How long does it take to learn French?

How many hours does each French level take?

"Learning French" can mean reading a menu in Lyon or following a debate on France Inter, so the honest answer comes in levels. The Council of Europe's CEFR scale splits the road into steps from A1 to C2, and the Alliance Française de Leeds publishes the cumulative hours of instruction it expects a learner to need to reach each one. They are a school's planning figures, not a guarantee, but they are specific to French.

The Alliance Française puts the same figures another way: 60–100 hours for A1 is about a year if you take two and a half hours of classes a week. Most adults with jobs study at that pace, which is why a weekly evening class on its own feels slow.

The US Foreign Service Institute (FSI), which trains American diplomats, gives a tougher benchmark. Its students reach an integrated score of 3 for speaking and listening on the ILR scale, a professional level, in about 30 weeks of French. A typical FSI week is 23 hours in class and 17 hours of self-study, so 30 weeks comes to 690 class hours plus 510 on their own: roughly 1,200 hours. That is more than three years at an hour a day, or 20 months at two hours a day.

Why is French slower than Italian on the FSI list?

The FSI puts French in Category I, its group of languages close to English, but lists it at 30 weeks, alongside Spanish, while Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish and Romanian are listed at 24. The FSI doesn't give a reason. Two features learners often point to are spelling and listening.

• Spelling that hides the sound. In the free A1 chapters of the Contos French library, about 6 in 10 words end in a letter that isn't pronounced, such as the t of est or the s of pas. Reading is easy to start; matching what you read to what you hear takes longer. Our pronunciation guide explains the rules.
• Words that run together. Liaison and elision join words in speech (les escaliers, l'immeuble), so a sentence you could read easily can be hard to pick out at speed.
• A head start on vocabulary. English took many words from French, and an English reader can guess a lot of an A1 chapter cold. That speeds up reading far more than listening.

What changes your own timeline most is not the FSI category but hours per week, months without a break, any language you already know (school French counts, even if it feels rusty) and your goal. Reading a novel, passing the DELF and chatting with in-laws are different targets; see what each CEFR level means in French.

What does the Contos library show about each step up?

We measured the free chapters (1 and 2) of every series in the Contos French library, October 2026 export: 12 series per level, each written for a single CEFR level. The numbers show what "the next level" means on the page.

A B2 chapter is more than twice the length of an A1 chapter, its sentences are more than twice as long, and the level uses nearly three times as many different word forms. The biggest jump in sentence length comes between A2 and B1, which is also where the past tenses arrive: était (was) and avait (had) appear once in the 24 free A1 chapters and 191 times in the free B1 chapters.

The start is kinder. In the free A1 chapters, the 100 most frequent word forms make up about 65% of every word on the page. Learn a small core and most of a beginner story is already familiar; our list of your first 100 French words is built from those chapters.

What does a realistic first year of French look like?

Here is one way to spend about 45 minutes a day for a year, with reading as the core. That adds up to about 270 hours: past the Alliance Française's figure for A2 and short of B1. It is a fair picture. By month 12 you should be reading B1 stories with help, not yet speaking at B1.

1. Months 1–3: A1 stories, one chapter a day. An A1 chapter is about 179 words, a few minutes of reading. The A1 level has 74 chapters across 12 series, enough for ten weeks without repeats.
2. Every day: 10 minutes of flashcards for the words you tapped. Our 15-minute reading routine shows how to fit reading and review together.
3. Months 4–7: A2. Contos moves you up at 500 known words. A2 chapters average 249 words and bring in the first past tenses in context.
4. Months 8–12: B1, slowly. Chapters get longer and the imparfait becomes routine. Read a chapter over two days if you need to.
5. Throughout: 15–20 minutes of listening. Contos is a reading app with no audio, so pair it with French podcasts, radio or a conversation partner. Spoken French is where the hours go.