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As long as you want.

While that may seem like a flip response, it’s really not. The truth is is that how long it takes you to learn Spanish depends primarily on you and what your objectives are.

Using myself as an example, I’ve studied Spanish in five different countries, currently live in a Spanish-speaking country and also have a master’s degree in Spanish, and yet, under my own personal standard, I’m STILL learning Spanish. Every week I discover something new about Spanish or gain a new understanding on some particular aspect of the language that I didn’t grasp before. In fact, I plan to never stop learning Spanish. But that’s just me. I know that for many people their own personal standard will be different.

So, why do you want to learn Spanish? What would it take to make you happy with your Spanish level? Some people will be content if they learn enough Spanish to be able to flirt with pretty chicas or to maintain a five-minute conversation with their future mother-in-law.   Other people need a specific vocabulary or a specialized understanding of Spanish to communicate on the job with Spanish speaking customers or co-workers.  Others just dig the sound of Spanish and want to learn a few slang terms and phrases that they can use to impress people and inject into their conversations with native Spanish speakers. Then there are people like me who, for lack of a better term, are addicted and fascinated by the language and aspire to reach a level of native-like fluency. All of those objectives and goals are legitimate. There’s not one category of Spanish learner that is “better” or more important than the other.

So the question remains….What’s your motivation?

If you only want to learn Spanish for survival purposes, such as an upcoming trip (Dos cervezas, por favor) or a visit from your Spanish speaking in-laws, you can learn a fair amount of Spanish in a matter of days or weeks. In terms of pronunciation, sentence structure and grammar, Spanish is a pretty straightforward language, making it relatively easy to learn the basics for someone who is motivated. However, if you need to learn Spanish to function in a job where speaking it well is a professional asset, it will obviously take several months to become comfortably proficient and probably years to reach a level of fluency where you can use the language as nimbly as a native Spanish speaker.

Just to give you an idea, at the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center that trains U.S. military and other government officials in foreign languages, it takes 25 weeks of intensive instruction (minimum 6 hours a day) to go from zero knowledge of Spanish to an advanced level.

Come back here next week where I will start breaking down for you the differences between beginner, intermediate and advanced levels and the skills you need to develop in order to move up the Spanish learning ladder.

¡Hasta pronto!

Eleena

Eleena also blogs about the Spanish language over at Voices en Español, a bilingual blog and Spanish language podcast.

Making mistakes. It’s something that many of us learning a second language hate to do. We don’t want to sound stupid, or worse, seem stupid. For many of us, we grow up receiving a mixed message from our parents, our teachers and basically our society, and that message is: Making mistakes are a fact of life but we should avoid making them at all costs.

Most of us can’t help it. We want to be perfect. When speaking Spanish, we want to speak it as fluently as we speak English (or French, German, Dutch, Japanese) or whatever our first language is. But the truth is is that we’ll never get to that level of fluency until we risk something and that means looking and sounding like an idiot from time to time.

Once at a party in Madrid, I was talking to a new mom about her baby and I kept saying pañuelos when I should’ve been saying pañales. Finally the mom, unable to take it anymore, said to me in Spanish, “Quieres decir pañales.” ¡Qué vergueñza! (How embarrassing!) But that one experience cemented in my brain the two words and I know I will never use them incorrectly again.

Don’t beat yourself up if you don’t have the precise vocabulary to express what you’re thinking. Talk around it or talk through it and use the vocabulary you already have. Let’s say you’re telling a Spanish-speaking friend about your job. In the middle of recounting the story, you suddenly realize you forget how to say the word “boss” in Spanish. Instead of freezing, keep going and talk your way through it. Although you may not know or remember the exact word for boss (jefe), you probably know how to say “la persona para quien trabajo.” Hey, it’s not concise but it gets the job done!

So the next time you feel the urge to zip it when you’re not 100% sure how to say something in Spanish, déjate llevar (go with the flow), and go ahead and say what’s on the tip of your tongue. It may be that you’re not as far off base as you think. And in the worst case scenario you make a mistake, but you will definitely learn from the experience, even if it is something as simple as the difference between a scarf (pañuelo) and a diaper (pañal).

Have you ever made a whopper of a mistake in Spanish? What was it? Do you get uptight about making mistakes when speaking Spanish? What helps you get past that anxiety? Tell us your story in the comments section below.

-by Eleena de Lisser

Eleena also writes about the Spanish language at her bilingual blog “Voices en Español.”