How Long Does It Take to Learn Italian?
For a native English speaker, the U.S. Foreign Service Institute (FSI) estimates 24 weeks of full-time study, or about 552 class hours, to reach professional working proficiency in Italian. That puts it in FSI's fastest group, six weeks quicker than French or Spanish. At an hour a day, 552 hours is about a year and a half.
On this page
The FSI figure
The State Department's Foreign Language Training page lists Italian in Category I, "languages close to English", at 24 weeks, the same as Portuguese, Dutch, Romanian and the Scandinavian languages. French and Spanish are the only Category I languages at 30 weeks. Our post on the easiest languages for English speakers covers the whole group.
The target is an integrated 3 in speaking and listening on the ILR scale, usually read as upper B2 to C1 on the CEFR (there's no official conversion; see FSI hours vs CEFR levels). FSI's typical week is 23 hours of class plus 17 of self-study, so total effort over 24 weeks is closer to 24 × 40 = 960 hours.
An older FSI data point agrees that Italian is quick. In a 1993 FSI report on the speaking level students reached after 24 weeks, reproduced by economists Barry Chiswick and Paul Miller, Italian scored 2.50, above Spanish (2.25) and level with French and Portuguese.
Hours per CEFR level
Italy's certificate bodies don't publish a standard hour-per-level table the way Campus France does for French, so these are planning estimates. They combine FSI's 552 hours, this blog's rule of thumb that B1 takes about half the FSI hours, and published figures for close relatives (Campus France's indicative DELF hours put French B1 at 350–400 hours and B2 at 550–650). With Italian slightly faster than French on FSI's list:
| Level | Hours |
|---|---|
| A2 | ~150–200 |
| B1 | ~275–375 |
| B2 | ~450–600 |
| FSI (ILR 3) | 552 |
How long that takes at your pace
| Per day | B1 (~300 h) | 552 h |
|---|---|---|
| 30 min | ~20 months | ~3 years |
| 1 hour | ~10 months | ~18 months |
| 2 hours | ~5 months | ~9 months |
The calculator below turns any daily time into a date, for B1, B2 or FSI's full figure. If you're weighing Italian against another language, our hours calculator for every language puts them side by side.
What's easy and hard about Italian
Easy: Italian spelling is close to phonetic, so you can read words aloud correctly almost from the start. Its vowels are clear and few. Vocabulary is full of words English shares through Latin (importante, informazione, possibile), plus the music, food and art words English borrowed directly.
Hard: verb conjugations (many forms per verb, several past tenses and a subjunctive used more than in Spanish), noun gender and agreement, and the combined pronouns (glielo, me ne) that take a while to come out naturally. Regional accents and dialects also vary a lot across Italy, which matters for listening more than speaking.
If you already speak Spanish, French or Portuguese, expect to need noticeably fewer hours; the grammar and much of the vocabulary will feel familiar. The flip side is mixing up words between them, which is a normal phase.
Track it
With a Category I language, the first 100 hours feel fast and the next few hundred feel slower, because the remaining work is listening at speed and accuracy in speaking. Logging your hours keeps that from feeling like a stall. LangTrack shows your running total against your goal, and our Italian tracking guide covers what to measure along the way.
FAQ
How many hours does it take to learn Italian?
FSI estimates about 552 class hours (24 weeks full time) for a native English speaker to reach professional working proficiency. For a conversational B1 level, plan for roughly 275–375 hours of study.
Is Italian easier than Spanish?
On FSI's list, yes, slightly: Italian is 24 weeks (552 class hours) and Spanish 30 weeks (690). In older FSI speaking data, Italian also scored a little higher after 24 weeks. Both are among the easiest languages for English speakers.
Can you learn Italian in a year?
To B1, yes, at under an hour a day. FSI's full 552 hours in a year works out to about an hour and a half a day.
Track your Italian, hour by hour
Log every session and see your total close in on B1 and FSI's 552 hours.
Start tracking — free
