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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| StanLanguages Bilingual Tetraglot Newbie Poland Joined 3988 days ago 1 posts - 1 votes Speaks: French, Russian*, Polish*, English Studies: Spanish | Message 1 of 5 31 December 2013 at 1:11am | IP Logged | ||
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Hello,
I am a great believer in that everything is possible, so I set some language goals for the New Year. I chose Mandarin, Spanish and Arabic. I want to achieve basic fluency in these 3 languages by 2015. I already started with mandarin last month and with Spanish 2 months ago. Now I want to add Arabic. I plan to dedicate 4-6 hours a day for these languages. I am very dedicated. When I am not studying, I plan to watch movies and listen to music in these languages. I will also start reading as soon as I am able to. I would like to know is how “doable” you guys think, is learning 3 languages in a year. Edited by StanLanguages on 31 December 2013 at 1:13am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| culebrilla Senior Member United States Joined 4002 days ago 246 posts - 436 votes  Speaks: Spanish | Message 2 of 5 31 December 2013 at 2:26am | IP Logged | ||
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Anything is possible, but not everything is probable. Winning the Nobel Prize, becoming Miss Universe, and winning a gold medal in the 400 meter dash are all possible if one is a female but that is highly unlikely.
With that said, your goal to learn three languages to basic fluency in one year is very feasible. However, it depends what you define as "basic fluency." It also depends on what languages you are starting out with and how similar they are to your target languages; it appears that you are bilingual in Russian and Polish and speak English very well. How many hours of work did it take you to reach your definition of basic fluency in French or English? You have your answer there. Good luck. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| MixedUpCody Senior Member United States Joined 5261 days ago 144 posts - 280 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin | Message 3 of 5 31 December 2013 at 2:54am | IP Logged | ||
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Hey,
From your profile it appears that you are already a very experienced language learner, so you probably know what you can achieve in a given time frame. Assuming you do 6 hours a day, that would work out to 2 hours a day per language, which is 730 hours total per language. That is if you divide it evenly amongst your languages of course, and that might not be the most wise choice. 730 hours for Spanish would definitely be enough as that is around the total time for the DLI Spanish course. Chinese presents special challenges with the writing system, but if your only goal is spoken fluency than I think 730 hours would get you to a very conversational level. Arabic is probably going to be the most challenging because of the diglossia aspect. As I understand it, not many Arabs can converse at length in MSA, so if you just want to be conversational something like Egyptian may be a better bet. As culebrilla said, it really comes down to how you define fluency: it has been debated at length here and other places, and there is no real answer, but if you just want a 3000ish word vocabulary and a good knowledge of grammar that's common in speaking then 730 hours should be fine. Good luck! 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| maydayayday Pentaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5224 days ago 564 posts - 839 votes Speaks: English*, German, Italian, SpanishB2, FrenchB2 Studies: Arabic (Egyptian), Russian, Swedish, Turkish, Polish, Persian, Vietnamese Studies: Urdu | Message 4 of 5 31 December 2013 at 1:14pm | IP Logged | ||
If you persevere for a couple of hours each day you will have the Arabic Nashk script within a couple of weeks - it may take a further couple of weeks to get the hang of handwritten ruq'a script and from what I've experienced Arabs are astounded when any foreigner can say anything in Arabic - I can't imagine what will happen when
I aim for 25 to 30 vocab items per day so you could get your 9000 in 360 days.... good luck with that one! Keep us posted. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4538 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 5 of 5 31 December 2013 at 3:12pm | IP Logged | ||
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Well I don't want to sound negative, but I can't see how you could possibly learn both Arabic and Mandarin on 2-hours per day for a year. I guess it depends how you define basic fluency. If it's B1 then I guess it should be possible.
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