What does it ACTUALLY mean to reach B2?

Recently, we received a question from the community about if it was possible to go from A1 to B2 in a year in Arabic.

Believe it or not, there are a few different interpretations of what it means to reach the B2 level in a language.

Socially: Reaching the level where tutors and conversations partners will consider you functionally fluent
Officially: Reaching the level where you can pass the B2 exam

Both of these goals require much different strategies and the answer will vary. Tune in to find out what Ethan and Ben have to say about it!

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[paulwalther]

I feel like B2 is where you can understand native content really well except for really difficult content (like hard newspaper articles). But your output while easy to understand has mistakes or awkward choices that advanced learners wouldn’t make. But people shouldn’t have to grade their language very much for you to understand. You should also be able to keep up with conversations between native speakers most of the time although it will require concentration. A B2 is like a sloppy C1 to me. You can do most of the same things but you don’t look as good doing them. Someone at a B1 won’t be able to keep up with the conversation and will need everyone to slow down for them. Steve Kaufman said in one of his videos most people never reach B2 in their target language. It’s really hard. I think if you’re a motivated intelligent teenager you can sometimes do amazing things compared to adult learners (it's not just the added free time, their brains are better at it) and who knows, B2 in a year maybe (don’t know). It takes me years and years to hit B2 though. I didn’t take the test but sample B2 German material seemed mostly easy for me after studying German for several years with mostly immersion. However in my case, because I did more immersion than classroom studying, I felt like a took a weird circular route where I probably couldn’t pass A2 or B1 tests after 1, 2 or 3 years or whatever. Until immersion started really clicking and then I was B2. Just my opinion on how I learned it though. When you don’t do classroom study or very much of it, measuring your progress is quite tricky.

[mattstone]

In my experience, it's super easy to reach the level of comfortably communicating one on one with people while traveling around by focusing on memorizing how to say a bunch of different things (500 hours-ish?). I did that with Spanish, and while I couldn't understand a word of TV shows, movies, or conversations between two natives, I had a great time. Only after digging in and REALLY trying to learn the language did I realize how far away I truly was from sitting down and watching a movie and understanding everything with ease. I've spent 3 hours per day the past 15 months and I'm still not quite there! But I'm super happy about my progress.

[lowtide]

What kind of Arabic(s)? I think the hosts did what they could with what they were given but you need way more details about this person’s specific goals to even approach giving them a personal answer. Arabic is one of the most notoriously decentralized languages. Do they want to learn a specific region or multiple regions spoken arabic that people actually use in real life? Do they want to be able to read and write fusha(standard Arabic)? Do they want to read and write standard Arabic and also make progress in a dialect or multiple dialects of actual spoken Arabic? It’s one of the hardest languages to answer this question for on an individual by individual basis.

[biiauchann]

That’s so true I already immersion with german for nine months or so, and when I try to do some mock tests，I can easily understand article, content with it, I cannot say I can easily get those answers right as well

[endouerick]

what if a portuguese native speaker is learning english and they spend 3 hours a day studying the language, would they be able to pull that off ?
also, I wanted to enter another question. are three hours little or a ton of time ?