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What do you call a person who speaks 3 languages? Trilingual! What do you call a person who speaks 2 languages? Bilingual! What do you call a person who only speaks 1 language? American! It is a sad fact that foreign language education is sorely lacking in this country. And when students actually take foreign language classes, they are largely ineffective because they are slow, unfocused, and grammar-based. It's too bad that nobody learns a language by memorizing complex grammar rules because then it would be easy. It is not an exaggeration to say that 3 months of smart self-study will put you on about the same level as a 3rd year college Spanish student. This is because self-study is much more concentrated, leaving out or at least prolonging knowledge that won't help you to speak now. The most effective approach is to constantly drill, drill, drill until the correct phrase comes to your lips automatically. A teacher simply cannot do this effectively in a classroom of 20 students, but you can at home! By far the 2 most effective programs using this approach are Pimsleur (easier) and the famous FSI program (harder but much cheaper). You will of course need many other resources, but one of these 2 programs (or both if you're loaded) should comprise the core of your Spanish-learning library. How long will it take? This is the first question everybody asks and the answer, of course, is "it depends." The research I've seen, and it corresponds to my own personal experience and the experience of others, is that it takes about 250 to 350 hours of core study to achieve a reasonable fluency in Spanish. If you were to study 1 hour a day, every day, you could conceivably achieve fluency in 5 months. Even if you aren't that gifted, it certainly shouldn't take more than a year for even the poorest of language students. But even a year doesn't sound so bad when you consider that most people who take 4 years of Spanish in college can barely ask the time. And they pay thousands of dollars in tuition for the privilege! In my experience it's reasonable to plan for about 7 or 8 months. The key, however, is regular practice. One hour 7-days-a-week is vastly superior to 5 hours 2-days-a-week. If you stick to the approach on the following pages and practice daily, you should be able to converse fluently in almost any situation in less than a year. As you can see, learning Spanish will be neither quick nor easy, but it's not that hard, either, and the rewards will be far greater than you can imagine. So, if you're ready to begin, continue to my Beginners Spanish page and start your journey towards bilingualism.
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