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The honest answer, from someone who moved to Israel at eight speaking no Hebrew at all, and has spent over a decade teaching English speakers to do the same thing faster.
With one lesson a week and a bit of practice between them, most complete beginners can hold a basic, real conversation in two to three months. Not a scripted one. An actual back and forth about where you live, what you did today, what you want to order.
Fluency is a different question and takes considerably longer. But the reason most people give up on Hebrew has nothing to do with fluency. They quit at week six because nothing feels like progress yet, having never been told what progress is supposed to look like.
So here is what it actually looks like.
Ask five people how long Hebrew takes and you get five answers, because they are quietly answering five different questions.
Reading the letters. Two to three weeks. The alphabet is 22 letters, it is smaller than the English one, and the shapes stop looking alien within days. This is the part people dread most and it is over fastest. Here is what learning it actually involves.
Understanding simple Hebrew. One to two months. You catch the shape of what someone said, even while missing words.
Speaking, badly but for real. Two to three months. Full of mistakes, and it works. People understand you and answer you. This is the point where it stops feeling theoretical.
Comfortable fluency. One to two years of consistent use. Following a conversation between two Israelis at full speed, arguing, joking, not translating in your head.
Somebody who tells you Hebrew takes two weeks means the alphabet. Somebody who says five years means fluency. Both are true and neither is useful, which is why the honest answer has to say which one it is talking about.
Speaking at some point. Not necessarily from day one. Students who build vocabulary and grammar first often speak perfectly well when they start, because they have something to say. The people who stall are the ones who never make the jump at all, waiting to feel ready. You do not start feeling ready. You start, and the feeling arrives later.
Frequency beats duration. Twenty minutes on four days does more than two hours on a Sunday. Language lives on repetition, and a week of silence undoes a lot of a long session.
Having something you actually want to say. Learners with a real reason move faster. Talking to a partner's family, handling a doctor's appointment, reading the news without a translator. Vague goals like "learn Hebrew someday" fade around week five. Specific ones survive.
Not being alone with it. Apps are good at vocabulary and useless at the moment you say something wrong and nobody corrects you. Mistakes repeated for six months are far harder to remove than mistakes caught the first week.
What does not matter nearly as much as people fear: age, being "bad at languages", or not having a musical ear. I have taught people in their fifties and sixties who moved faster than students half their age. It varies by the person far more than by the decade they were born in, and a method built for adults who already know how they learn closes most of the gap anyway.
Hebrew has a reputation for being hard that it only half deserves.
What makes it faster than European languages: there are no cases to memorise, unlike German or Russian. The alphabet is only 22 letters. Words are built on three-letter roots, so learning one root often unlocks a family of related words at once. And there is no verb "to be" in the present tense. "I am a teacher" is simply "I teacher", which deletes a whole category of mistakes before you can make them.
Where it genuinely is hard: everything has a gender, including you, so your own verbs change depending on whether you are a man or a woman. The script runs right to left, which feels alien for about two weeks and then stops being something you notice.
And the real one: modern Hebrew is written without vowels. Those little dots you see in textbooks are called nikud, and outside of children's books and poetry nobody uses them. So you do not sound words out the way you do in English. You learn to recognise whole word shapes. רוצה is spelled identically whether it means a man wants or a woman wants, and you tell them apart by context and by ear.
That sounds worse than it is. It is how every Israeli reads, and it comes with exposure rather than study. But it is the single clearest reason self-teaching from an app plateaus: an app can show you words, and it cannot tell you which one a sentence meant.
None of those three are difficult to understand. They are difficult to make automatic, and that only comes from using them out loud with someone who corrects you.
Assuming roughly one lesson a week plus short practice between them. Faster if you are living in Israel and hearing it all day.
Weeks 1 to 3. The alphabet, the sounds, and enough phrases to greet someone and order a coffee. You start picking familiar words out of signs and shopfronts, which feels like a magic trick the first time it happens.
Months 1 to 2. Present tense, everyday vocabulary, asking and answering simple questions. You start catching words in other people's conversations, which is the first moment it feels real.
Months 2 to 3. Basic conversation. Broken, slow, full of mistakes, and genuinely a conversation. Most people are surprised they get here this fast.
Months 4 to 6. Past and future tense. You can tell a story about something that happened, which is when Hebrew stops being a subject and starts being a way to say things.
Months 6 to 12. Longer conversations, more natural word order, reading short articles. You still miss plenty and you are no longer translating every sentence in your head first.
Somewhere in there is the moment people describe as the language clicking. It is not really a click. It is the point where enough small things are automatic that your attention is free to think about what you want to say rather than how to say it.
Every timeline above assumes weekly lessons with someone correcting you. If that is what you are missing, one trial lesson is enough to work out where you would begin and how long your particular goal would realistically take.
A full 50 minutes, one to one, for $55. No subscription and nothing that renews, and if one-on-one lessons are not right for you, I will say so in the lesson rather than sell you a package.