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How long does Japanese take to learn?
Japanese is about as linguistically distant from English as it gets. You probably don’t need me to tell you that. So, as an English speaker, the hours roughly break down like this:
- Survival basics (A2) – 700
- Everyday conversations (B1) – 1,200
- Comfortable fluency (B2) – 2,100
- Near-native fluency (C1) – 3,500
Why so long? Well, because almost nothing transfers. You’re getting none of the “shared ancestry” stuff that, say, Latin-based or Germanic languages would provide. Completely “alien” writing system, vocabulary, and grammar.
Now, don’t get me wrong, this doesn’t mean that it’s harder (don’t wanna scare ya), it just means it’ll take longer. And that’s a-okay, because there’s no rush.
Of course, where you start matters big style. Mandarin speakers, for example, can usually read most of the kanji already, so they’ll probably reach fluency in half the time. And then there’s immersion; if you’re spending some time in Japan, that’ll shrink things further.
For a number that’s tailored to your actual situation, play around with the calculator above. That’s what we built it for 🙂