How many hours a day should I learn Chinese to be fluent in a year?

You won’t be fluent by the end of a year anyway, but the number of hours depends if you are in China or not.

If you are China, you will benefit from hundreds of hours of passive learning during your daily life (hearing people talking, reading signs in the streets, discussing with neighbors, etc.)

If you are in a non-Chinese speaking area, then you need to find a way to immerse yourself in the language. My advice : surround yourself with Chinese speakers. It will help tremendously your learning process, and may also help you to assess if speaking Chinese is really worth the 1000s of hours you going to spend on it.

This text was originally published in quora.