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Fastest to ever learn a foreign language? | ||
Tags: Fluency | Time to learn | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| robsolete Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5387 days ago 191 posts - 428 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French, Russian, Arabic (Written), Mandarin | Message 9 of 36 24 March 2010 at 10:40pm | IP Logged | |||||
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It would be fun to get a bunch of polyglots together and have everyone write a language on a piece of paper and put it in a hat. Then mix it up, everyone draws a language and random, and has to race for one month to learn as much as possible. Then reconvene and see who can express themselves the best in whatever language at one month.
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| datsunking1 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5587 days ago 1014 posts - 1533 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: German, Russian, Dutch, French | Message 10 of 36 25 March 2010 at 12:14am | IP Logged | |||||
that would be so cool. better yet, lets form a polyglot island! How cool would it be to wake up and greet your neighbor everyday in a different language? The bathroom doors would be COVERED in words for "Male" "Female" and "restroom" :D There would be 60 newspapers in different languages! Television... don't even get me started!! :D 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5383 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 11 of 36 25 March 2010 at 12:22am | IP Logged | |||||
Unfortunately, my job doesn't require that I actually have legs, so... not a good enough reason. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| ruskivyetr Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5483 days ago 769 posts - 962 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Russian, Polish, Modern Hebrew | Message 12 of 36 25 March 2010 at 12:33am | IP Logged | |||||
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I'd love to take a month during the Summer or something and just study my brains out
(outside of course, I don't want to be an unhealthy slug :). Perhaps I will do that with Russian this summer. This girl did the same thing with Ukrainian and the difficulty for Ukrainian isn't that much harder than Russian. It is actually harder resource wise. Hmm. I'd choose another language to do that with as well :). 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| irrationale Tetraglot Senior Member China Joined 6052 days ago 669 posts - 1023 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Tagalog Studies: Ancient Greek, Japanese | Message 13 of 36 25 March 2010 at 3:25am | IP Logged | |||||
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I see 3 months being a minimum for the average person, assuming the maximum of all factors besides raw ability. Tammet was not at advanced fluency, and his incredible abilities notwithstanding, already knew 10 or more languages ( European languages included) at the time of his challenge, and had a constant full time tutor. It was still an amazing achievement. Edited by irrationale on 25 March 2010 at 3:25am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| doviende Diglot Senior Member Canada languagefixatio Joined 5988 days ago 533 posts - 1245 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Hindi, Swedish, Portuguese | Message 14 of 36 25 March 2010 at 3:47am | IP Logged | |||||
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The problem for me is usually getting materials. I'd love to devote a few months to doing nothing but learning Punjabi, for example, but there are very very few learning materials. Ideally I want to have at least one full-length audiobook with text. I've found some novels in Punjabi at the central library here in Vancouver, but I've never heard of any audiobooks, so I might have just pay some people to read a book for me, and record it ;)
Beyond the challenge of having enough materials, there's a motivational challenge. You're going to have to have even more materials available in case you get tired of just one source, which will probably be the case if you actually spent 10 hours a day working on it. For the past week I've been pushing myself and have averaged maybe 3 - 3.5 hours per day, and I could see myself going a bit higher, but it would be an extreme challenge to try and concentrate on a language full-time for 3 months in a row. If I think about what I can accomplish in 9 months doing 3 hours per day, and then chop that down to 3 months by doing 9 hours per day, then I'm quite willing to believe that truly tremendous results could be achieved as long as you could actually follow through with a big commitment like that. This is mostly a test of your ability to do single-minded devotion to a task over a long period. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5383 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 15 of 36 25 March 2010 at 4:09am | IP Logged | |||||
I don't think the math is quite that simple. Some things actually do take 9 months for the brain to process and you can't simply squeeze into 3 months.
Hmm... probably. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| doviende Diglot Senior Member Canada languagefixatio Joined 5988 days ago 533 posts - 1245 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Hindi, Swedish, Portuguese | Message 16 of 36 25 March 2010 at 4:30am | IP Logged | |||||
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I think there may be some things that will be enhanced by continuing your activities over 9 months instead of 3 months, such as long term memory retention, but I think that this requires less and less maintenance as time goes on, so it wouldn't require the full (crazy) amount of effort over the 9 months (or however long).
Also, I think there would be numerous benefits in doing it in a shorter timespan. I think that doing 3 hours of work in a single day gives you more than 3x the benefit of doing only 1 hour of work. If I do only 1 hour of work, then I learn some things...but if I do 3 hours of work, then my head will be buzzing with the language, and I'll probably dream about the language too, and then when I wake up the next morning my first thoughts will be in the language. Random sentences will bubble up into my consciousness. To me this indicates that somewhere after 1 hour of work, my brain is deciding that this task is really important, and it should continue processing long after I stop doing the activity. I've never actually put in more than 3 or 4 hours in a day before, so I have no idea what would happen if I did something like 9 hours of study. I suspect that there's an optimal amount of "active" study, and then you need a certain number of hours of "rest" in between for the stuff to get organized. Maybe a nap every 3 hours ;) I think when you do it in a shorter timespan, you also have more opportunities to connect little bits and pieces that may not be remembered in the longer term. Little things that you notice, like similarities between words, or which words are always near a new word that you don't know. I think you would learn more from natural context if you spent more overall time during the day. This is probably connected to what the L-R enthusiasts have said about greatly increased benefits if you do 3hrs of L-R instead of 1 hour. 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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