Insights From 1800 Hours of Learning Spanish
How long does it really take to learn a language?
Background
I’ve been attempting to learn Spanish for over a decade, ever since I entered high school and was forced to pick between either it or French.
Despite this, even after 5 years of weekly Spanish lessons, I was utterly incapable of holding even a basic conversation in the language.
The next few years involved several short-lived attempts at self-study. I scoured the web for methods, resources and — most crucially for my dwindling motivation — success stories. I tried using textbooks, Duolingo, Anki etc. to no success.
I later stumbled upon the term “comprehensible input” and Stephen Krashen’s input hypothesis and also learnt about the ALG approach to language learning, courtesy of Pablo of Dreaming Spanish (a resource which proved indispensable during my initial phase of learning). From there onwards, I shifted my efforts to watching and listening to, the most easily comprehensible input I could find. This proved difficult, as there was not a huge amount of extremely easy to understand content completely in Spanish.
(In fact, with the exceptions of Spanish and Thai, there is a real dearth of beginner-friendly CI content on YouTube for practically all other languages — including English. Thankfully, some individuals have kindly taken the time to document what is currently available for other languages).
Timeline
Around 70 hours into my journey, I ran out of easy, interesting YouTube videos with slow speech and lots of visual aids. I was therefore forced to jump into the deep end and consume less comprehensible content. I started listening to learner’s podcasts such as Español con Juan and Hoy Hablamos. These were quite difficult, and it was a struggle to concentrate for more than 30 minutes a day. However, I managed to power through at a steady pace of 30 minutes to an hour a day.
Later that year, I moved to Spain. (By that time I had likely accumulated around 200 hours of input). This is when my acquisition of the language reached breakneck speed — though it wasn’t due to the direct environment, as I was living and working in an English-speaking bubble. It was because in my free time I started consuming Spanish content for many hours a day, mostly in the form of podcasts.
My progress was undeniable thanks to the hours I was putting in, during one 5-month period I was averaging 144 hours a month (I use an app called Simple Time Tracker to keep track). I was able to permit this due to the fact that I was working only part-time as an English Language Assistant and thus had a lot of free time.
My records tell me that I had done as much as 10 hours a day, which in retrospect seems absurd to me. In the time period between January 26th to June 20th 2023 I watched or listened to 833 hours and 56 minutes of Spanish content. In the same period in 2024 I have managed 95 hours, 16 minutes. Granted, I stopped being quite as diligent with my tracking, even so, the real number is not far off from that estimate.
As my comprehension improved, I managed to move from learner’s podcasts, to easier native content. Such as easier for-natives podcasts like Entiende Tu Mente, and YouTube videos where someone was speaking directly to the camera. I then broadened myself to all sorts of native content on YouTube and English series dubbed in Spanish (significantly easier to understand than Spanish originals due to clearer speech).
The bread and butter of my daily input quickly became podcasts due to how easily I could fit them into my life and to maximise speed of acquisition (they tend to have the highest density of words per minute). Some of my favourite for-natives podcasts include The Wild Project, Lo que tú digas and Qué Cacao.
Listening
All my hours tracked have been spent listening. So, quite unsurprisingly, it is my strongest ability. Content from Spain generally does not pose an issue at all, though I may struggle to understand thicker regional accents were I to encounter them, due to a lack of exposure (such as Ferran Adrià’s). Latin American accents can require more effort to understand, and as I’ve hardly consumed content from there, I’m not familiar with much of the slang either.
Reading
Reading is something I have spent far less time doing, and have made no attempt to track my reading time. According to what I’ve read, one needs to read around one million words to see a significant improvement in their reading ability, and around 3 million words to be able to read almost anything without difficulty. The majority of the content I’ve read has been forum posts, news articles and YouTube comments. Non-fiction is also much easier to read than fiction. I have read very little literature in the language due to a lack of interest combined with an overwhelming amount of content that I want to read in English.
Writing
Besides texting, I have little experience doing this thus far. It’s not something I intentionally plan on doing at the moment, not until I’ve invested a significant amount of time practising reading.
Speaking
This isn’t something I’ve practised much. Even whilst living in Spain, my interactions with locals tended to be limited to brief interactions with employees in bars, restaurants and supermarkets. I also wasn’t quite sure how to meet locals due to having no social hobbies, combined with a fear of attending local groups/clubs due to my limited Spanish ability. I did use MeetUp to attend some language exchanges, however I realised these weren’t particularly fruitful as most people were speaking in English most of the time, and I met a lot more other foreigners than Spaniards. This realisation is what made me focus my efforts on improving my Spanish as much as I could by myself, and is why I was able to manage 3+ hours of Spanish input daily. I did, however, have success meeting locals through the site Conversation Exchange, and I would highly recommend it for meeting others who are more serious about language learning.
I’m also glad that I followed a long self-imposed silent period, I don’t believe I had my first prolonged conversation till 900+ hours in. I’ve been told on more than one occasion that my accent sounds fairly native-like. Don’t get me wrong, I have no doubt that natives can tell I am not from Spain provided the conversation is anything more than very brief, however I’m still very content with what I’ve achieved so far.
Am I fluent?
I feel the estimated 1800 hours I have spent so far have been very fruitful. Progress could have been faster through CrossTalk, however it was difficult to find individuals willing to do this.
Overall, I would say I am conversationally fluent and could live in a Spanish-speaking country without issue. With that being said, I can’t say I’d feel confident working in a Spanish-speaking environment without potentially being a hindrance to others.
Could I get there eventually? I’ve no doubt I could, provided I continue to put in the hours.
The most important thing to mention is that you should enjoy the process. Once you’re several hundred hours deep, it can be difficult to remember a time when you didn’t have the foggiest idea about what was being said, even whilst watching videos for complete beginners. The process is gradual and there’s no big reward at the end — you sort of just take it all for granted when you’ve reached a high level. So remember to enjoy the journey!