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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 |  | |
| yushuak Newbie United Kingdom Joined 5777 days ago 2 posts - 2 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Italian | Message 25 of 36 25 March 2010 at 9:34pm | IP Logged | ||
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Well I learnt Mandarin in a week!
Beat that! :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes  Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 26 of 36 26 March 2010 at 12:09am | IP Logged | ||
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I suppose the fastest leaning learning I have done was in the case of Portuguese, where I went from barely being able to read a simple text and not being able to understand speech at all to being able to have simple conversations in a month. And it was a month because I had bought a travel to Cape Verde in the fall of 2006 and decided to try to learn Portuguese during the waiting time.
BUT... I suppose Portuguese for me already in 2006 ranged as an "overly related language that makes it ridiculously easy to learn the new language". I already knew Spanish, Italian and French, I had also some (mostly forgotten) knowledge about Catalan and Latin and I had studied Romance languages in general during the 70s. Besides I didn't have my present workload at the time, neither at my job or in my free time, so I could spend several hours daily on the purpose. I have more or less run out of Romance and Germanic languages now, but under optimal conditions I'm fairly sure I could learn any of the remaining in a month. This would be things like Anglosaxon, Old High German, Sardic or Aromanian. The problem is that with these languages I can't expect to get optimal conditions: interesting audiosources with transcripts, bilingual texts, good dictionaries and grammars and a native speaker ready to answer my questions all day long. And last but not least: lots of free time during that month. So I doubt that I'll be able to repeat my one month feat from 2006. With new language families I'm probably slower than at least some of the readers of this thread. My next basic fluency language will probably be Modern Greek, but it has taken me something like 2½ year to get there, partly because I haven't had suitable resources (no 'comprehensible' audio at all), partly because I have had far too little free time to spend on the project (normally just up to 3-4 hours weekly, in periods 0 hours). Russian and Irish will take at least as much time, probably more because I have a far larger number of languages to tend to now. I'm fairly sure I could match the three months per language of IrishPolyglot if I also moved to a relevant place every now and then, but this is just not an option for me. So I have to be patient and just let the collection grow slowly, but steadily. Edited by Iversen on 26 March 2010 at 9:30am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5381 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 27 of 36 26 March 2010 at 12:37am | IP Logged | ||
I've been studying Japanese for a year and a half and I must admit, I now view studying other Romance or Germanic languages as a walk in the park. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| irrationale Tetraglot Senior Member China Joined 6050 days ago 669 posts - 1023 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Tagalog Studies: Ancient Greek, Japanese | Message 28 of 36 26 March 2010 at 6:58am | IP Logged | ||
It was a totally baseless guess, I admit. Perhaps I meant not average ability, but just barring some outlier or someone with extreme ability like Tammet or any other possible savants. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| zerothinking Senior Member Australia Joined 6372 days ago 528 posts - 772 votes Speaks: English* | Message 29 of 36 26 March 2010 at 2:11pm | IP Logged | ||
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This really, really, gets on my nerves. Do you all not see the pointlessness of talking
in months and years? It's the hours that matter. If someone spends two hours a day studying a languages for three months, that person will have spent 120 hours on the language. If someone spends half an hour studying a language for 8 months, they have spent 120 hours on the language. You would expect them to be at around the same level depending on the method they used and their ability. So who learned faster? Really, you will learn in less months if you put in more hours. I imagine I could learn a language fairly well if I put in 4 hours a day study for 3 months. In fact, I'd probably know it to the level of my best language now (French) since that would amount to 360 hours study. If someone were to learn a language really well only studying for a total of 20 hours, then I would consider that fast. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| ennime Tetraglot Senior Member South Africa universityofbrokengl Joined 5904 days ago 397 posts - 507 votes Speaks: English, Dutch*, Esperanto, Afrikaans Studies: Xhosa, French, Korean, Portuguese, Zulu | Message 30 of 36 26 March 2010 at 2:28pm | IP Logged | ||
I guess that be true if immersion was taken out of the equation and those hours are the sole exposure to the language... If study was only study, and one would live in the country where they spoke the language it be different. Though I wonder if spreading 3 hours over two days instead of all in one block would be helpful, giving the brain some process time, as well as the benefit of spaced repetition... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5381 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 31 of 36 26 March 2010 at 2:29pm | IP Logged | ||
I disagree for 2 reasons, mostly. First, there are some aspects of language acquisition that are passive, namely that certain features are acquired unconsciously over time and so 3 months vs. 8 months is not simply a matter of hours. For instance, if I study 1 hour a day for a month, but you study 8 hours a day for 4 days, I'd be willing to bet a lot that I'll be more fluent than you. Secondly -- and this is the most crucial point of disagreement for me -- I do most of my language work when I'm not studying. I may sit down and study for 30 minutes, but in reality, I might have spent 1 or 2 hours thinking about the language (on the bus, while walking, in the shower, etc.). I can't get any of those benefits from working 8 hours a day for less days -- the equation simply does not work. (And I'm not even talking the quality of each hour: an hour spent learning vocabulary doesn't do the same thing at all as an hour speaking with a native, or an hour spent listening to a radio show or reading a textbook. Or the fact that a single person may not be able to concentrate equally for all hours, every single day. Humans are not machines.) Edited by Arekkusu on 26 March 2010 at 2:53pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6011 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 32 of 36 26 March 2010 at 4:48pm | IP Logged | ||
I learnt a little-known Tibetan-Turkish trade pidgin on an overnight train journey between Stockholm and Budapest. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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