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Fastest to ever learn a foreign language?

 Language Learning Forum : General discussion Post Reply
36 messages over 5 pages: 1 2 3 4
Arekkusu
Hexaglot
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Canada
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 Message 33 of 36
26 March 2010 at 5:01pm | IP Logged 
Cainntear wrote:
yushuak wrote:
Well I learnt Mandarin in a week!

Beat that! :)

I learnt a little-known Tibetan-Turkish trade pidgin on an overnight train journey between Stockholm and Budapest.

Do you any good resources for it? I'm having such a hard time finding adequate recordings or a manual that doesn't use the cyrillic alphabet.
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FrenchLanguage
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Germany
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 Message 34 of 36
26 March 2010 at 6:25pm | IP Logged 
@irrationale:

I see..so you meant 3 months would be the absolute minimum, not for the average person, but for an outlier aka someone highly talented at learning languages?

In that case I could see 3 months working..actually if we're talking about an extreme outlier, I could see someone like that do it in much less time.

@all:

Let's forget about the "who did it the fastest", I'm wondering: How long does it take people who move into a new country (and who are motivated to learn) take to speak the native tongue(exp?) fluently?

I do remember my sister told me about some friends of hers who thought they'd go to South America for a year and would come back speaking the language fluently. They did not (they said their Spanish was still far from their level of English).

I concluded that...if they went there with zero knowledge of Spanish then...until they do have basic/intermediate skills the time they spent in those south american countries was probably close to useless.

Personally I could see myself do it within 1 year (studying the basics of the language for half a year, and then spending half a year in a country where the language is spoken) - then again this is mostly a guess!

How long did it take you guys to learn a foreign language when immersed in it (in the country)?
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numerodix
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Netherlands
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 Message 35 of 36
26 March 2010 at 6:30pm | IP Logged 
FrenchLanguage wrote:
Personally I could see myself do it within 1 year (studying the basics of the language for half a year, and then spending half a year in a country where the language is spoken) - then again this is mostly a guess!

How long did it take you guys to learn a foreign language when immersed in it (in the country)?

My guess is that in a situation like this the achievements that people seem to have reached can be deceptive. After a year maybe you can pass for someone who speaks the language with fluency, but by then you'll have had so much practice that you know how to handle yourself to cover up your weaknesses. You can still have a low vocabulary, you can still have weak points in your grammar, but you just never use those parts thus you seem competent.

Then a few years later, you can actually reach a solid fluency, without letting on much in the meantime.

Someone who'd be talking to you for a long time might be able to tell the difference, but a lot of our impressions of other people's skills are based on pretty short exchanges.

Edited by numerodix on 26 March 2010 at 6:32pm

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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 36 of 36
26 March 2010 at 6:33pm | IP Logged 
FrenchLanguage wrote:

I do remember my sister told me about some friends of hers who thought they'd go to South America for a year and would come back speaking the language fluently. They did not (they said their Spanish was still far from their level of English).

I concluded that...if they went there with zero knowledge of Spanish then...until they do have basic/intermediate skills the time they spent in those south american countries was probably close to useless.

It's a function of what you do with your time. I met a guy who'd been living in Japan 4 years and couldn't carry a conversation in the slightest. A LOT of people simply couldn't be bothered.

I would agree that reaching some level in the language before you visited the country is probably a better way to benefit from a short term immersion. However, you could go with zero knowledge learn a lot. Again, it's a matter of what you do with the opportunity that's within your reach.


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