How long does it take to learn Italian?

How many hours does each Italian level take?

"Learning Italian" covers everything from ordering a cappuccino to reading Calvino, so the honest answer comes in levels. The Council of Europe's CEFR scale defines six of them, and Cambridge English publishes a rough, cumulative guide to the guided hours (lessons plus supervised study) a learner needs to reach each one from scratch. Cambridge wrote its figures for learners of English and calls them a guideline only, so read them as an order of magnitude for Italian.

The Foreign Service Institute (FSI), which trains US diplomats, offers a second yardstick. It lists Italian at 24 weeks for students to reach a professional level of speaking and listening (3 on the ILR scale), with a typical week of 23 hours in class and 17 hours of self-study. That works out at 552 class hours plus about 408 hours on their own: roughly 960 hours in all. At an hour a day that is about two years and seven months; at two hours a day, about 16 months.

Few people learning Italian for holidays, family or opera need the FSI's professional standard. B1 is enough to travel and hold everyday conversations, and it is the level the Università per Stranieri di Siena says Italian citizenship requires. B2 is a realistic long-term target for a committed learner.

Why is Italian one of the quicker languages for English speakers?

The FSI puts Italian alongside Danish, Dutch, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian and Swedish at 24 weeks, six weeks less than it lists for Spanish and French. It doesn't say why. For an English reader, two things help from the first page.

Much of the vocabulary is already half familiar

Italian grew out of Latin, and English borrowed a large share of its vocabulary from Latin and French. Chapter 1 of the A1 romantic comedy A Promise by Mistake describes its heroine, a graphic designer in Milan, in words most English speakers can read cold:

Not every lookalike is a friend, though. In chapter 1 of The Key on Garibaldi Street, Marco asks why his new flat is so economico: here it means cheap, not economic.

What slows you down

• Verb forms. In the 96 free chapters of the Contos Italian library we found 18 different forms of essere (to be), from è and sono to fosse and sarebbe, and 19 of avere (to have).
• A new past tense at B1. Italian novels narrate in the passato remoto. Twenty-eight common forms of it (such as disse, vide and arrivò) appear 210 times in the free B1 chapters and not once at A1. The Italian CEFR levels guide shows the change on the page.
• Listening. Double consonants, elisions (l'amica, c'è) and regional accents make spoken Italian harder to follow than the regular spelling suggests.

What the estimate depends on

• Hours per week, kept up over months without long breaks.
• Languages you already know. Spanish, French or Latin give you a large head start; Cambridge lists language background as a factor.
• Exposure outside study: reading, films, podcasts, people to talk to.
• Your goal. A CILS B1 for citizenship, reading a novel and chatting with in-laws are different targets.

What does the Contos library show about each step up?

We measured the Contos Italian library (October 2026): 48 series, 12 at each level, and 296 chapters. The full chapters 1 and 2 of every series are free, so the text figures below come from those 96 free chapters.

From A1 to B2, chapters grow about 2.4 times longer, sentences grow about 2.5 times longer, and the free chapters use nearly three times as many different word forms. That is why each new level feels like a jump: more words to know, and longer sentences to hold in your head while you read.

The encouraging number is at the start. In the free A1 chapters, the 100 most frequent word forms (names included) make up about 62% of the running text. A small core carries most beginner Italian, which is why the first few weeks of reading pay off so quickly. Our list of your first 100 Italian words is counted from these chapters.

How do you plan your first six months?

Reading graded stories won't teach you to speak, but it builds the vocabulary everything else rests on. At 30–45 minutes a day, a realistic first half-year looks like this:

1. Month 1: one A1 chapter a day. Our 30-day Italian reading plan lays it out chapter by chapter, using only free chapters.
2. Months 2–3: finish whole A1 series. The A1 level has 74 chapters, about ten weeks at one a day. Following one cast through six or eight chapters brings the same words back again and again.
3. Every day: 10 minutes of flashcards. Review the words you tapped. Contos moves you to A2 at 500 known words; until then, another A1 series is better practice than a harder one.
4. Months 4–6: A2. Chapters grow to about 240 words and the passato prossimo (ho visto, è arrivata) becomes routine. Keep to one chapter a day and read it twice.
5. Throughout: listen and speak elsewhere. Contos is a reading app with no audio, so add podcasts, films or a conversation partner.

For the daily routine itself, see Italian reading practice in 15 minutes a day; for how hard each part of the language is, see is Italian hard to learn?