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La clase dura una hora.

La clase dura una hora.
The class lasts one hour.
From Lesson 261:Delay and duration (tardar en)·Spanish (Latin America)

Breakdown of La clase dura una hora.

la clase
the class
la hora
the hour
durar
to last

Questions & Answers about La clase dura una hora.

This lesson is about tardar, so why does this sentence use dura?
Durar means "to last" and focuses on how long an event itself continues. Tardar means "to take time" and focuses on how long it takes someone or something to complete an action. Since the class is an event continuing for an hour, we use durar.
Could I say La clase tarda una hora to mean the same thing?
No, that would sound unnatural. You use tardar to talk about the time it takes to do something, usually followed by en and an infinitive. You could say La clase tarda una hora en empezar (The class takes an hour to start), but to just say it lasts an hour, you need durar.
Why isn't it dura por una hora?
With the verb durar (to last), the time period is stated directly. Adding por sounds like a literal translation of "for one hour" from English, but in Spanish, durar doesn't need a preposition to show duration.
I've seen dura used to mean "hard." How do I know which meaning it has here?
Sentence structure is your clue! As an adjective, dura means "hard" or "difficult" and would describe a noun (like una clase dura). Here, dura is placed exactly where the main verb belongs, so it must be the verb durar (to last) conjugated for la clase.

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