The good news? Spanish is reputed to be one of the easiest languages for native English speakers to learn, and with over 500 million fluent speakers (50 million of whom live in the US), you'd have to be living in a cave to not bump into one of them fairly often.
According to an FSI study, i.e. the Foreign Service Institute, it should take a new learner approximately 600 classroom hours to achieve conversational fluency in Spanish. They also suggest an approximate 1:1 ratio between the time spent independently studying Spanish and the time spent in a classroom.
Although it may come as a surprise, English and Spanish are not so different, since both belong to the Indo-European language family, they are more similar than they may seem at first glance. The richness of the Spanish language is immense and for this very reason, the language can be difficult to learn.
Although Spanish is a Romance language rather than a Germanic language, it's fairly easy for English speakers to learn because many English words stem from Latin. Spanish also uses the same alphabet as English, and many of the words are pronounced just as they are spelled.
Verdict: Should You Use Duolingo To Learn Spanish? All in all, there's a lot to like about Duolingo. This Spanish learning app is free, there's a decent variety of drills and exercises, and the digital platform is top-notch.
Well, learning to speak Spanish, is a good idea for a handful of reasons: you can increase your chances of being able to work from anywhere in the world, more easily meet and date folks in countries where most people don't speak your native language and maybe even get to travel the world for free.
1. Mandarin. As mentioned before, Mandarin is unanimously considered the most difficult language to master in the world! Spoken by over a billion people in the world, the language can be extremely difficult for people whose native languages use the Latin writing system.
Speaking regularly is one of the fastest ways to learn Spanish without putting in too much effort. If you're not in Spain or Latin America, it can be difficult to find someone to practice speaking and comprehension with, but it's possible.
Colombia claims to have the clearest Spanish accent in the world, making it ideal for beginners.
Spanish is arguably somewhat easier for the first year or so of learning, in large part because beginners may struggle less with pronunciation than their French-studying colleagues. However, beginners in Spanish have to deal with dropped subject pronouns and four words for "you," while French only has two.
Based on US Foreign Service Institute (FSI) research, if you start out as a beginner and spend an average of one hour per day working actively on Spanish—such as with a teacher or conversation partner, as well as doing homework—then it can take 480 hours to reach conversational fluency.
We see this question a lot and the answer is: yes. Duolingo is a free language-learning platform, and every language and lesson is totally free!
Learning Spanish by Yourself is Entirely up to You
You need that level of persistence to learn Spanish by yourself. It's not impossible by any means. With the right tools at your disposal and a little extra motivation, you can learn in no time.
It is possible to learn Spanish in 3 months, but it is true that to fully master the language to a native level, you will need more time. An intensive Spanish course covering all levels (from A1 to C2) consists of 62 weeks (about 15 months in total).
Tamil (5000 years old) - Oldest Living Language of the World. Source Spoken by 78 million people and official language in Sri Lanka and Singapore, Tamil is the oldest language in the world. It is the only ancient language that has survived all the way to the modern world.
Sumerian can be considered the first language in the world, according to Mondly. The oldest proof of written Sumerian was found on the Kish tablet in today's Iraq, dating back to approximately 3500 BC.
As long as the reason you want to learn Spanish is compelling enough, you can do it at any age!
It does not matter how old you are, it is never too late to start learning a foreign language. Many language learners are put off by their advancing years; they believe age is a barrier to learning an entirely new language. However, this is not the case.