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How fast can you learn it? An answer. | ||
Tags: Time to learn | Software | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| liddytime Pentaglot Senior Member United States mainlymagyar.wordpre Joined 6045 days ago 693 posts - 1328 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Galician Studies: Hungarian, Vietnamese, Modern Hebrew, Norwegian, Persian, Arabic (Written) | Message 9 of 23 23 January 2011 at 6:25pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Brilliant!
I think the results need to be taken with a grain of salt but I believe the results are fairly accurate. It would be a good starting point for most people who want a general idea of the time commitment. So how exactly does it take into account the languages already spoken? What calculation did you use for these? Nice work and fun to play around with! 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| litovec Tetraglot Groupie Switzerland lingvometer.com Joined 4947 days ago 42 posts - 60 votes Speaks: German, Russian, French, English | Message 10 of 23 23 January 2011 at 10:01pm | IP Logged | |||||
Thanks for your support!
The idea is as follows. The closer is the target language to your language portfolio, the less time you need to spend compared to someone who's only language is English (these numbers are from Defense Language Institute). From the site's statistics I see that this procedure works well for 98-99% of the queries, but in some cases (two of them were posted on the 1-st page) especially with a high number of languages in portfolio, it doesn't work properly. I hope to fix it in a few days. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5958 days ago 2150 posts - 3229 votes Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian | Message 11 of 23 23 January 2011 at 10:14pm | IP Logged | |||||
If you're including the influence of Arabic on Persian, than you should definitely also include it for Swahili as well. And then, indirectly, Swahili should help you with Persian (or vice versa), which I have definitely found to be true. So for this example, there should be listed correlations between: Arabic <-> Persian Arabic <-> Swahili Persian <-> Swahili What about Chinese loanwords in Korean and Japanese? Does that have any effect? What about the Chinese characters used in Japanese? 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| hjordis Senior Member United States snapshotsoftheworld. Joined 5002 days ago 209 posts - 264 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French, German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 12 of 23 23 January 2011 at 10:33pm | IP Logged | |||||
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What about unrelated languages with similar grammar? Surely in the first language most people would spend a lot of time trying to get used to a new grammar, while the second time around they'll understand how two or three of the hardest parts work, even if they don't know the specifics.
I'm still thinking Japanese/Korean, which I tested because I was curious whether that would be accounted for, but surely there are at least a couple others to a lesser extent. Say, two or three of the hardest concepts for an English speaker are shared, while the rest of the easier stuff is different. Of course, you can't account for everything. Especially since you're one person. I don't expect you to know all these similarities. Edited by hjordis on 23 January 2011 at 10:34pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| litovec Tetraglot Groupie Switzerland lingvometer.com Joined 4947 days ago 42 posts - 60 votes Speaks: German, Russian, French, English | Message 13 of 23 23 January 2011 at 11:06pm | IP Logged | |||||
The problem is the following. I put in the bottom option list almost 200 languages (criteria: more than 3 million speakers), it induces 200*200-200=3800 relations. If considered, that A relates to B the same wayB relates to A, than there are still 1900 relations left. They were calculated authomatically based on the language groups classification. Further, I used several studies on the language distance, but they all concern some of European languages. I also added some known to me influences. I missed Swahilli-Arabic pair, there must be many such cases, for the following reason: the African and Asian languages are scarsely studied, there's almost no quant studies (to my best knowledge) on them concerning this issue. Also how cross-related are the languages on the Indian subcontinent would be an interesting infromation for me. What I mean under quant study: a group of linguists take n words in a pair of language (say, Spanish and Portuguese) and determine that 89% (source:Ethnologue) are of common origin.
I actually took it into account exactly for Korean (link1 1120h instead of 1220h) and Japanese (link2 also 1120h instead of 1220h). The 10% correlation between them underlies this result, how good is my estimate? I don't know, I didn't see anything on this. However, a problem for me would be other Asian languages influenced by Chinese (for example, how much was Vietnamese), because I don't know how much they were influenced and there are no quant studies on this. Your first-hand observation that Swahili helped you with Persian is a valuable information. I'll gather such impressions and put them at some moment into the base. If you are aware of any quantitative article, concerning non-European languages, please let me know. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Oasis88 Senior Member Australia Joined 5521 days ago 160 posts - 187 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Italian | Message 14 of 23 24 January 2011 at 12:05am | IP Logged | |||||
Before learning any Italian 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5197 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 15 of 23 24 January 2011 at 3:24am | IP Logged | |||||
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It says I should reach intermediate in Japanese in 4 years and 36 weeks. It's been about
2 years and 25 weeks and I've passed B2 already. I doubt such a great difference is indicative of an accurate system. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Segata Triglot Groupie Germany Joined 4987 days ago 64 posts - 125 votes Speaks: German*, Japanese, English Studies: Korean, Esperanto | Message 16 of 23 24 January 2011 at 10:14am | IP Logged | |||||
edit: Whoops, my bad. I somehow thought that post was refering to the correlation between Korean and Japanese. edit 2: Wait a minute. With this setup, I still need 1220 hours. This is even worse ;) From my own experience, there's a huge amount of similarities between Japanese and Korean that counts for more than 100 hours. For one, if you know either of those two languages, you are already familiar with the grammar and basic structure of the other one - you know the difference between topic and subject, you are used to particles (many of which differ only slightly in usage) etc. Furthermore, a majority of the vocabulary was imported from China and is very similar in both sound and usage (bonus points if you learned Korean and you already know how to read Hanja). My knowledge of Japanese makes learning Korean vocabulary so much easier. Oftentimes when I read Korean text and encounter new words I think "Oh, this is probably [Insert Japanese word]" and I'm usually right. The main difficulty lies in native Korean/Japanese words which are completely different and the pronounciation which - you guessed it - is also completely different. This might not be based on scientific research or anything, but I'd value a knowledge of either Japanese or Korean much higher when attempting to learn the other one. Edited by Segata on 24 January 2011 at 10:25am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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