Fluent in 3 Months: How Anyone at Any Age Can Learn to Speak Any Language from Anywhere in the World

How Much Time Do You Need to Reach Fluency?
Now, as you read previously, you can have a particular milestone in mind to
aim for—advanced beginner (A2), conversational (B1), fluent (B2),
mastery (C2), or others—but here comes the big question: How long does it
take to get there?
This book, of course, suggests that you can become fluent in three
months, but fluency won’t be achieved if you don’t do the work! You have
to live up to your side of the bargain—you have to put in the time and stick
to the plan. Also, the process requires a lot of strategic mental and
emotional adjustments. It’s very hard, for example, to realistically become
fluent in three months if this is your first-ever language learning project.
Generally, I would recommend you aim for conversational (level B1 on
the CEFRL scale) or advanced beginner (level A2) in three months. In the

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process, you’ll discover tweaks you’ll need to make to your learning
approach in order for it to work best for you. If you succeed in learning one
language to fluency over a longer period, then your approach may be ready
for you to use in a shorter—say, three-month—period of time on your next
language.
An intensive language learning project demands your absolute focus.
But if you’re serious about learning a particular language, you will always
make the time and give it several hours a day, even if you work full-time.
Ultimately, languages are learned in hours, not months or years. It’s not
about the amount of time that passes from the moment you begin the
project, but the amount of time you put into it. Whether or not your process
adds up to a huge number of hours, the only thing worth counting is the
time when you are 100 percent focused on learning, living, and using the
language. To realistically expect to make good progress in a language in a
short amount of time, you have to put at least two hours a day into it, and
ideally more. As mentioned in the previous chapter, you can always make
the time, even if it’s a few minutes a day, to advance. But you have to set
aside much more than scattered study sessions if you want to advance
quickly. Do what it takes to create this time, avoid other side projects, and
fill your language learning slot every day. If you put just a few hours a week
into it, fluency in three months is indeed impossible.
There’s no magic fluency number either. You can’t multiply eight hours
(the number of hours a day you would theoretically have available if you
could work on the language full-time) by ninety days to figure out how long
it will take you to learn a new language. You simply have to put in as much
work as you can, as intensively as you can, with as much emphasis on
solving immediate language problems as you possibly can in order to
progress. If you do, you will quickly see how much time is necessary for
you to advance to a higher level.
So why am I so crazy about three months? The answer is incredibly
simple: that’s all the time I’ve had during many of my projects. When I
would go to a new country to learn the language, the visa limit for tourists
was about three months. Fortunately for me, that’s the amount of time I
usually liked to spend in a foreign country before moving on to a new one.
So I had only three months to reach my deadline. It’s as simple as that.
Even though I no longer go to a country to learn a language, and I now
prefer to learn in advance of traveling abroad, I have found that three

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months is as good a time line as any. It’s long enough to realistically aim for
a high fluency goal but short enough that the goal is always within sight,
that three-month deadline pressuring you to work harder.
When we make a resolution—such as a New Year’s resolution—with a
vague deadline of learning a language within a year, or to speak it fluently
“someday,” even the best of us can get lazy. There are seven days in a week,
and “someday” is not one of them.
When you give yourself a short deadline, rather than thinking you have
plenty of time, you tend to work as efficiently as possible. Deadlines of one,
three, or six months are excellent for this reason. Even if you’re more
interested in a year deadline, break that year into smaller achievable chunks.
You don’t have to pick three months for your major end goal; I’ve also
had missions of “conversational in one to two months” and “get by as a
confident tourist in a few weeks,” but my successes have more often been
with a three-month time line.
If three months feels right to you, focus on one project and have an
adventurous end goal. You don’t have to pick fluency, but look at that
CEFRL table (fi3m.com/cefrl) and see which level would be enough of a
challenge to truly push you but still be realistic, given the time you can put
in.