How long does it really take to reach B2 in French?

I get this question almost every week, usually in the first lesson.

"How long until I reach B2?"

Since January 2026, the question has become urgent for a lot of people. B2 is now the level required for French citizenship, in speaking and in writing, and attending classes is no longer enough on its own. You need a diploma to prove it.

So people want a number. Six months? A year? You will find plenty of numbers online, and they are easy to publish and hard to check.

I would rather give you something more useful than a number, and I hope you will find it reassuring rather than discouraging. After years of teaching adults in France, I have seen the same story often enough that I would not feel right simplifying it.

1. Two students, same starting point, very different outcomes

Take two people. Both arrive at A2. Both want B2. Both are engineers working full time in Toulouse. Both are motivated, both are intelligent, both genuinely want this.

The first one takes two to three lessons a week and works on her own in between, regularly. Six months can be enough.

The second one takes one lesson a week and rarely finds time at home. The same journey can take years. Sometimes it does not happen at all.

Same language, same city, the same abilities. The difference between them has little to do with talent or intelligence, and I want to be very clear about that, because the second student almost always concludes that the problem is her.

It is not. It is the shape of her week, and a week can be reshaped.

2. The number nobody gives you

Here is the arithmetic that changes how you read everything else.

Going from A2 to B1 takes somewhere in the region of 180 to 200 hours of learning. B1 to B2 takes another 200 to 250. These are indicative figures used across French language teaching, not a law of nature, and individuals vary. But as an order of magnitude, the journey from A2 to B2 is roughly 380 to 450 hours.

Now count what happens in our lessons. At two or three lessons a week over six months, that is 50 to 80 hours.

Read those two numbers next to each other.

A2 to B2, in hours

380 to 450

what the journey costs

50 to 80

what your lessons give you in six months

80 percent

what happens outside the classroom

I am not saying this to diminish what we do together. Our lessons are where the difficult things get untangled, where you try something out loud and get an honest answer, and where you find out what is actually blocking you. What they cannot be is the whole of your 400 hours. Their job is to make the other 350 work.

Because here is the good news about those 350 hours: if you live in France, you already have them. They are sitting in your week, waiting to be used.

3. So why do three years in France sometimes change so little?

This is the question I hear behind the first one, usually said more quietly.

"I have been living in France for three years and I still cannot speak."

Three years in France is thousands of hours of French. Shops, colleagues, the radio in the car, the school gate, the doctor, the neighbour who talks too fast. On paper you have had far more than 400 hours. So where did they go?

They passed by, because being surrounded by a language is not the same as learning it.

That sentence is the heart of this article, so let me be precise about what I mean.

4. The mistake I see most often, and it comes from good intentions

My students often tell me this one, and they tell me proudly:

"I watch series in French with subtitles."

Good, honestly. And then I ask what they took away from the last episode, and there is usually a silence.

That silence is the whole problem, and it is not a lack of effort. If nothing new comes out of the activity, the activity cannot leave much behind. If you do not note down an interesting word, or a turn of phrase you noticed, or the way a character said something you would never have thought to say, forty-five minutes go by and very little stays.

It is a very common habit, and an understandable one: the usual advice is to surround yourself with French, and it tends to stop there. The advice is good as far as it goes. It simply leaves out the second half.

One of my students, an engineer at Ascendance Flight Technologies, put his finger on what changed for him:

"I like the way lessons are built around real situations. It helps me handle daily life in France and follow ordinary conversations." Saurav, Aerostructure Stress Engineer, Ascendance Flight Technologies

He is describing the difference exactly. What changed for him was not the amount of French around him, it was having French he could use.

5. Exposure and extraction

Two words, and most of the difference between six months and three years.

Exposure is French happening near you. The podcast in your headphones while you answer emails. The series with subtitles. Colleagues talking at lunch while you wait for someone to switch to English. Three years of it can leave surprisingly little behind, and now you know why.

Extraction is taking something out of that French and putting it somewhere you will meet it again. One word. One phrase. One construction you noticed. Written down, reviewed, and then used out loud, imperfectly, until it becomes yours.

Exposure is free. Extraction is what turns it into progress.

And this is why living in France is such an advantage once you know what to do with it. The hours are already in your week. Your commute, your groceries, your children's school notes, the ten minutes of small talk before a meeting. Left passive, they add very little. Worked actively, they all count toward your 400 hours.

The week is the same either way. What changes is what you do with the French that is already in it.

6. What working at home actually means

When I ask a student to work between lessons, this is what I mean, concretely.

Add new vocabulary to Anki regularly, and review it just as regularly. I name the tool on purpose. Anki is a flashcard app that shows you a word again exactly when you are about to forget it. It is not glamorous, and it is probably the highest return on your time available. The important word in that sentence is regularly, twice. Ten minutes every day does more than an hour on Sunday.

If you have never used it, I have written a full guide to how I set it up, including the one thing most people get wrong about organising their cards: how I use Anki to learn vocabulary without forgetting it, in French for now. I found it while preparing for my own DALF C2, and it changed how I learn languages.

Do the homework I give you. It is not busywork. It is the part where what we practised together becomes something you can produce alone.

Surround yourself with French as often as possible, and take something from it. Watch the videos, listen to the podcasts, read the recipes in French. My general rule for students is simple: try to do everything you already do in your daily life, but in French. You are not adding an hour of study to a day with no room left. You are changing the language of hours you already spend.

But every one of those activities comes with the same small condition: take one thing out of it. A word into Anki. A phrase into your notes. Otherwise we are back to the series with subtitles, wondering why nothing seems to move.

7. What six months actually looks like

Let me show you the week, because "work regularly at home" is easy to say and vague enough to be unhelpful.

To cover roughly 400 hours in six months you need something in the order of fifteen hours of French a week. That number frightens people until they see how it is built.

Look at the biggest line. It is not the lessons and it is not the homework. It is your ordinary life, which you were going to live anyway.

Now the other student, the one who takes one lesson a week:

Fifteen hours against one and a half. That is a factor of ten, and it explains six months against several years better than any difference in ability. She is not working less hard. She spends time on French every week. It simply does not convert yet.

8. About those fifteen minutes a day

You have read a hundred articles telling you that fifteen minutes a day is enough. I would like to be honest with you about that, because I think the promise, however kindly meant, sets people up for disappointment.

Fifteen minutes a day is about ninety hours a year. Compare that with the four hundred we started with.

Both of those statements matter, and the first one is not nothing. Regularity really is more important than duration, and a short focused session every day will beat a two hour session once a week, always. But regularity at fifteen minutes maintains you. It does not move you two levels.

I mention it because students who follow that advice and then do not reach B2 tend to blame themselves. In my experience, the fifteen minutes were never going to be enough on their own, and nobody had told them.

9. How to know where you actually are

Start with an order of magnitude, and it is free. There is a simulator on this site: about twenty questions, five minutes, and it gives you an estimated level and the hours between where you are and where you want to be. It asks you twenty questions instead of guessing, which is the whole difference with a number published for everybody: test your level.

Take it for what it is, an estimate rather than a diploma. Then two questions, which are the ones that tell you whether B2 is close.

Can you argue? B2 is the level where you stop describing and start defending a position. Not "the meeting was long and difficult" but "I disagree with the approach, and here is why, and here is what I would do instead." If you can hold that in French, under mild pressure, without rehearsing it first, you are close.

Can you write it? This is where nearly everyone overestimates themselves, and it is the half of the requirement people forget. Speaking improves faster in France, because life asks for it every day. Writing does not, because nothing asks for it. You can be a confident B1 speaker and a shaky A2 writer, and the citizenship requirement asks for B2 in both.

If writing is your weaker side, that is genuinely good news. It is the most trainable part of the whole journey, and the part where working with a teacher makes the biggest difference.

10. Where this leaves you

You do not need to find 400 hours. You already have them, sitting unused in a week you are already living.

What you need is regular lessons that work on what actually blocks you, the habit of taking one thing out of every French thing you touch, and someone who will tell you kindly and clearly when an activity is not doing much for you.

I learned French as a foreign language myself. I am Russian, I arrived here as a beginner, and I took it as far as the DALF C2. I have made every one of these mistakes personally, including the series with subtitles. I know where the time goes because I have spent it.

Tell me where you are today, and we will look together at what your six months would need to look like.

---

For the naturalisation procedure itself, see service-public.fr. This article is only about the language.

Everything in Speaking French