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Roadmap to Spanish Fluency

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  1. 🏠 SETTING YOUR MINDSET
    How to learn Spanish in 3 hours
    5 Temas
  2. Sit back, relax and learn
    4 Temas
  3. Harry Potter and the boring grammar book
    5 Temas
  4. The "Spanish is like a cake" methaphore
    5 Temas
  5. I don't give a s*** about your Spanish level
    5 Temas
  6. 📈 DESIGNING YOUR WORK PLAN
    De-constructing spanish
    2 Temas
  7. Dreaming big is hurting your spanish
  8. Your daily spanish work
  9. Your work against you
  10. 🧠 LEARNING HOW TO LEARN
    The Golden Rule to Learn Languages
  11. How to avoid forgetting your spanish
  12. The "two buckets" theory
  13. How to memorize thousands of words with no effort
  14. 📺 UNDERSTANDING SPANISH
    Improving your Listening skills
  15. Improving your reading skills
  16. Resources to Listen and Read
  17. 💬 CREATING SPANISH
    Improving your Speaking skills
  18. Improving your Writing skills
  19. Improving your Fluency skills
  20. Resources to Speak, Write and Think in spanish
  21. 🏅 REACHING A NATIVE LEVEL
    Improving your pronunciation
  22. Improving your vocabulary
  23. Resources for your pronunciation and vocabulary
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When you say you want to learn Spanish, then I assume you want to eventually become fluent.

Everyone seems to have their own definition of what fluency really means, but it can generally be boiled down to two different levels:

Conversational Fluency

  • You can understand about 95% of what you hear or read about everyday topics. For more complex or technical subjects, you don’t understand as much but you can still get the gist of what’s going on.
  • You can comfortably hold a 1-on-1 conversation at a normal speaking pace and you can usually get your ideas across regarding a variety of topics without having to repeat yourself or stop to think too much.
  • Your pronunciation is clear and accurate, and you’re easily understood by native speakers.

Native-level Fluency

  • You can understand 99-100% of anything you hear or read, regardless of subject matter. This includes all jokes and cultural expressions.
  • You can express yourself spontaneously and precisely in complex situations involving groups of native speakers. You can accurately communicate emotions and subtle shades of meaning.
  • Your pronunciation is perfect. You can hold a 2-hour conversation with a native speaker and afterwards they wouldn’t be able to tell that you didn’t learn the language from birth.

In my opinion, the majority of people wanting to learn Spanish should aim for “conversational fluency” because it is very achievable for everyone.

Frankly, most people are never going to reach “native-level fluency” because it takes exponentially more work to get there, and the added benefits of which may not be worth it.

Time/Effort over Results on Conversational VS Native level

Best-selling author and polyglot Tim Ferris puts it this way:

To understand 95% of a language and become conversationally fluent may require months of applied learning; to reach the 98% threshold could require 10 years. There is a point of diminishing returns where, for most people, it makes more sense to acquire more languages (or other skills) vs. add a 1% improvement per 5 years.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with trying to become fluent at a native level.  But as a beginner, aiming for a more achievable goal puts less pressure on yourself and can save you a lot of frustration.

So when it comes to the question of how long does it take to learn Spanish, we’re talking about becoming conversationally fluent.