How long did it take?

[aleCcowaN]

Well, I invested more than 10,000 hours in English and I'll never learn it.

Another forum member, a new one, looks like having a few dozen hours studying Spanish and s/he is asking for intermediate material using 100% Spanish, a horrible one yet pretty understandable, showing great skills for communicating by means of constructing a language from scattered fragments into something idiomatic. To this kind of people a couple of thousand hours will suffice.

[ROBINDESBOIS]

Acording to Experts and methodology books to speak like a national, you need at least 8 years living in the target language country, that is to express yourself with the nuances a native of the lg does and to undestand every bit of information like an average speaker. Ahora bien, to manage a bit, it depends on your willpower and how disciplined you´re. 18 mounts is a chimera I would say, you can manage but de esto a hablar como un nativo, impossible.
Can anybody translate ahora bien, and de esto a hablar como....

[Jferstler]

Originally Posted by aleCcowaN

Well, I invested more than 10,000 hours in English and I'll never learn it.

Another forum member, a new one, looks like having a few dozen hours studying Spanish and s/he is asking for intermediate material using 100% Spanish, a horrible one yet pretty understandable, showing great skills for communicating by means of constructing a language from scattered fragments into something idiomatic. To this kind of people a couple of thousand hours will suffice.

You seem to have learned it. The paragraph you wrote is in complete English....

[aleCcowaN]

Originally Posted by Jferstler

You seem to have learned it. The paragraph you wrote is in complete English....

But I took 5-6 minutes to write it -though I'm very fast at typing-, and I thought it in Spanish and translated into English. You asked about "fully master", and being unable to think something in the language is opposed to that, methinks

[Perikles]

Originally Posted by aleCcowaN

Well, I invested more than 10,000 hours in English and I'll never learn it.

Another forum member, a new one, looks like having a few dozen hours studying Spanish and s/he is asking for intermediate material using 100% Spanish, a horrible one yet pretty understandable, showing great skills for communicating by means of constructing a language from scattered fragments into something idiomatic. To this kind of people a couple of thousand hours will suffice.

Originally Posted by Jferstler

You seem to have learned it. The paragraph you wrote is in complete English....

Yes, very fluent. And yet...and yet...not quite correct. A native English person would say these kind of people, or this kind of person.

Further - I would have said I have invested more than...., using a perfect, not a simple past.

[Awaken]

In High School, I took 4 straight years at a good school. By the end of the 3rd year, I could read basic Spanish books. It took me a long time though as I was still translating in many cases. Writing at a basic level was fine as well. Speaking was very tough for me as the vocab took effort to think of. And listening was almost impossible to me when a native speaker was going at full speed.

10,000 hours to master - I love the article Sosia posted. We use it for computer programming all the time.


A study was done with a group of native speakers of French, to see how many hours it would take them to get up to a standard level of fluency in different languages. It took them 2000 study-hours to learn German, 1500 study hours to learn English, 1000 study-hours to learn Italian, and only 150 study-hours to learn Esperanto.

I wish Constructed Languages would gain more friction. It would be so much easier for the world.

In summary, years assuming you work on it daily. Otherwise, decades or never =)

[pierrre]

Elaina has said it all for me. Personal interest, frequency of use of language in its various forms (written, spoken, listened to, read etc) and reduction of the inhibition about the use of the foreign language all influence the pace at which one learns and the confidence to face up to the foreign language. Such a combination of factors. It is not just time alone.

[sosia]

The best way is finding a boy/girlfriend. Then you will learn pretty fast

[flamencoguy]

I started taking Spanish class in HS, living about 20 minutes away from the border with Mexico. I took four years of high school (including AP which I passed pretty easily) Spanish, and 3 years of college Spanish (starting at the 300/Junior level) with multiple Spanish classes per semester before I went to Spain to study abroad. I thought I was pretty hot stuff.

When I arrived in Granada and met my host family for the first time, I could have sworn they were speaking Italian. I was pretty crestfallen, believe me. It took me a couple months of living in Spain with a family, taking 4-5 hours of class IN SPANISH every day, hanging out with only Spanish people, to feel "comfortable" in my language there. Of course there were some folks that I just couldn't understand, like the 80 year old guitar maker I hung out with: he would talk to me for like 3 hours in a discourse on guitars and stuff, and I would really not get anything he said. But he only had like 5 teeth so some of it might have been him ;-)

By my 6th month there, tourists from other parts of Spain were asking me for directions, and the grandma of the girl I was dating didn't believe that I wasn't Spanish. Still not "fully mastered" though...

When I got back to the good old U.S. of A I went to a taco shop to finally get some good Mexican food. With my chest puffed out in my best Spanish, I busted out my order, and the guys behind the counter looked at each other and gave the "Here's another stupid gringo trying to speak Spanish to us" eye-roll.

A lot of it is relative. If you can speak/sound like the people around you, then you'll begin to feel comfortable. The second you're in a different linguistic environment, people might think you're just shy of completely ignorant...

**Ditto on the post above. Girlfriends and boyfriends really help.**

[Awaken]

Great story. I always recommend to my friends to send their kids abroad to study. I wish I could do it all over. In my case, the girlfriend in the US kept me from going haha.