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Become a Polyglot in Minutes not Years

 Language Learning Forum : Polyglots Post Reply
30 messages over 4 pages: 1 2 3
Arekkusu
Hexaglot
Senior Member
Canada
bit.ly/qc_10_lec
Joined 5140 days ago

3971 posts - 7747 votes 
Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto
Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian

 
 Message 25 of 30
04 September 2010 at 3:52pm | IP Logged 
I have a question about the 10,000-hour rule.

It's generally accepted that if reaching level X in French (from English) would take 24
weeks, doing the same feat in Japanese or Mandarin would take 88 weeks.

If reaching mastery in French will take 10,000 hours, how can you say the same of
Japanese, given that it should take 3 1/2 times longer?
1 person has voted this message useful



lingoleng
Senior Member
Germany
Joined 5057 days ago

605 posts - 1290 votes 

 
 Message 26 of 30
04 September 2010 at 8:11pm | IP Logged 
Arekkusu wrote:
I have a question about the 10,000-hour rule.

It's generally accepted that if reaching level X in French (from English) would take 24
weeks, doing the same feat in Japanese or Mandarin would take 88 weeks.

If reaching mastery in French will take 10,000 hours, how can you say the same of
Japanese, given that it should take 3 1/2 times longer?


Japanese is not 4 times harder or more complex or more difficult than French. It does not take you 5000 hours to notice that word order is different. With some talent it takes you only 1000 hours, and then you can start learning just as in French. It is just a difficult start from a different language family, nothing else. These languages are not inherently difficult, only for you (or for me, of course. But Japanese people don't have to get 40 years old when they finally can speak some coherent words.)

Edited by lingoleng on 04 September 2010 at 9:33pm

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John Smith
Bilingual Triglot
Senior Member
Australia
Joined 5801 days ago

396 posts - 542 votes 
Speaks: English*, Czech*, Spanish
Studies: German

 
 Message 27 of 30
14 October 2010 at 1:47pm | IP Logged 
Splog wrote:
This may be controversial but I have put up a new youtube video revealing the secrets of how to Become a Polyglot in Minutes not Years


loved it. Spent an hour playing the piano after watching it. 10,000 hours here I come :)
1 person has voted this message useful



Cainntear
Pentaglot
Senior Member
Scotland
linguafrankly.blogsp
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Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic
Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh

 
 Message 28 of 30
15 October 2010 at 2:16pm | IP Logged 
The 10,000 hour principle is as much snake oil as any of the "learn to do X in Y days" books mentioned at the start of the article.

10,000 hours was a figure pulled out of someone's backside, backed up with a number of years from starting to professional success, then some contrived assumptions about the number of hours that would have been spent in between.

10,000 hours is an "easy answer", a nice soundbite, and it's appealling because it claims to be so much more sensible than the "learn in a day" school of marketing, but in the end, it's just not that useful. There is such a thing as task complexity. Harmonica vs piano. Tin whistle vs concert flute. Riding a bicycle vs piloting the space shuttle.
7 persons have voted this message useful



RogerK
Triglot
Groupie
Austria
Joined 4834 days ago

92 posts - 181 votes 
Speaks: English*, German, Italian
Studies: Portuguese

 
 Message 29 of 30
06 January 2011 at 7:13pm | IP Logged 
Great video. I also like the idea of reading a children's encyclopaedia which is another of his videos.

This is my very first post and I thought I should add my experience to the thread. I began learning German 17 years ago, after a couple of months I moved to Austria (hence the reason to begin learning in the first place), then I spent two years mainly reading Assimil's 'German With Ease' (Deutsch ohne Mühe) and flipping through the dictionary. After 18 months I spent five months studying German in Austria in a course for foreign students. During the course there were 9 hours of instruction per week and I would have spent at least another 30 hours at home learning.

Since then I have married an Austrian and German has been daily language (language at home) for approximately 15 years including the years I lived in Australia. I certainly haven't spent 10,000 hours learning or studying German but I have certainly spent that many hours speaking it. So how well can I speak it? I would have to be stupid not to be able to converse on any subject after all this time but there are many words that I still don't know that a native would learn at school. If one were to spend 10,000 speaking including 1,000's of hours learning you could possibly speak like a native. I haven't done sufficient learning or reading to become as good as I could have become. However I would agree that you can learn 80% of a language in 2,000 hours and you would be excellent at it.

The alternative is to move overseas with your parents and do your formal education at a foreign language school. Then you will have two mother tongues.
1 person has voted this message useful



slymie
Tetraglot
Groupie
China
Joined 4987 days ago

81 posts - 154 votes 
Speaks: English, Macedonian
Studies: French, Mandarin, Greek
Studies: Shanghainese, Uyghur, Russian

 
 Message 30 of 30
20 January 2011 at 7:49am | IP Logged 
Excellent video, I even showed it to my sister who has no interest in learning languages and she loved it as well.


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