How long does it take? Part 1

Just for kicks, I did a bit of googling this morning on how long it takes to learn a foreign language.

Although I consider this sort of question something just barely north of pure entertainment, I did find some comments that seemed interesting and possibly even true.

After learning that first foreign language, no matter what it is, learning any other additional language is said to be much easier.

Learning a language similar to a language you already know is said to be made easier due to the similarity. Example groups of similar languages were Romance languages (Spanish, Romanian, French, Portuguese, Italian, etc.) and whatever grouping includes English and Dutch.

Estimates of the sheer number of hours of focused study vary pretty wildly for a variety of reasons.

So I got to thinking about the number of actual study hours I put in toward learning Spanish.

First off, I don't count time spent browsing language forums, blogging about Spanish, etc. But I do count the time I spend writing posts in Spanish, reading posts in Spanish, and such, because that is time spent actually in the target language.

I opened IDLE (an interactive Python programming thingy) and started adding up a few figures.

Pimsleur Spanish I-III contains a total of 90 half-hour lessons. (I don't count the "bonus" lesson in each set, because I don't use them.) That's 45 hours if one only went through each lesson once.

I've worked through each of the lessons in Spanish II and Spanish III at least two or three times, but seldom more than that. And I slogged through the Spanish I lessons over and over, because that's what it seemed to take to get them into my brain.

I believe I can safely say that I put 150 hours into Pimsleur and could easily put in another 50 for review of sets II and III at some point.

If I counted right, LSLC (through Nivel Dos) contains 72 roughly half-hour audio lessons and about an hour of video.

Assuming I zip through some of the LSLC lessons with relative ease due to Pimsleur having already made me familiar with the material, I'll estimate 100 hours of additional study with the audio lessons.

That puts me at 250 hours just working the audio lessons.