Commonly repeated misconception. There is no way in h anyone learns Spanish in 480 hours. The number you are looking for is 575-600 class room hours which conveniently ignores this is 24 weeks with 7 hours of homework per week. Under nearly ideal circumstances where one's life is dedicated to the task. So starting point for consideration with self study is over 768 hours to reach a Spanish level you'll be moderately pleased with.
My view is that 800ish hours is the first point where you start to get a bit of reward for having studied the language & likely can keep your ability long term without forgetting it all. But it is more of a starting point for study if trying to get fluent/highly functional/professional.
Your numbers are not true. Or, are true only if you demand some very high level of knowledge.
I sux at learning foreign languages and did learned enough to converse and communicate everything needed with less then 480hours of learning. That was years ago, before Neflix and internet were available. And the other kids in the same school learned more then I did.
Moreover, English is quite close to Spanish, so any English speaker should learn much much faster. Many words are for free.
> Under nearly ideal circumstances where one's life is dedicated to the task.
It definitely was not and I would not even consider it ideal.
> So starting point for consideration with self study is over 768 hours to reach a Spanish level you'll be moderately pleased with.
Only if you have some kind of super great expectation.
To make sure we're on the same page, at the level you describe, were you able to confidently watch YouTube videos on non-fiction topics like documentaries and generally always understand? Or for example dramas? Just checking because being able to produce language without matching listening skills to understand everything they say back is a kind of popular YouTube fake polyglot thing these days sadly, and listening is the most unfakeable skill of them all. No technique on earth can shortcut building the robust neural connections needed to instantaneous interpret unmodified native speech.
Documentaries yes, those are the easiest content to watch. Youtube did not existed and in general getting your hands on videos was hard.
I was able to communicate with French tho. We traveled there and everyone lived in host family for over a week. There was no issue communicating with French, whether adults or peers. Most books were unpleasant to read, but I generally understood most of the normal ones. It just took too much effort and there were some paragraphs I did not understood here or there.
Also, movies are much harder to understand then real people. I did not had any issue conversing with Americans for literally years and still can't understand movies fully. Maybe if you learn from movies entirely and watch them all the time it is different, but if the goal is actual communication it is not necessary benchmark.
The issue here is that you or many people put absurdly high requirements as a benchmark for "knowing language" or "knowing enough to be useful" for the sake of an argument. Like dramas - they use weird vocabulary, phrasing and sentence structure. You can literally discuss philosophy in a language and still not understand that.
From the wikipedia on the Foreign Service Institute:
FSI provides more than 800 courses—including up to 70 foreign languages—to more than 225,000 enrollees a year from the U.S. Department of State and more than 50 other government agencies and the military service branches.[3]
I think I'm going to take their estimate over yours.
My view is that 800ish hours is the first point where you start to get a bit of reward for having studied the language & likely can keep your ability long term without forgetting it all. But it is more of a starting point for study if trying to get fluent/highly functional/professional.