How Long Does It Take To Learn Spanish?
The amount of time it takes to learn Spanish varies from student to student depending on a variety of factors such as aptitude, previous language experience (specifically experience with other romance languages). Conventional wisdom holds that it takes between 250-350 hours of core study for the average student to learn to speak Spanish at a functionally-fluent level. Functionally-fluent is not the same thing as “near-native fluency,” instead, it means being able to express abstract ideas and communicate with educated adults without sounding like a child.
The Foreign Service Institute itself allocates about 6 months to the task of teaching a new diplomat Spanish. You might prefer to work at a slower pace than a professional diplomat, but I think the 250-hour number still applies. Note this applies only to core Spanish studies and not outside practice such as reading, watching Spanish TV, and practicing conversation with native speakers.
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A very interesting post! From my teaching experience however I know that it’s just impossible to give any real answer to the question in the title. You have various teachers, various students and various motivations. If you have a good accessible teacher, great materials and a lot of tenacity you could learn it no time.
I wonder how fast people learning on their own are.
250-350 hours of studying sounds like a fair amount of time to get yourself to an acceptable speaking level. My thought is that if you could practice to speak the language with someone else while studying, 100 hours would also suffice.
yeah I think 250-350 is more than sufficient but a someone said above, if you have someone else to converse with, you can learn the language in much less time. Interesting post, nonetheless. Thanks for sharing.
Umer.