The first thing everybody wants to know when beginning to learn Spanish is how long it will take. Of course, the answer depends on what exactly you mean by the term "learn Spanish". Do you mean native-level fluency? Functionally conversant? Somewhere in between? The time required to reach a near-native fluency is different for everybody and is hard to measure, but there are rules of thumb on how long it usually takes to reach a level adequate for all but the most specialized of professional and social situations.
Conventional wisdom holds that it takes between 250 to 350 hours of dedicated study to reach a functional fluency in the Spanish language. This means you will be able to express abstract ideas and communicate in a manner consistent with an educated, professional adult. It does NOT mean that you will possess a native-level fluency as only prolonged study in a Spanish-speaking country is likely to yield such results. That said, a functional fluency is more than adequate to live and work in a Spanish-speaking country while you polish off your Spanish skills at leisure.
The Foreign Service Institute (FSI), the branch of the US government responsible for teaching languages to US diplomats , allocates 6 months to the task of teaching Spanish to a new diplomat. Learning Spanish on your own time at home, you might wish to work at a less frenzied pace than that, but it is unlikely to take any reasonably determined Spanish student more than a year to achieve functional fluency.
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