Firstly, why are you asking this question? If I told you it takes nine million years to learn German, would you stop? What if I told you it only takes 2 months? It all depends of course on how important it is to you.
I get it, I do. I used to google this kind of thing all the time. It’s almost as if you want reassurance that a human can actually learn German at all and you’re not just wasting your time. Well, you’re not – it is possible to learn German, and it’s possible to learn it really well, so don’t worry.
Hours, Not Years
First things first: Let’s drop the idea of weeks, months and years. They are pretty meaningless when it comes to learning. If you learn for one minute a week, for 20 years, would you say you’ve been learning German for 20 years? It’s hours that count, not years!
There are a lot of people who get disheartened with German because they’ve been learning it for so long without getting any results. Usually they have bad associations with the language from years of mind-numbing classes. And they can still only say “wie geht’s dir?” and “ich komme aus den USA”. It took you six years to learn this much, right, so just imagine how long it will take to learn the whole language!
But fear not. There is nothing wrong with you. You haven’t really spent six years learning German. In fact, if you weren’t concentrating in class and you only spent an hour a week, I would say you haven’t been learning German at all!
My Progression Through German
Soon after I started learning German I noticed something weird. After about 4 weeks I knew more German than I knew Spanish, and I’d been learning Spanish for 4 years!! How could this possibly be? It turns out I wasn’t actually learning Spanish at all. I was just spatially located in a classroom in which four students were learning Spanish inefficiently and 26 were chatting in English, writing little notes to each other and playing snake on their phones (this was in like 2005).
But when I started learning German by myself, it didn’t feel like schoolwork. I actually wanted to do it. I wasn’t distracted, so when I spent an hour learning, I actually spent an hour learning. It turns out that doing this for just an hour a day for a few weeks was enough to surpass four years’ worth of Spanish. Ay caramba!
Okay, so how long does it take? I’m going to tell you, but wait, there’s one more thing! It doesn’t just matter that you are actually learning, it also depends how you are learning. You need to be focused and working through your chosen material sensibly and efficiently. It doesn’t have to be crazy, but you can’t fool yourself into thinking you’re studying when you’re not. Half-heartedly watching a German Netflix series and not paying attention every time you hear a new word or notice a new construction doesn’t count – sorry.
When I started learning I didn’t know anything about languages and I didn’t really know what I was doing, so the quality of my learning wasn’t world-class, but it was acceptable. I was enthusiastic and determined, and I had no problem focusing on the material I was using (mostly random grammar websites, a few children’s books and listening to German music on the school bus). Whenever I was walking or waiting for bus, I also used to think about German a lot, wondering how to say certain things and practising phrases I’d learnt in my head.
After keeping up my routine of learning for about an hour a day after school for about 6 months, I started to get pretty good. I couldn’t believe it! Sometimes I understood whole sentences and could even construct a few as well.
Don’t Trust The Plateaus
Sometimes you don’t feel like you’re improving. You keep doing the same thing for weeks and you feel exactly the same. You learn loads of words, and you start to think you’ve reached the limit for non-native speakers. Maybe this is it. You still don’t understand native speakers speaking, and you’re about to give up, until one day WHOOSH, you level up. This is breaking through a plateau, and you better get used to it. Every plateau convinces you it’s the final one. But it’s not. You can always break through.
I experienced such a moment about 1 year in (365 hours!) I was in Germany with my mum, dad and sister. We were in a hotel in Konstanz. It was breakfast time and the German lady came over and asked what we would like to eat. She couldn’t speak a word of English, and my family couldn’t speak German. But I understood her, more or less, so I couldn’t just keep my mouth shut. I had to communicate. I opened my mouth, and German came out. I couldn’t believe my ears. I had never spoken to a real German before. We communicated, and I learnt the word das Rührei (scrambled egg).
I continued to study regularly for an hour a day, and my level increased. The interesting thing was that I didn’t feel like I was improving. It was only when comparing my knowledge after several months that any improvement was noticeable. Let’s take a look at how my skills progressed over time. I am assuming an hour a day for the hour calculation. I didn’t keep track of it back then.
| Cumulative Hours Studied | Skillz |
|---|---|
| 2008 0 months / 0 hours | Could pretend to speak German and make my friends laugh. |
| 2009 6 months / 182 hours | Could understand children’s books. Could produce basic sentences. Understood about a quarter of spoken German. |
| 2009 1 year / 364 hours | Could have a very basic conversation. Could read most day-to-day text and understand the jist. Understood half of spoken German. |
| 2010 2 years / 728 hours | Could have a basic conversation. Understood three quarters of what I heard and almost all of what I read. Encountered a lot of words I didn’t know, but could usually guess their meaning from context. |
| 2012 4 years / 1456 hours | Could speak fairly fluently on basic topics. Understood almost everything I heard and read. Encountered some words I didn’t know, but could usually guess their meaning from context. Living in Germany. |
| 2014 6 years / 1820 hours | Could speak fluently. Could understand almost everything I heard or read. Sometimes passed as a native speaker. |
| 2016 8 years / 2912 hours | Could speak very fluently. Understood fast or accented German in loud environments. Rarely encountered words I didn’t know. Usually passed as a native speaker. Living in Germany. |
| 2018 10 years / 3640 hours | Maybe saw some slight improvements, but my level pretty much stayed the same at this point. Sometimes it gets rusty if I don’t use it for a while, but it comes back quickly within a few days and weeks of use. Living in Germany. |
| 2020 12 years / 4368 hours | Again, pretty much no noticeable improvement compared to 2018. Definitely reached a plateau which would take more intense studying to surpass, but wouldn’t be worth the time investment for me personally at this point. Living in Germany. |
I should stress once again that my estimate of one hour a day is very rough. There were some days when I studied less and some when I studied more. I also started spending a lot of time in Germany from about 2012 onwards. I wasn’t really studying much from then on, but I had contact with German for many hours a day for a period of several years.
Official Measures
That was my personal experience, but let’s look at some other sources. Whenever people ask how long it takes to learn German (or any other language), it doesn’t take long before someone mentions the United States Foreign Service Institute. This is the government body responsible for training government workers for service in foreign countries, and they have over 70 years’ experience teaching languages.
They divide languages up into categories of difficulty and specify the number of class hours it usually takes an English native speaker to reach what they call “professional working proficiency” in each language. Here is the categorisation.
| Category I Languages: 24-30 weeks (600-750 class hours) Languages more similar to English. | Danish, Dutch, French, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish |
| Category II Languages: Approximately 36 weeks (900 class hours) | German, Haitian Creole, Indonesian, Malay, Swahili |
| Category III Languages: Approximately 44 weeks (1100 class hours) “Hard languages” – Languages with significant linguistic and/or cultural differences from English. | Turkish, Russian, Polish, Icelandic, Hebrew, Finnish, Czech, Hindi (+ many others) |
| Category IV Languages: 88 weeks (2200 class hours) “Super-hard languages” – Languages which are exceptionally difficult for native English speakers. | Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean |
Source: https://www.state.gov/foreign-language-training/
For some reason they decided German was difficult enough to be in a different category from the other Western European languages, but not quite difficult enough to be in the same category as Polish (quite rightfully so lol). Bizarrely they listed it with Haitian Creole, Indonesian, Malay and Swahili which seems pretty arbitrary. Anyway, Category II means an English native speaker can expect to spend 900 classroom hours over 36 weeks (that works out at about 25 hours a week or 3–4 hours a day) in order to attain professional working proficiency.
The Definitive Answer, Maybe?
If we compare that to my timeline, I had invested 900 hours of study time after about 3 years, and that indeed was around the time I started to feel semi-competent in the language, so I am quite happy with this estimate. I also imagine the FSI classroom time was more structured and efficient than mine, especially considering I had no idea how to learn languages for the first year I was learning. So let’s round it up to 1,000 for good measure.
So, how long does it take to learn German? About 1,000 hours. That’s 42 days (coincidence?) It’s not uncommon for people to rack up 42 days playtime on certain video games, so this really isn’t that much time when you consider the incredible skill it affords you.
Of course, the answer to the question of how long it takes to learn German is subjective and depends on your expectations. If all you want is basic proficiency, then 500 hours is plenty, and if you want native-like proficiency then you can expect to spend closer to 2,000 hours.
My Advice to the Learner
My advice is to stop worrying about how long it’s going to take. Is 1,000 hours a long time? Yes? No? Who cares? If you want to learn German to fluency, and I’m sure you do if you’ve read this far, then just put the hours in. It’s not hard to study German for an hour. The hard part is doing it a thousand times. Have the goal in the back of your mind, by all means, but focus on the process. Plant your acorn now, water it every day, and get on with your life. One day you will have an oak tree.