CLASSROOM HOURS TO ACHIEVE PROFICIENCY LEVELS
BY LANGUAGE DIFFICULTY

Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR) Levels

Language       From S/L/R*- 0 to:

S/L/R 1

S/L/R 2

S/L/R 3

S/L/R 4

I.  Romance and Germanic Languages:
French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian, German, Afrikaans, Danish, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish
 

150 hours

400 hours

650 hours

**

II.  Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean

350 hours

1,100 hours

2,200 hours

**

III.  All Others ***
e.g., East European,    African, Asian Languages

250 hours

600 hours

1,100 hours

**

Note:  For learner to achieve these goals, classroom study should be supplemented by a minimum of two to three hours of preparation for each five classroom hours.

This table is an adaptation of the U.S. State Department Foreign Service Institute’s expected levels of speaking proficiency for various lengths of training.  This adaptation is intended to meet the needs of private sector students.

*  S :  Speaking Proficiency,  L:  Listening Proficiency,  R:  Reading Proficiency

**  Generally cannot be achieved in classroom.  Requires extensive use of language in the native setting.

***  Indonesian, Malay approximate classroom hours for S/R-1:200; S/R-2:500; S/R-300;900

Hours approximate.  Actual hours required may vary according to student’s language learning aptitude.