My TL is Ukrainian. I have put in about 400 hours of reading on LingQ and god knows how much listening off LingQ. Plus have done a fair bit of reading off LingQ and also just spent a couple of months in Ukraine.
I have just cracked the 12,000 known words mark, which moves me from Beginner 2 to Intermediate 1. That seems low, but I’m now at a point where I can add 100-200 words per hour of reading whereas I used to get maybe 20 in a whole day.
The next level is another 12,000 known words away, and I don’t think it will take me anything close to another 400 hours.
But I thought to ask. How long did each level take you? Did the later levels come faster or slower?
Upper levels will tend to take longer because the amount of vocabulary needed to progress explodes. The FSI guidelines tend to be a good rule of thumb for English speakers learning other languages; FSI puts Ukrainian at 1100 classroom hours (roughly speaking double that to account for outside of class time like practice speaking, exposure, or consuming media.)
Language learning involves putting a lot of hours in-- if getting to Intermediate 1 means you’re spending more time with the language because it’s more enjoyable, or easier for you to keep going, then you’ll get to fluency faster
I’m mostly off LingQ these days but using an equivalent free software-- I will say that at maybe 15k words known in German, I definitely noticed that there are more words I can pick up after a single exposure (German has a lot of compound words, so I hit some kind of threshold for knowing the most common parts that make up the language and how they tend to fit together.) Now at 20k known, and while progress can feel slow day-to-day (though is definitely fast month-to-month) I’m motivated to spend 1-1.5 hours a day reading because I can read at a level that interests me without heroic efforts, and it’s just plain fun.
I have 303 hours in Italian and will be at Advanced 2 very soon, likely within the next 2 months. I began learning in November 2025. I have a detailed breakdown of exactly how long it has taken me and what I read to get to each level in another thread: https://forum.lingq.com/t/intermediate-1-in-italian-in-32-days/
I have also started Ukrainian. However Ukrainian is harder for multiple reasons, one of those being the LingQ dictionary / AI translations are a lot worse for Ukrainian than for Italian, which causes general comprehension issues. The other being there is less familiar content in Ukrainian to start out reading with, so you are battling both an unknown language and an unknown story. The third being there are far more cognates in English - Italian than in Ukrainian - Italian.
