paseoCalculator
Conversation hours
Count only the minutes you will speak. The result is a planning range for a five-minute exchange, then the published class-hour total beside it.
Estimate
At 20 minutes of speaking, 5 days a week, the planning range for Spanish is 14 to 17 weeks.
Matching the 690 class hours listed for Spanish takes 414 weeks at this pace.
Listening and flashcards are not counted.
What the number is assuming
For a planning range only, a five-minute unscripted exchange is counted as 23 hours of speaking, multiplied by the language’s listed class hours and divided by 552, the floor of Category I. When a language sits inside Category I and above that floor, the range runs from 23 hours up to that scaled figure. Languages published as a single class-hour total get a single figure. Listening and flashcards are not counted. This is not an ILR milestone, and it is not a survey result.
Figures were read from the National Foreign Affairs Training Center page on 31 October 2026. Class hours for Categories I, II, and III on this page are the listed weeks times 23, and those products match the totals printed for the categories. Category IV uses the printed total of 2,200 class hours.
The class hours are copied from the National Foreign Affairs Training Center’s Foreign Language Training page. The checkable write-up, including the fact that Paseo has no learner survey yet, is speaking practice, in public figures.
| Language | Category | Weeks listed | Class hours |
|---|---|---|---|
| Spanish | I | 30 | 690 |
| Portuguese | I | 24 | 552 |
| French | I | 30 | 690 |
| Italian | I | 24 | 552 |
| German | II | 36 | 828 |
| Polish | III | 44 | 1,012 |
| Arabic | IV | 88 | 2,200 |
| Japanese | IV | 88 | 2,200 |