- At B1, you’re getting more comfortable. You now have a working knowledge of around 2500 words total, maybe half of which you can recall and use pretty quickly. This makes conversations much more fluid generally.
- You’ll still hesitate if it’s a topic you haven’t talked about much, but this is where you can start going into stores or ordering at restaurants and it’s not much of a burden on the people working there. You can read simpler books or read a good amount of newspaper articles if you know the context. You can even watch TV if the subtitles in the target language are on – it’s still pretty rough without them.
- Think Dev’s Italian in season two of Master of None. Or maybe Colin Firth’s Jamie proposing to Aurelia in Portuguese at the end of Love Actually. They’re not totally fluent, but it’s not a huge struggle to understand what they’re getting at or generally communicate with them.
Reaching B1 from A2 takes about 200 hours, so you’re looking at roughly 450 hours of work from scratch. At one hour per day, this is about 18 months of work total. If you’re working at it full time in a program, you can probably get here in about 4 or 5 months. - Reaching B2 is generally considered by most people as having basic fluency. You’ll have a working vocabulary of around 4000 words.
- It’s not always effortless and it’s not always perfect, but neither you nor your native speaking partners are having a really hard time in most circumstances at this point. Conversations about wide ranges of things are pretty easy for everyone involved. Most television or movies in the target language are understandable.
- Think of Massimo, Jennifer Lopez’s unrequited Italian courtier from The Wedding Planner, or maybe Jackie Chan in Rush Hour. You’re perfectly understandable and you don’t have issues understanding what native speakers are saying, even at the speed of a Chris Tucker.
Getting to B2 from B1 is another 200 hours probably, making it about 650 hours from zero. At one hour per day, this is nearly two years of work if you’re starting from scratch. With intensive language courses, missing nothing, and taking courses 4-5 hours every day plus a ton of homework, this is still 28 weeks (7 months) of work.
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