How Long to Learn Spanish? 750 Hours, Not 600

By the Audaz Revista editorial team

Updated September 14, 2026 · Reviewed by the Audaz editorial team

Search how long it takes to learn Spanish and you get one of two answers. A number of weeks from the US government. Or an app telling you that 15 minutes a day will do it.

Neither tells you when you will read a novel, follow a waiter in Seville, or hold a conversation that does not feel like an exam.

So we went back to the institutions that actually count hours. The school that trains US diplomats. Cambridge English, which publishes hours for every level. And Instituto Cervantes, which lists its Spanish courses hour by hour. Then we turned their hours into calendar time, at the amount of study a normal adult really does.

Every number below comes with its arithmetic. You can check all of it with a phone calculator.

Where does the 600 to 750 hours figure come from?

From the Foreign Service Institute, the US State Department’s language school. Its page says the timelines reflect 76 years of teaching languages to US diplomats.

The target is what FSI calls General Professional Proficiency. On the Interagency Language Roundtable scale, that is Speaking-3 and Reading-3. It is a professional standard.

The line for Category I, the languages closest to English, reads 24-30 weeks (600-750 class hours). Almost everyone stops reading there. The list underneath is the part that matters.

Spanish is listed at 30 weeks. Only French shares that figure. The other seven Category I languages are listed at 24.

The hours follow from the page’s own range. 600 hours over 24 weeks is 25 hours a week. 750 hours over 30 weeks is also 25. So 30 weeks of Spanish is 750 class hours.

FSI is clear that this is an average. It says the actual time varies with the learner’s natural ability, prior linguistic experience, and time spent in the classroom.

What do 750 hours look like if you are not a diplomat?

Very different, because of those 25 hours a week. That is close to a part-time job.

An adult learner with a job might manage 30 minutes a day. That is 3.5 hours a week. Divide 25 by 3.5 and you get the uncomfortable number. One FSI week takes 7.1 weeks at 30 minutes a day.

The arithmetic is one division. 750 hours at one hour a day is 750 days, or 2.1 years. At half an hour, it is 1,500 days, or 4.1 years. At 15 minutes, it is 3,000 days, or 8.2 years.

This is a reason to stop feeling slow. Two years at 30 minutes a day is 365 hours. That is roughly half of FSI’s figure. You are on schedule.

And if your Spanish seems to be sliding backwards somewhere in the middle, that is a known stage, and it passes.

Does Instituto Cervantes agree on the hours?

This is where it gets interesting. Instituto Cervantes publishes its courses level by level, and every course is 30 hours. So you can add them up.

We added them up for two of its offers. The first is AVE Global, its online course, as laid out by its Belo Horizonte centre. The second is the classroom programme at its Los Angeles centre.

Same institute. Same levels. To finish B2, the online route counts 360 hours and the classroom route counts 540. That is 180 hours apart, or 50% more.

By the end of C1, the gap is 270 hours. That is 480 against 750, or 56% more.

The lower online count already includes everything. The Belo Horizonte page says each 30-hour course covers all of the learner’s work, including group activities and time with the tutor.

Neither page explains the difference, so we will not guess. What we can check is which count agrees with an outside source.

Cambridge English publishes guided learning hours for each level, counted from zero. They are for English, so treat them as a cross-check. The levels, though, are the same six CEFR levels.

Four of the five Cervantes classroom totals land inside Cambridge’s bands. The fifth, A2, is 10 hours over. All five online totals sit below Cambridge’s bands.

One more match is worth noticing. The Los Angeles total to finish C1 is 750 hours, the same figure FSI lists for Spanish. The two institutions test on different scales, so read that as a useful coincidence.

If you want one planning number, use the classroom count. 540 hours to finish B2. It is written for Spanish, and Cambridge’s figures for English land in the same place.

How long does each Spanish level take, day by day?

Here is the honest timeline. The low end is the Cervantes online count. The high end is the Cervantes classroom count. Every figure assumes you study every single day, starting from zero.

Each cell is hours divided by hours per day. Take B2 at 30 minutes a day. 360 divided by 0.5 is 720 days, and 540 divided by 0.5 is 1,080 days. That is 2 to 3 years.

Real life has days off. Study six days in seven and every figure in the table grows by a sixth.

What can you actually do at each level?

Hours mean little without a picture of the finish line. These lines paraphrase Instituto Cervantes’ own descriptions from its Los Angeles course page. We kept the one ability that matters most at each level.

For a reader, the jump that matters is B2. It is the first level where the description talks about understanding the main ideas of complex text.

That is why we tell readers to start real books well before B2. Our guide to reading books in Spanish as a beginner is where to begin. If you are moving abroad, our first-year guide to living in Spain covers the level the Spanish state asks for.

Can you learn Spanish faster than this?

Cambridge lists the things that change the count. Your language learning background. How intensely you study. Your age. And the amount of study or exposure outside lesson times.

FSI’s list overlaps. Natural ability, prior linguistic experience, and time spent in the classroom.

Only two of those are in your hands. The first is intensity, and the table above shows its effect. Double your daily time and you halve the calendar.

The second is exposure outside lessons, and people underrate it. Every chapter you read and every episode you follow in Spanish is time outside lessons. Cambridge names it as a factor. It does not put a number on it, and neither will we.

What does not work is squeezing the hours. At the lowest count here, 360 hours, reaching B2 in 90 days would take four hours of study every day. If a course promises B2 in three months, ask to see its hour count.

Listening often lags behind reading, too. That gap has a reason, and it closes with the same hours.

How did we work this out?

So you can check it, and so you know which numbers are ours.

FSI. The weeks, the class-hour range and the proficiency target are quoted from the State Department’s Foreign Language Training page. The 25 hours a week, and the 750 hours for Spanish, are our arithmetic from that page.

Cambridge English. The hour bands come from its guided learning hours page. Cambridge says the figures are cumulative, approximate, and intended as a guideline only.

Instituto Cervantes. The online course structure comes from the Belo Horizonte centre’s AVE page. The classroom structure and the level descriptions come from the Los Angeles centre’s course FAQ. For pacing, the London centre’s AVE FAQ says a tutored course lasts 10 weeks at three to six hours of work a week. The level totals are our sums of 30-hour courses.

The calendar. Hours divided by daily study time, with a month taken as 30.44 days and a year as 365.25 days.

What we did not do. We did not convert FSI’s scale into CEFR levels, because none of these sources does. And we did not re-count the input-method hours, which our comprehensible input piece already covers.

What should you do with this?

Frequently asked questions