The short answer for a motivated English speaker learning Spanish, French, Italian or Portuguese is roughly 350 to 500 hours of real study to reach B1. At an honest forty-five minutes a day that is somewhere between fourteen and twenty months.
The longer answer is more useful, because almost every part of that sentence hides an assumption worth examining.
What B1 actually means
B1 is the middle rung of the Common European Framework, and it is deliberately described in terms of what you can do rather than what you know:
Can deal with most situations likely to arise while travelling. Can produce simple connected text on familiar topics. Can describe experiences, events, dreams and ambitions, and briefly give reasons and explanations.
In practice B1 is the level where a language stops being a subject and becomes a tool. You can have a real conversation with a patient person. You will still misconjugate things, and it will still be tiring.
| Level | Roughly | Words known |
|---|---|---|
| A1 | Introduce yourself, ask simple questions | ~500 |
| A2 | Handle routine daily exchanges | ~1,200 |
| B1 | Hold a conversation, explain yourself | ~2,500 |
| B2 | Argue a point, work in the language | ~4,000 |
| C1 | Comfortable in nearly all contexts | ~8,000 |
Word counts are families, not forms — be, am, was, been is one word, not four. It matters, because counting forms inflates the number by twenty per cent or more in a language like Spanish and much more in Polish.
The hours depend enormously on which language
The US Foreign Service Institute has trained diplomats for decades and publishes how long its students take to reach professional working proficiency — roughly B2/C1, considerably beyond B1. Their categories are the best-known estimate available:
| Category | Languages | FSI hours |
|---|---|---|
| I | Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch | ~600–750 |
| II | German, Indonesian, Swahili | ~900 |
| III | Russian, Polish, Greek, Hebrew, Turkish | ~1,100 |
| IV | Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic | ~2,200 |
US Foreign Service Institute classroom hours to professional working proficiency — well beyond B1, and measured on full-time students with professional instructors. Treat it as the ratio between languages rather than a forecast for your evenings.
Two things to hold on to. First, those are hours for a much higher level than B1 — B1 lands somewhere around half. Second, and more importantly, FSI students study full time in small classes with professional instructors and no job. Your hours will not be as efficient as theirs. Nobody's are.
Why the same hours produce wildly different results
Two people can both put in 400 hours and end up in genuinely different places. The variance comes from three things, in descending order of size.
What you did with the hours
An hour of tapping multiple-choice answers and an hour of speaking are not the same hour, and the difference is not marginal. Recognition exercises build the ability to recognise; they do not transfer to speech nearly as well as people assume. If most of your hours were recognition, your effective total is a fraction of your logged total.
Whether the words were ever going to be useful to you
A general course teaches the most statistically common words in the language. That is a sensible default and a poor fit for any particular person. Learning two thousand words of which four hundred are relevant to your life is not the same as learning eight hundred that all are.
Whether you were reviewing at the right moment
Vocabulary decays on a predictable curve, and the timing of review changes how much survives per hour spent by a large factor. The mechanism, without the jargon.
A realistic schedule
For Spanish, from nothing, at 45 minutes a day, six days a week:
- Month 1–2 — introduce yourself, ask and answer basic questions. A1 territory.
- Month 4–6 — handle routine exchanges. Understand a slow, patient speaker. A2.
- Month 12–18 — hold a real conversation about your own life. B1.
- Year 3+ — B2, and the point at which most people stop calling it studying.
For Polish or Russian, add roughly half again. For Mandarin, closer to triple, and expect the speaking and the reading to advance at completely different rates.
The number that actually predicts arrival
Of everything above, the strongest predictor is not hours per day. It is whether you are still doing it in month nine. Almost everyone who fails to reach B1 fails by stopping, not by being slow — and people stop when the material stops feeling connected to their life.
That is the whole reason Arbor is built the way it is. It asks about your life first, then builds the lessons from the answers, and it measures your level from four things it can observe rather than awarding it for completing units. Where it has not seen enough of you to be sure, it says so instead of showing a zero.
Try a conversation — it takes about thirty seconds, and there is nothing to install.
Arbor builds this into the app.
Every lesson, conversation and review session is made from your own job, your own week and the people you are learning for. Spanish and Polish are ready today.