Does it take 10,000 hours to learn a new language?

10,000 hrs is a full time job for 5 years! Does this mean I will never be able to learn Italian or any other foreign language? Am i doomed now? But wait, I have learned English to a pretty fluent level and I don’t think I spent 10,000 hours before I was able to have conversations and be reasonably good at it. I felt like there is something funky going on, something didn’t add up. I started to dig into it, partially to help with my motivation, partially out of pure curiosity. Here is what I found - listen to the episode to hear it all  If you want to find out more about my method of learning a language effectively as a busy adult, that’s called FLR - https://lgelena.com/ My Instagram page - https://www.instagram.com/language.guide.elena/