AcademiaNut wrote: Admittedly I was short on study time, I was studying too many languages at once, and I didn't know the best way to study language, but still, I don't want to go through that again. This time, if I go ahead with language learning again as I would like to do, I want to learn a language right, meaning with good teachers who know what the heck they're doing, good learning material, and foundations of English grammar and a phonetic alphabet already in place.
There is more. Despite what language learning books say in their titles, and despite what FSI claims, it takes a long time to learn a language, even to get to conversational level, even for Spanish, which is considered a Group 1 language, meaning one of the easiest to learn.
Group 1? An easy one? Please don't believe. That designation should be considered pragmatically. For tourism, maybe 1 year will do a nice job, yes, but to read Garcia Marquez or Vargas Llosa? no way Jose.
AcademiaNut wrote: The most realistic estimate I've seen for reaching the level of conversational Spanish, taking into account the reality behind all the hype, is 8-12 months.
It depends what you mean by conversational and to whom you might want to speak to. Consider that though there is standard Spanish that all educated people speak, every latino country have their own twist. My wife studied in Spain and have Spanish teaching degree, but when she met my family and siblings ... ooph!! What are they talking about?! Sometimes I had to translate. Dominicans speak very fast, dropping ss, exchanging r-l consonants, and on top of that with adagios. Argentinians, Peruvians, Mexicans, Cubans, Espanoles, etc. all have their own special lingo. So, define your goal and target population and you will see the length of the journey.
AcademiaNut wrote: A working professional at my level would normally be making at least $100,000 per year, so we're talking about spending a year of time, or at least $100,000, just for me to learn Spanish. (I'm not making *anywhere* near that much money, but that's beside the point.) Is knowing how to speak Spanish worth that much time or money to me? Objectively, no, not even close, but in practice, because I'm so interested in languages, have an emotional attachment to a few of them (including Spanish), love intellectual challenges, and work so few hours per week currently, I would like to go ahead with learning Spanish anyway (and preferably 1-3 additional languages, eventually). That is why I need to determine the extent of my goals, especially with the task of tackling the effectively infinite amount of words in any given language. The higher my aspirations, the more months of time and more thousands of dollars I will be theoretically spending to reach those goals. At lot is at stake, and a 1% increase in vocabulary limitation could equate to thousands of more dollars of required investment, so careful planning is the wise thing to do, at least at my age and in my current situation. I need to put a practical limit on my aspirations so that I don't encounter my earlier problem of overambition. Your situation and the situation of other readers could be completely different, in which case this thread may be of little or no interest to you, which is fine.
I am studying Italian. I believe that if I just want to have small talks the 50+ most common verbs will do the job. But if I want to read the news, that will NOT do. I need the 500+ on top of a bunch of expressions NEVER used in small talk. The learning goal defines the mountain height. Why do you want to learn Spanish? Your answer is fundamental.