How long did it take you to learn spanish reddit

TLDR at the bottom if you don't want to read the wall of text!

Hola, I have been learning Spanish with my public school for around a year. This is just my experience and I don't think my education so far has been the most intensive so you could likely achieve better results than me if you try. After a year of learning the language I would describe my knowledge as "basic." I have most of the basic rules of grammar and more important phrases memorized and I feel if I was in a Spanish speaking country I could communicate well enough to cover basic things, provided the person I was speaking to was patient with me. However, this is just speculation. I was lucky enough to have a native speaker teaching alongside my main teacher, and I can say that if I was speaking to a native speaker and they weren't purposefully slowing down their speech it would still be hard for me to communicate with them. So I would say that while you shouldn't expect a very advanced command of the language after only a year, you can certainly get a basic-intermediate understanding that would mean you aren't completely lost when trying to communicate with a Spanish speaker. But realistically you can't expect a uniform amount of time to reach a certain goal, it ultimately depends more on your conviction to learning, how often and how effectively you practice, and your own personal talent with learning languages.

For "how many words a day" you should be learning, I don't really have a specific target for this. More experienced learners might be able to answer this. The two important things to focus on would be finding a good curriculum (from a good tutor to an app like Duolingo) and spending time practicing, which doesn't always mean learning new words. You should be spending at least as much time practicing the words you already know as learning new ones.

TL;DR: You certainly can get some of the most important areas of the language covered in one year. I wouldn't expect more than a early intermediate knowledge of the language even if you practice a lot. Learning a language ultimately takes time and it depends on your personal conviction as a learner. I'd worry less about the amount of words you're learning per day than finding a good curriculum and spending enough time practicing. Hope this helps!

Honestly dude to have full conversations and be able to joke like I would in English. It took years. And the biggest discovery I made was that we all learned our native language by listening, to speaking, to writing, then reading. But many people learn their second language through reading and writing first. So they end up learning a lot of grammar and understand the construction but couldn't tell me their favorite movie in Spanish. Or watch a tv show in Spanish.

And this is because words in connected speech and words in isolation don't always match. In my American English accent the word "Don't" has an audible "t" sound at the end. But in the sentence "I don't care" there isn't an audible "t" sound. Or in the words "Black Coffee" there is a "K" at the end of black that makes the "kuh" sound. And a "C" at the beginning of "Coffee" that makes a "kuh" sound. But there aren't two "kuh" sounds in the word "Black Coffee" they share that "kuh" so it's like "Blackoffee". This is something that wasn't taught to me as a kid, I learned from listening and mimicking. And when you don't focus on listening or you try to read the word in your head instead of mimicking the sounds you hear, it's so much harder.

I realized, if they don't teach it to natives in Spanish speaking schools then it doesn't need to be explicitly studied. That means that the patterns happen regularly enough for you to learn them. Like in English, there is a specific order of how you put adjectives before a noun if there is more than one. Opinion, Size, Physical quality, Age, Shape, Color, Origin, Material, and Purpose. But I never learned that in American school because implicitly you learn this pattern.

So find content that you enjoy and know about so it could be skateboarding, anime, cooking, sports, video games, movies. And listen and copy what people say. And use the little you know every day. And build your vocabulary naturally this way.

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How many years does it take to become fluent in Spanish Reddit?