How long does it take to learn a new language?

This guy spoke 50 languages. lol

Kenneth Hale, a master of languages

From The Economist print edition

SOMETIMES Kenneth Hale was asked how long it would take him to learn a new language. He thought ten or 15 minutes would be enough to pick up the essentials if he were listening to a native speaker. After that he could probably converse; obviously not fluently, but enough to make himself understood. To those whose education, however admirable in other respects, had provided only rudimentary language skills, Mr Hale seemed a marvel.

And so he was. He had a gift. But he was also an academic, a teacher of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He was aware that many otherwise clever people are dunces at learning a second language. He sought to find laws and structures that could be applied to all languages. As well as studying the common languages, French, Spanish and so on, the search took him into many linguistic byways, to the languages of native Americans and Australian aborigines and the Celtic fringes of Europe.…

Unfortunately, not all of us are linguistics professors at MIT. =(

The U.S. Foreign Service Institute (FSI) developed a scale to measure language proficiency.

Level 1 Elementary
Level 2 Limited Working Proficiency
Level 3 Professional Working Proficiency
Level 4 Full Professional Proficiency
Level 5 Native or Bilingual

Here are the number of hours of training and practice it takes FSI students to speak a "hard" language:

360 hours for Level 1
720 hours for Level 2
1,320 hours for Level 3

FSI classifies a "hard" language as Chinese, Arabic, Polish, Russian, etc.

What's the point? Language learning is not easy for most of us. It's a serious undertaking.
If it was easy, then everyone would speak 50 different languages.

So, now you know how long it takes. 1,320 hours for Level 3. How many hours do you practice?