How much fluent should I be if I reached passive upper intermediate level and then had 365 hours of speaking?

Hello everyone

How much fluent should I be if I reached passive upper intermediate level and then had 365 hours of speaking?

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Hard to say - everyone is different…But if you are learning a language similar to yours and speak 365 hours, you should be OK I think. Not fluent, but conversational.

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I suppose it would depend on the language, but generally, 365 hours of speaking is an INSANE amount of speaking. I would expect you to be incredible AND fluent if you hit that many words of passive vocabulary (ie what you can understand) and then spent that much time actually practicing it.

Think of it: that would like being in the country for 46 days and speaking the language for 8 hours a day straight like it was your job, with no breaks.

I’ve just recently reached Advanced Level 4 on LingQ, consider myself a solid B2 on the European Framework scale and have just about hit only 70 hours of speaking.

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Thank you my friend.

Do you mean you reached a solid B2 on the European Framework scale in terms of speaking with 70 hours of speaking?
This point was not clear to me so, if you could clarify it that will be big help to me.

Thank you my friend!

What I meant was that overall, I consider myself a “fluent Spanish speaker” judging by the criteria spelled out in the European Framework scale and what might be called common sense. I am able to coverse comfortably back and forth with native speakers on a wide variety of subjects that cross my path in work, my personal life, and regarding the interesting areas I seek out (telenovelas, the news, political lectures/speeches, nonfiction books of interest, etc.) Yet, over the course of 1,500 hours of Spanish study/work/exposure, only about 70 of those hours have been spent speaking. If I went to Spain and had more than 8.5 hours of conversation over 46 days (365 hours total), I think my Spanish would be amazing and I’d break into the C-Levels on the European Framework with all that practice.

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t_harangi could you please provide us your opinion, I have high appreciation of your knowledge in learning languages.

You have truly helped me understand the whole story. Thank you very much my friend. I am honored by your help.

Do you think should I go for European Spanish or Latino Spanish?
I am interested in both places, Spain and Latin America.

I actually disagree with this, 365 hours of speaking is not an insane amount of speaking, at least for some languages (I am learning Mandarin Chinese).

I have spoken almost 186 hours of Mandarin Chinese, and I still feel that my speaking is far from fluent. I am expecting to need to reach 750-1000 to feel comfortable in day-to-day conversation, and probably 3000+ to be truly fluent.

However, keep in mind that it all depends on what you want to do with the language. I want my Mandarin Chinese to be as close to my native language (English) as possible. So take my crazy thoughts with a grain of salt if you aren’t planning on going that far :wink:

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No problem. You are welcome.

I don’t think it matters whether you choose the European/“Castillian” or Latin American style of Spanish because, in truth, there’s not that much difference. And though I am a speaker of the Spain-version, the majority of my listening has been done through telenovelas from Mexico.

In my experience, except for some occaisional vocab words here and there, the only practical difference is the way the letter “c” before a vowel and the letter “z” are pronounced. The informal plural of the “you” form of the language is vosotros, which Spaniards use, but I as a speaker of the Castillian variant almost never use. Reason: I seldom encounter people I speak the informal “tu” form with, let alone a small group of such people that would require it. Speakers of Latin American varieties never use vosotros forms of the verb, but they can at least understand it when presented to them. So, as long as you can understand it when you see it, for example, when watching a TV show or movie from Spain, you’ll be fine.

So, in summary, do whatever variant you want, especially since your learning content will come in both styles, which matters even less when reading. If you plan on living or traveling extensively in a particular region, then I’d say you might as well pick that version. But outside of that possibility, just pick whichever version you like best.

So, yeah, as LILinguist pointed out, 365 hours of speaking – one hour each day for an entire year – is a lot more than most students get to do. And I like that you’ve provided another criteria, the passive upper intermediate level, which assumes that you’d be doing reading and listening and / or some other form of structured study while aiming for 365 hrs of speaking.

But, if one had the opportunity to do that much speaking and they spent ample time on LingQ, my guess would be that their known word count would be in the advanced levels here – above upper intermediate – because their speaking would be pushing word recognition faster while reading. (The other factor here is that most people who get to do that much speaking are living “in country” meaning they’re also heavily immersed and constantly soaking up words, even when not speaking.)

In any case, the combination you have outlined would probably get you at least into a functionally fluent category in most languages.

I say that speaking is the result of lots of reading and listening. Houra is not the best metric for fluency. However, getting lots of words are a better metric than hours. A more tangible and applicable approach is a better metric to measure fluency. I go further in my blog post.
https://learnlanguageslive.weebly.com/methods/what-is-the-problem-of-the-fsi-on-viewing-hours-as-a-metric-for-language-fluency

lang101e, I see you are responding to a thread posted a year ago in order to promote your own website - I realise your profile shows you’ve been a member here since 2017.

In fact, you only started posting on LingQ a week ago, purely to promote your own website.

Wouldn’t it be better to simply create a brand new thread promoting your own website? You might get lots of interest from language learners that way ^

Hm. That is not a bad idea. I think it could work. We are part of a community after all. Thank you for the advice!