RELOVA JOURNAL

Blog/Published April 10, 2026 · Updated September 19, 2026

How to Learn a Language Before Moving Abroad: The Practical 2026 Guide

By Anna Moore

How much language you actually need before moving abroad, realistic study timelines by language family, and how citizenship pathways build in language tests.

Most people planning a move abroad ask the wrong first question about language — "should I learn it?" — when the more useful question is "how much, by when, and for what specific tasks." The honest answer depends heavily on which language you are learning and what you actually need it for: reading a lease, sitting a citizenship interview, or just ordering coffee without switching everyone around you to English. Getting a realistic sense of the time commitment before you move, rather than assuming a few apps sessions will carry you, prevents a lot of frustration in the first few months.

How long language learning actually takes

The US Foreign Service Institute's well-known hour estimates remain the most useful public benchmark for how long different languages take an English speaker to reach working proficiency, and they vary dramatically by language family. Romance languages closely related to English's vocabulary — Spanish and Portuguese chief among them — sit at roughly 600 classroom hours to reach a solid working level, while Germanic languages like German and Dutch run somewhat higher, around 750 hours, reflecting their more complex grammar despite shared vocabulary roots. At the far end, languages that are structurally and script-wise very distant from English — Arabic, Japanese, and Mandarin are the FSI's standard examples — are often modeled around 2,200 hours to reach comparable proficiency, nearly four times the Spanish or Portuguese estimate. These are FSI classroom-hour figures for intensive, structured study; self-directed learners working part-time around a job should expect the calendar time to stretch considerably longer, even if the total hour count is similar.

Budgeting for lessons and setting a realistic timeline

Private online tutoring through platforms like italki is one of the more efficient ways to accelerate progress before a move, with typical rates running roughly $15–25 per hour depending on the tutor's experience and the language in question — a worthwhile investment relative to the value of being able to handle your own lease negotiation, medical appointments, or landlord disputes in the local language rather than depending entirely on translation apps or English-speaking intermediaries. The practical approach is to work backward from your move date: if you have six months before departure and you are learning a language in the FSI's 600-hour category, you would need roughly 25 hours a week of study to reach a working level purely through hour-count math — unrealistic for most working adults, which is exactly why most people arrive with partial, functional proficiency rather than fluency, and continue building it in-country through daily immersion rather than trying to front-load everything before departure.

Where language requirements show up in visa and citizenship rules

Language ability is not just a lifestyle nicety in several major relocation pathways — it is a hard legal requirement, and one worth knowing about well before you are deep into an application. Portugal's citizenship-by-residency pathway generally requires demonstrating A2-level Portuguese, a genuinely achievable bar for most learners within a year of consistent part-time study. Germany's naturalization pathways typically require B1-level German, a meaningfully higher bar that usually calls for structured coursework rather than casual self-study, particularly given German's position in the FSI's higher-hour tier. Italy's naturalization process has a similar B1 requirement, verified through recognized certificates like CILS or CELI. In each of these cases, the language requirement is tested formally — through a certified exam, not a casual interview — so if a language-gated citizenship pathway is part of your longer-term plan, it is worth starting structured, certificate-track study well before you are close to filing, rather than treating language as something to pick up informally along the way.

Building language study into your actual moving timeline

The most common mistake is treating language learning as a parallel, optional project rather than integrating it into the sequencing of the move itself. A more realistic plan starts language study the moment a destination is chosen — ideally six to twelve months out for A2/B1-level requirements — and treats the pre-move period as the time to build core survival vocabulary: housing and lease terminology, banking and utility set-up phrases, and medical basics, since these are the interactions you will need to handle almost immediately on arrival, often before your language skills have had time to improve through daily immersion. For deeper cross-checking against specific destinations and how their language and residency requirements interact, see move to Germany, the Portugal D7 visa guide, and building a social life after relocating abroad, which covers how language progress and social integration reinforce each other once you have actually landed.

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