It all depends on the characters you use, as this changes the number of combinations you have. Assuming 8 characters:
Dictionary word:
egrep "^.{8}$" /usr/share/dict/words | wc -l
15601
Lower case letters: 268 or 208827064576
Lower and upper case letters: 528 or 53459728531456
Lower, upper and numbers: 628 or 218340105584896
Add punctuation and other symbols and brute forcing is going to take some time.
Those numbers are the total combinations that are going to have to be tried. Obviously, a hacker isn't going to try every combination after they've got the password, so divide by two to get the average number of combinations required.
Harder hashes result in longer cpu time to calculate the hash, so the total time is longer. An example from john:
Benchmarking: Traditional DES [64/64 BS]... DONE
Many salts: 819187 c/s real, 828901 c/s virtual
Only one salt: 874717 c/s real, 877462 c/s virtual
Benchmarking: BSDI DES (x725) [64/64 BS]... DONE
Many salts: 29986 c/s real, 30581 c/s virtual
Only one salt: 29952 c/s real, 30055 c/s virtual
Benchmarking: FreeBSD MD5 [32/64 X2]... DONE
Raw: 8761 c/s real, 8796 c/s virtual
Benchmarking: OpenBSD Blowfish (x32) [32/64]... DONE
Raw: 354 c/s real, 356 c/s virtual
Benchmarking: Kerberos AFS DES [48/64 4K]... DONE
Short: 294507 c/s real, 295754 c/s virtual
Long: 858582 c/s real, 863887 c/s virtual
Benchmarking: NT LM DES [64/64 BS]... DONE
Raw: 6379K c/s real, 6428K c/s virtual
Benchmarking: NT MD4 [Generic 1x]... DONE
Raw: 7270K c/s real, 7979K c/s virtual
Benchmarking: M$ Cache Hash [Generic 1x]... DONE
Many salts: 12201K c/s real, 12662K c/s virtual
Only one salt: 4862K c/s real, 4870K c/s virtual
Benchmarking: LM C/R DES [netlm]... DONE
Many salts: 358487 c/s real, 358487 c/s virtual
Only one salt: 348363 c/s real, 348943 c/s virtual
Benchmarking: NTLMv1 C/R MD4 DES [netntlm]... DONE
Many salts: 510255 c/s real, 512124 c/s virtual
Only one salt: 488277 c/s real, 489416 c/s virtual
Of course this is all completely academic, because hackers will just phone up your secretary telling them that they are from IT and they need their password for something and your strong password is worthless.