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X00 hours to learn a language? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| smallwhite Pentaglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5130 days ago 537 posts - 1045 votes  Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin, French, Spanish | Message 9 of 17 21 November 2011 at 7:49am | IP Logged | ||
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It says "How many course hours of French should I have completed before taking this exam?", not "... before I could surely pass this exam". It's a rough guideline of how much grammar or vocabulary you'd need for that exam, because number of class hours taken should roughly reflect how much you have learned. 1 hour means you have learned greetings but not numbers. 10 hours means you have learned greetings and numbers but not the pluperfect tense. Etc. It's a rough guideline, and if you're a student of their's I'm sure it's a pretty accurate indicator, as likely they've written those numbers based on their courses.
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| DaraghM Diglot Senior Member Ireland Joined 5973 days ago 1947 posts - 2923 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French, Russian, Hungarian | Message 10 of 17 21 November 2011 at 10:38am | IP Logged | ||
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The course hours they quote cover just the hours that you attend their institute. At the end of each class they'll give homework which lasts several hours more. As a very rough guideline, I would multiply their estimates by three to get the total hours of work needed.
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| Elexi Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5387 days ago 938 posts - 1839 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French, German, Latin | Message 11 of 17 21 November 2011 at 11:40am | IP Logged | ||
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I think those projected course hours come from the central CEFR documents rather than that particular institute because they are used by all language learning schools/methods (they are the same as, for example, as the Deutsche Welle projected hours).
These figures always interest me - if the CEFR people reckon it takes 100 hours of formal tuition to get to CEFR A1 then assuming that most people do a class for 2 hours per week in term times (so only about 72 hours in a year), it shows why people taking non-intensive language classes do not progress very well. Likewise the totality of Pimsleur I-III and + is 50 hours, so that takes you 50% of the way through to getting DELF A1. That rather tells you how limited something like Pimsleur is. Many of the people on this forum seem to suggest that A1 is achievable in a very short time scale and I have read from contributors here that B1 is 'easily' achieved in a year of self study. Do we here underestimate what it takes to get a CEFR grade? Or is class room learning just intrinsically slow? 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5964 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 12 of 17 21 November 2011 at 2:43pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm surprised that most people here are suggesting that the time needed for attaining these levels is actually more than what is listed on that website. I personally think that classroom hours are not nearly equal to self-study hours because you have to take into account the time that all the routine activities that have nothing to do with actual learning take, as well as the fact that classes are often taught to the "lowest common denominator," and moving at an excruciatingly slow pace as a result.
I have about four hours of German and Japanese classes each week, but sadly I think that they only have a fraction of the value of my own self-studies. In my Japanese class, for example, it usually takes us several class hours to "master" a new grammatical concept or a list of vocabulary, whereas if I were studying on my own I could accomplish the same feat in far less time. I almost never have to do any outside work for either of the classes -- maybe an hour per week of writing or reading in German, and I don't think I've studied for a Japanese test outside of class more than twice in two years. Moreover, I get negative influence from the other students on my own pronunciation and grammar, which means that I then have to spend extra time fixing these problems that would not have arisen if I hadn't been in the class. Also, neither of the teachers in my case are native speakers of the target language, so while they may be fluent speakers, it's just not the same as being exposed to a native accent and getting a native speaker's perspective when you ask a question. The only advantage I see to classroom language study is that it forces me to work on my target languages nearly every day, which I can't guarantee about my own erratic study habits. Is classroom study really more valuable than self-study? EDIT: L'esprit de l'escalier strikes again. Edited by ellasevia on 21 November 2011 at 2:56pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| aloysius Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6062 days ago 226 posts - 291 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, German Studies: French, Greek, Italian, Russian | Message 13 of 17 21 November 2011 at 7:11pm | IP Logged | ||
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What I find interesting is, that those hours (which I suppose must be accumulated)
describe a linear growth from A2 to C1. (Provided that the ratio, whatever that is, of course hours to total hours remains the same throughout). My feeling is that getting from B2 to C1 takes a lot more work than getting from A2 to B1. //aloysius 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| FuroraCeltica Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6687 days ago 1187 posts - 1427 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French | Message 14 of 17 21 November 2011 at 8:40pm | IP Logged | ||
Think those are very good points 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4831 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 15 of 17 21 November 2011 at 11:09pm | IP Logged | ||
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ellasevia is quite right in my opinion, that it might require less of self study time, if you were studying the right way. But I think most of us was still thinking inside of the frame of original question on the link "how many course hours are needed" (I guess it could be translated as "how much money will you need to pay to the language school").
Is there anyone who had been roughly counting self-study hours from start to some level, especially confirmed by an exam, and could share their experience? 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Elexi Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5387 days ago 938 posts - 1839 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French, German, Latin | Message 16 of 17 22 November 2011 at 12:00pm | IP Logged | ||
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I once made a note going through a couple of French as Foreign Language textbooks (Latitudes and Echo) what one had to learn for the CEFR A1 exam in real terms as opposed to the vague Eurospeak CEFR tables. Popular beginner courses like the Michel Thomas courses and the Pimsleur series do not go much beyond this A1 list (MT Advanced covers more grammar such as the imparfait, subjunctive, etc) so I think it probably would take a total beginner 60-100 hours of study to master all of the functions.
Here is the list I made, if it helps: Grammar: articles, personal and possessive Pronouns, Verbs: etre, avoir, regular -er, C’est vs. il/elle est, futur proche, passe compose Use of ‘on’, the use of the conditionnel for politeness, the three question forms, Relative pronouns ‘que, qui, ou’, ‘that/these’: ce, cet, cette, ces, use of y and en. Functions: tu or vous, yes and no, please and thank you, excuse me, alphabet, ordinal numbers to 1000, cardinal numbers, expressions of self, age, name, job, likes and dislikes, the time, the date, food and drink, asking someone to do a task, inviting and accepting an invitation, expressing an opinion (e.g. je trouve que, ca me plait), colours, expressions of quantity and price, negation, directions and distance, expressions of location, expressions of oligation and interdiction, expressions of advice (pourrais, ll ne faut pas), describing a place or location, expressions of frequency (e.g. encore, souvent, deux fois). 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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