Well, I've mastered two months worth of class Spanish, lol, so I guess I only have about 9,940 more hours left to go before I've mastered the language. Spanish is certainly a heck of a lot easier to read than German (because of English's Norman-French loanwords), I must say. I've taken a year's worth of German, and I can understand almost nothing written in German, but I can already understand most websites written in Spanish without a dictionary, and read most factual books, magazines, and newspapers in Spanish if they use academic, formal language. I bet the reverse is also true, so Spanish speakers sure are lucky that they can already understand a great deal of written English after only a month or two of study. I think that's pretty cool. Novels and poetry still make my eyes cross though. The thing that's hardest for me, is that it seems just about everything is phrased differently in Spanish than it is in English, so learning to speak and write Spanish will take a long time.
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