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Minutes a day / hours a week to maintain | ||
Tags: Maintaining Languages | Time to learn | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| outcast Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member China Joined 4947 days ago 869 posts - 1364 votes  Speaks: Spanish*, English*, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 1 of 28 05 August 2013 at 3:20am | IP Logged | ||
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There are many variables here, but for the purposes here how many minutes a day / hours
a week do you believe one needs to keep the level of: a) basic fluency (B1-B2) b) advanced fluency (solid C1) Do you think these levels require different amount of time to maintain? Do you think a language radically different from your mother tongue would require yet additional time? Or does a very closely related language perhaps require more time in order to prevent interference from setting in? Finally, do to time constraints, which two of the four major skills would you prioritize or be most effective in keeping your level: Reading, Writing, Listening, Speech. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4705 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 2 of 28 05 August 2013 at 6:57am | IP Logged | ||
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I don't need to maintain French or German at
all. I forget languages I know poorly. The more you know the less maintenance you need. Can't give a number. When I get home from this trip I am going to revive my Romanian. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| casamata Senior Member Joined 4260 days ago 237 posts - 377 votes Studies: Portuguese | Message 3 of 28 06 August 2013 at 1:29am | IP Logged | ||
I would say that the more you know, the harder it is (the more time required) to maintain. Personally, it takes me about 50 minutes a day to maintain a C2 level. If I were at a B1 level, I could probably get by with 30 minutes or so a day. Maintenance is a bitch. There are so many words that I forget without daily, intense practice. Look at it this way: for an olympian 5K-marathon runner to maintain their world-class level, they need to be training 100-120 miles per week WITH cross-training. But to be better than an average division 1 college runner, they could probably get by with 15 miles per week in the 5K and perhaps 30 miles per week in the marathon. A very unrelated language would logically take more time to maintain. Let's say that you are a native Italian speaker and want to maintain your French or Spanish. Since the languages are relatively similar, you are kind of "practicing" French and Spanish when you speak Italian due to word similarity and sentence structure. If you were a violin and viola player, how hard would it be to pick up the viola again if you had only played the violin in the last year? Hard, yes. But much easier than the person that plays the violin and the drums. The violin and viola are VERY similar instruments, kind of like very related languages in the same language family. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Wulfgar Senior Member United States Joined 4669 days ago 404 posts - 791 votes Speaks: English* | Message 4 of 28 06 August 2013 at 9:29am | IP Logged | ||
The opposite is true for me. a) basic fluency (B1-B2) - 30 min/day b) advanced fluency (solid C1) 0 min/day (A1/A2 - not worth maintaining) Do you think these levels require different amount of time to maintain? yes Do you think a language radically different from your mother tongue would require yet additional time? no Or does a very closely related language perhaps require more time in order to prevent interference from setting in? no Finally, do to time constraints, which two of the four major skills would you prioritize or be most effective in keeping your level: Reading, Writing, Listening, Speech. - balanced is best, assuming your skills are balanced 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cabaire Senior Member Germany Joined 5597 days ago 725 posts - 1352 votes | Message 5 of 28 06 August 2013 at 3:23pm | IP Logged | ||
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I can support Wulfgar's experiences:
In advanced languages like French, wherein I have read amounts of books in my life, I can pause half a year doing nothing, but then take a book and start reading without noticeable loss. Passive skills are very stable, only speaking becomes a bit rusty, but this is nothing permanent. Whereas in languages, where I have only finished language courses, the loss is drastic, I have go begin nearly from scratch when I have paused too long. Conclusion: The poorer your skills, the more often you have to do maintenance work. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| aloysius Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6238 days ago 226 posts - 291 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, German Studies: French, Greek, Italian, Russian | Message 6 of 28 06 August 2013 at 3:49pm | IP Logged | ||
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In the interesting thread on
time management ProfArguelles (in message 20) gives the number of "15 minutes/day as a minimum for maintenance". 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| outcast Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member China Joined 4947 days ago 869 posts - 1364 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English*, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 7 of 28 06 August 2013 at 4:51pm | IP Logged | ||
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I immediately could not help but notice the stark contrast in opinions about whether
advanced fluency requires MORE or LESS maintenance. Is it as casamata states, "the deeper the campaign, the longer the supply lines must be" or as Wulfgar and Cabaire state, "the more you save the less you need to save" (using analogies for both). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6907 days ago 4250 posts - 5711 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 8 of 28 06 August 2013 at 7:42pm | IP Logged | ||
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It's one thing if a marathon runner or a professional violin player has to exercise daily. Their skills are a lot more performance based than speaking a language. An athlete may lose strength/speed/stamina, a musician less so. However, there is always room for improvement and I suppose that a top musician practices more in order to improve than to maintain the skills. I can ignore my guitar for months without losing anything. The better you are, the shorter do you have to warm up (and the shorter it takes to get up to speed again).
This is not to say that top level lad/lass in whatever topic doesn't have to maintain the skills. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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