Reaching B2 in English takes roughly 500 to 600 hours of supported study, and C1 roughly 700 to 800, according to the guided learning hours Cambridge English publishes for its exams. Those figures assume lessons, feedback and homework, so independent learners should treat them as a floor rather than a forecast. The more useful number is the rate: 600 hours is under two years at an hour a day, and more than six at fifteen minutes.
Where the hours figures come from#
There is no single authority on how long English takes. The most widely used reference is the set of approximate guided learning hours that Cambridge English attaches to its exam suite, which is itself mapped to the Common European Framework of Reference published by the Council of Europe in 2001. Guided learning hours mean time spent in or around structured teaching, including homework set by a teacher. They do not include the hours you spend watching films or scrolling in English, which help but are much harder to count.
| CEFR level | Cambridge exam | Cumulative guided hours | What it buys you in English |
|---|---|---|---|
| A1 | no main-suite exam | ~90–100 (commonly used estimate, not a Cambridge figure) | Greetings, numbers, forms, survival phrases |
| A2 | A2 Key | ~180–200 | Routine exchanges, simple emails, basic travel |
| B1 | B1 Preliminary | ~350–400 | Familiar conversation, simplified news, connected writing |
| B2 | B2 First | ~500–600 | Unedited articles, meetings, most films with effort |
| C1 | C1 Advanced | ~700–800 | Academic and professional work, novels for pleasure |
| C2 | C2 Proficiency | ~1,000–1,200 | Implicit meaning, register, humour, technical material |
Two things are worth reading out of that table. First, the levels are not evenly spaced: the climb from B2 to C2 costs roughly as much as everything before B2 put together. Second, the ranges are wide on purpose. Cambridge presents them as estimates, and anyone quoting a single precise number for English is quoting something that was never precise. If you want the full picture of what each band claims, CEFR levels explained walks through all six.
Other boards publish their own CEFR mappings. IELTS, TOEFL and the Pearson tests each have an official concordance table on their own sites; check the board's own page rather than a third-party chart, because these mappings are revised.
Why your first language changes the answer#
This is the part most timeline articles leave out, and for English it matters enormously. English is learned by people from every language background on Earth, and the distance from their starting point is not the same.
English sits in the Germanic family but spent centuries absorbing French and Latin vocabulary. A much-cited count of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary by Finkenstaedt and Wolff (1973) found that roughly 28% of its entries came from French and another 28% from Latin. That figure describes dictionary entries rather than everyday speech, where short Germanic words dominate the most frequent band, but the consequence is real: a Spanish, French, Italian or Portuguese speaker meeting English academic and professional vocabulary recognises a very large share of it on sight.
| First language group | What transfers for free | What costs extra time |
|---|---|---|
| Romance (Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian) | Thousands of cognates, especially formal and academic words; Latin alphabet; similar sentence order | Spelling and pronunciation mismatch; phrasal verbs; articles used differently |
| Germanic (German, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish) | Core everyday vocabulary; alphabet; many shared structures | Fixed word order rules; continuous tenses; false friends |
| Slavic (Russian, Polish, Serbian, Czech, Ukrainian) | A shared layer of international vocabulary; the Latin alphabet already in use for Polish, Czech and Croatian | A new alphabet for Cyrillic-first readers such as Russian and Ukrainian; articles, which many Slavic languages do not have; fixed word order; vowel sounds |
| Turkic, Japanese, Korean | International loanwords, many already borrowed from English | Verb-final basic word order; articles; prepositions; for Japanese and Korean, a new script |
| Finno-Ugric (Finnish, Hungarian, Estonian) | International loanwords; Latin alphabet | Case systems with no English equivalent; articles; prepositions; the switch from postpositions to prepositions |
| Chinese varieties | No inflection to unlearn; a grammar already built on word order rather than endings | A new writing system; tense and plural marking; articles; consonant clusters; stress rhythm |
| Arabic, Persian, Hebrew | Some shared international vocabulary | A different script and writing direction; vowel writing; article and tense systems |
I know of no credible published table that converts those differences into hours for learners of English, and you should treat any that claims to with suspicion. The Foreign Service Institute tables you will see quoted measure the opposite direction: how long English-speaking American diplomats take to learn other languages. They say nothing about how long a Vietnamese or Polish speaker takes to learn English, and using them that way is a common mistake.
What the research does support is the direction of the effect. Cross-linguistic similarity makes vocabulary easier to recognise and recall, which is why learners from related languages tend to move faster through the early reading stages.
Daily study time converted to calendar time#
Here is the arithmetic. The table assumes focused study with no days off, which is already optimistic, and uses the cumulative Cambridge ranges above.
| Target level | 15 min a day (~91 h/yr) | 30 min a day (~183 h/yr) | 60 min a day (~365 h/yr) |
|---|---|---|---|
| A2 (180–200 h) | ~2 years | ~1 year | ~6 months |
| B1 (350–400 h) | ~4 years | ~2 years | ~1 year |
| B2 (500–600 h) | ~5.5–6.5 years | ~3 years | ~1.5 years |
| C1 (700–800 h) | ~8 years | ~4 years | ~2 years |
| C2 (1,000–1,200 h) | ~11–13 years | ~6 years | ~3 years |
The shape of that table is the real finding. The gap between fifteen minutes and an hour is not four times the result, it is the difference between a project that ends and one that quietly never does, because eight years outlasts most people's motivation. A fifteen minutes a day habit is far better than nothing and the right starting point if it is what you can hold, but treat it as a maintenance rate rather than an arrival schedule.
One more honest adjustment: an unstructured self-study hour is not equal to a guided hour. Hours in which you produce English and get corrected, or retrieve vocabulary from memory, count for much more than hours of passive exposure.
Vocabulary, the other way to measure the distance#
Hours are one yardstick. Words are another, and for reading they are the more predictive one. Paul Nation's work on vocabulary and coverage (Nation, 2006) estimated that understanding unsimplified written English comfortably takes around 8,000 to 9,000 word families, with roughly 6,000 to 7,000 enough for everyday spoken English. The same line of research puts comfortable independent reading at about 98% of the running words on a page being known, with about 95% workable when help is available.
The encouraging half of that finding is how unevenly the words are distributed. The most frequent couple of thousand word families cover the large majority of ordinary English text, so the first stretch of vocabulary buys far more comprehension per word than the last. The discouraging half is that the remaining gap to 8,000 is long, and it is where most learners stall. The intermediate plateau is largely a vocabulary problem wearing a motivation costume, and how many words do you know explains why an honestly conservative count beats a flattering one.
What English makes easy, and what it makes hard#
Worth separating, because the two pull in opposite directions.
English grammar is comparatively light on inflection. Nouns take one regular plural ending plus a short list of irregulars, verbs change very little across persons, and there is no gender agreement to track. Word order is fixed, which is a burden if your language is flexible, but a relief once learned because it is predictable.
The costs sit elsewhere. English spelling is unusually opaque: Seymour, Aro and Erskine (2003) compared children learning to read across a group of European orthographies in their own first language and found English learners took markedly longer to reach basic decoding accuracy than children reading more transparent systems. That is a study of children learning their own language, not of foreign learners, but it measures the property that affects everyone. Beyond spelling, the recurring difficulties are phrasal verbs, articles, prepositions, and the tense and aspect system, especially the present perfect.
None of those are learned well from rules. They are learned from meeting the same patterns in context, repeatedly, which is an argument for volume of reading over explanation.
What actually determines your timeline#
After the tables, the summary is short. Two things predict how long English takes, and the method is not one of them.
The first is daily consistency. A small amount every day compounds; an ambitious weekly plan that collapses after a month does not. Distributed practice also retains better than massed practice, a finding replicated across decades of research and summarised in the meta-analysis by Cepeda et al. (2006).
The second is volume of input you can mostly understand. Krashen's Input Hypothesis (1985) argues that acquisition happens when we understand messages slightly beyond our current level, which is why hours of readable English outperform hours of grammar drilling. English has one enormous advantage here: English dominates the web and the global publishing supply, so you will never run out of things to read. The problem is the opposite of scarcity. At A2 the material is either too hard or written for children, and both are discouraging. Comprehensible input explained covers the underlying argument, and reading news in a foreign language covers where to start once native text is within reach.
That supply problem is what LingoBlend is built around. Instead of searching for English at exactly your level, you paste something you already wanted to read in your own language and set the share of English woven into it, anywhere from 5% to 100%. Tapping any English word shows its meaning and, when the word is an inflected form, its base form, and lets you save it into a spaced-repetition queue that feeds five short review games. The Chrome extension blends web pages you are already on, and you can save words from them the same way. The English learning guide covers where to begin.