How long does it take to learn French?
The school that trains American diplomats puts French at 30 weeks of full-time study to reach professional working ability in speaking and listening — the same as Spanish, and at the slow end of the languages it rates easiest. That is the long view. Measured in words instead of weeks, French has the kindest start of any language we have measured, and that changes how the first months feel.
What the Foreign Service Institute says
The Foreign Service Institute (FSI) is the US State Department's language school. It publishes how long its students usually take to reach an integrated score of 3 (Speaking + Listening) on the ILR scale. French is in its first category, the languages closest to English:
| Weeks | Class hours | |
|---|---|---|
| French | 30 | 690 |
| Spanish | 30 | 690 |
| Italian, Portuguese | 24 | 552 |
A typical FSI week adds 17 hours of self-study to the 23 in class, so 30 weeks is more than a thousand hours of work in total. The students are adults chosen partly for aptitude, working full-time with trained teachers, and the target is high; take the ratio between languages from the table, not the number.
Older articles quote French at 600–750 hours. That is the same FSI page as it stood in December 2023, which counted class time at a different weekly rate; the 30 weeks have not changed.
The same journey, measured in words
On 318 million words of French film and television dialogue (the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus, which is close to how people talk), the most frequent word forms cover this much of what is said:
| Most frequent word forms | Share of the dialogue they cover |
|---|---|
| 64 | half |
| 1,000 | 79.4% |
| 1,076 | 80% |
| 4,876 | 90% |
| 13,909 | 95% |
64 word forms are half of everything said — fewer than in any other language we measured. Spoken French runs on a small set of very frequent words: je, tu, vous, de, est, pas, que. Compared on equal-sized samples, French is the steepest curve of all seven languages, at every point from the hundredth word to the ten-thousandth; the comparison is in which language has the steepest frequency curve.
Those figures are for the whole corpus. On a sample the same size as every other language's, the 80% line falls at 1,061 words — almost the same.
Turning the words into time
At a steady pace, the milestones arrive like this:
| New words a day | Half of speech | 80% | 90% |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10 | 7 days | 108 days | 488 days |
| 20 | 4 days | 54 days | 244 days |
Set that beside the same table for Spanish: French reaches 80% of spoken dialogue with noticeably fewer words. The arithmetic flatters in one way — a word has to come back several times before it sticks, and that review is not in the table — and not in another: these are word forms, so est, sont and était are separate rows of one verb.
Why French still takes as long as Spanish
If French pays off faster, why does the FSI give it the same 30 weeks? Because vocabulary is only one of the things that take time, and French makes up for its steep curve elsewhere:
- Spelling hides the sound. Much of what is written is not pronounced — ils parlent ends in three silent letters — so reading does not teach you how the language sounds, and listening does not teach you how it is spelt.
- Liaison and elision join words together in speech, so vous avez and les amis sound like one word. Knowing a word on paper is no guarantee of catching it in speech.
- Written and spoken French have drifted apart, in grammar as well as vocabulary. That is the subject of how many words you need to speak French, and it means a learner meets two registers where a Spanish learner meets one.
So how long?
For a full-time learner in a good classroom, the FSI's 30 weeks. For everyone else it comes down to consistency: at ten new words a day, every day, 80% of spoken French is about 108 days away, and daily practice beats long occasional sessions because words are kept by review.
The 1,000 most common French words are in frequency order, free, and can be downloaded as a printable PDF or a CSV for Excel or Anki. The French course teaches them in that order. If you are still choosing a language, the easiest languages for English speakers compares French with the rest, and French words used in English shows how many you already half-know.
Sources
- Foreign Service Institute, National Foreign Affairs Training Center: language learning timelines, checked 2026-09-25; and the same page as archived in December 2023.
- Lison, P. & Tiedemann, J. (2016). OpenSubtitles2016: Extracting Large Parallel Corpora from Movie and TV Subtitles. Proceedings of LREC 2016. aclanthology.org
- Dave, H. FrequencyWords: frequency lists from OpenSubtitles 2018, content licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. github.com. Every figure is computed by
scripts/frequency_curves.pyand printed from its output rather than typed.