How long does it take to learn Spanish?
The short answer is a range, and it depends on what you mean by learn. Here are the numbers that exist, what they are worth, and the three things you can do to change them.
The one measured figure
The US Foreign Service Institute trains diplomats to work in other languages. On its training page, Spanish is in the easiest group for English speakers: about 30 weeks and 600 to 750 class hours to reach professional working proficiency in speaking and reading.
That is the only widely cited estimate with a method behind it. Two things about it matter before you use it.
The students are full-time. Five or six hours of class a day, homework on top, in small groups with a teacher, for six months. Those are dense hours.
The goal is high. Professional working proficiency means holding a meeting in Spanish. It is well past ordering lunch. Most people who ask this question want something well short of it: following a conversation, reading the news, watching a series without subtitles.
What 600 hours means at your pace
Nobody outside a language school does six hours a day. Here is the same 600 hours at ordinary paces, as plain arithmetic.
| Practice a day | Time to 600 hours |
|---|---|
| 15 minutes | about 6 and a half years |
| 30 minutes | about 3 years and 4 months |
| 1 hour | about 20 months |
| 2 hours | about 10 months |
These are not predictions. A class hour with a teacher and an app minute on the bus are not the same unit, and the goal is one you may not need. But from the table you can see one useful thing: why most people feel they have little to show after a year of fifteen minutes a day. Ninety hours is ninety hours.
How long to become fluent in Spanish
Fluent is the word most people use for the goal, and there are two very different targets behind it. If you mean holding your own in a meeting or a heated dinner, that is close to the professional level in the table: hundreds of hours. If you mean following a conversation among friends and joining in, most learners get there well before, because you need only a few words for everyday speech, and you learn them early. With How to become fluent in Spanish you can name which one you mean, and only then is the estimate useful.
How long with Duolingo, or any app
People ask this separately because they have already put in the time and have less to show than the numbers in the table. Two reasons, and neither is a lack of talent.
The first is what the minutes contain. Researchers who compare ways of practising keep finding the same thing: you recall an answer better later if you produce it from memory than if you recognise it among options. In Rowland’s 2014 review of the published experiments, the benefits were larger for recall-format tests than recognition-format ones. Kang, McDermott and Roediger found short-answer practice was better than multiple choice when learners saw the correct answer afterwards. A lesson made mostly of tapping the right tile is real minutes, but you get less from each minute.
The second is timing. Whatever you learn, you forget on a curve; Murre and Dros replicated Ebbinghaus’s original measurement in 2015 and got the same shape. A word you came across once and never saw again is mostly gone in a week. On a course with a fixed path and review at no particular time, you forget a lot of it. Cepeda and colleagues went through 317 experiments and found spaced practice is better than massed practice, and the best gap grows as you want the memory to last longer.
So the answer to “how long with an app” depends on whether you produce the words in the app and whether each one comes up again before you forget it. If you get both, your minutes count close to full. If you get neither, divide by something.
What actually shortens it
Three things, in order of how much they matter.
Produce, do not pick. Type the word, say the sentence, write the line. If you never produce a word from nothing in your app, add something where you do.
Let something track the timing for you. Reviewing everything every day is not possible past a few hundred words. On a memory schedule, each word comes up again near the point you would lose it, and your vocabulary grows. Without one, it churns. What that schedule can and cannot promise is in our spaced repetition guide.
Read and listen to real Spanish early. The words that matter most are the ones that show up most, and you come across them fastest in text and speech made for adults. How to do that before you feel ready is in Reading is how you build vocabulary.
Set a checkpoint
Pick one thing you cannot do yet: follow a two-minute news clip, read one article, hold a five-minute chat. Try it now and note where it broke. Practise for six weeks. Try it again.
Then you have a number for your goal at your pace. It will be more accurate than any table, including this one.