building recognition vocabulary and keeping a daily habit alive. They are weak at exactly the thing that decides fluency, which is unrehearsed production. The realistic use is an app for daily vocabulary maintenance paired with something that forces output — a tutor, a conversation exchange, a writing partner. Used alone, an app plateaus somewhere around A2 or B1.

Around 15 minutes a day at A1 using beginner material, 20 at A2 with a transcript, 30 at B1 without one, 30 to 45 at B2 with slower native speakers, and 45 or more at C1 with unadapted native audio. The difficulty of the material matters as much as the minutes: aim for content you understand roughly 90% of, where the remaining 10% is what you are actually learning.

A workable ladder is four sessions of about 125 words a week for B1, five of 180 for B2, seven of 250 for C1 and seven of 360 for C2. What makes it work is correction — feedback on what you got wrong is where the improvement comes from, so a corrected paragraph beats an uncorrected page.

Whichever one the people you will speak to use. Spanish splits into Peninsular, Rioplatense, Mexican and Andean varieties whose differences go beyond accent to pronouns and everyday vocabulary; Brazilian and European Portuguese differ enough in pronunciation to trip up learners of the other; and Arabic is the extreme case, where Modern Standard Arabic is the written and formal register while the spoken dialects can be mutually unintelligible.

It depends on the field. Mandarin and German carry weight in technology and engineering, Mandarin and Spanish in business and trade, French and Arabic in diplomacy, Spanish in US healthcare, and German and French in academic research. But local demand beats global rankings: the language actually spoken by the clients, patients or collaborators in front of you is the one that pays.