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How long does it REALLY take to learn ___? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| victorhart Bilingual Tetraglot Groupie United States mandarinexperiment.o Joined 3503 days ago 66 posts - 155 votes  Speaks: English*, Portuguese*, Spanish, French Studies: Mandarin | Message 1 of 15 01 November 2014 at 8:41pm | IP Logged | ||
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Many of you are already familiar with the ILR Scale and Foreign Service Institute
(FSI) estimates, based on extensive empirical observation, of how long it takes to learn a variety of languages. Just in case, here are a couple of links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILR_scale http://web.archive.org/web/20071014005901/http://www.nvtc.go v/lotw/months/november/learningExpectations.html When this information is cited, people often focus exclusively on the classroom hours. For example, for an adult native English speaker who is highly educated, motivated and already a polyglot, learning a Category 1 language like Portuguese from scratch to ILR 3 level takes approximately 600 class hours. However, it is essential to note that the FSI students are also dedicating 3-4 hours daily to directed self-study, and no mention is made of possible additional contact with the language during “free” time. The latter would become especially relevant for Category 4 languages, where an entire year of study is done in-country. I’m assuming many students, during their free time, are watching TV in L2, in addition to going out and making friends. I also have not found information as to how long one would take on average to get from ILR 3 to ILR 4 and then ILR 5. My guess is that you would have to approximately double the total time in each case, because of the law of diminishing returns. For example, while knowing 5,000 words might get you to ILR 3 because they represent 95% of the spoken and written language (these numbers are fictitious and meant only to illustrate), you might need 10,000 words to get to 98% comprehension or ILR 4 because word frequencies diminish so much, and 20,000 to attain 99.8% comprehension or ILR 5 (educated native equivalency level). Idiomatic expressions, colloquialisms, cultural references, and native-like pronunciation and accent are necessary to get to these higher levels (especially ILR 5), which also can take a ridiculous amount of time to achieve (if ever). I should also note that in my opinion, as long as you are highly focused and engaged, avoiding certain pitfalls, and consciously trying to learn and improve, whether you are studying formally or immersing yourself in reading and conversation, you will be progressing efficiently. Therefore it is reasonable to sum formal study to self study and even informal contact (as long as it is highly engaged and deliberate). An additional question mark for me is that the FSI references only speaking and reading levels 3, whereas writing is not mentioned. Writing, especially with non-Roman alphabets, is an entirely different skill. Based on these lines of reasoning, I have come up with a little table to estimate how many hours of study/immersion it really takes a native English speaking adult polyglot to achieve ILR levels 3, 4, and 5. Basically, all I did was add the FSI class hours to the self-study hours (putting both at the higher end) to get total hours to ILR 3, then doubled that amount to ILR 4, which I doubled again to ILR 5. I did not consider any additional time for "free" study or for learning to write, though a more careful estimate probably should. Unfortunately, I do not know how to paste or create tables here, so I'm separating columns with a backslash (/). Cat. / FSI class hours / FSI self-study / ILR 3 / ILR 4 / ILR 5 1 / 600 / 576 / 1176 / 2352 / 4704 2&3 / 1100 / 1056 / 2156 / 4312 / 8624 4 / 2200 / 2464 / 4664 / 9328 / 18656 These are obviously wild estimates that would allow for a tremendous amount of variation. My purpose here is not to provide any answers, but rather to initiate a discussion and try to reach a consensus or a better level of understanding through this forum. Partly for fun, and partly as a basis of comparison, I also made rough estimates of how long it took me to get to levels 3, 4, and 5 for French, Spanish, and Portuguese (all Category 1 languages for me). I should note that my French is very rusty and in this case I have projected that I would need an additional 2 months or 365 hours to attain Level 3 for French (which is included in the total). Spanish undoubtedly benefited tremendously from my Portuguese. In this regard, it would be easier than a Category 1 language for me. I have also included English (my maternal tongue), which I learned to an educated native level as a child, and Mandarin, in which I still consider myself a total beginner. The Year / Age is when I attained the level I estimated in the previous columns, and Hours refers to a very rough estimate of how many hours I had of CONTACT with the language, including a tiny bit of formal study in each case but MUCH MORE informal contact (mostly conversation and reading). One of the reasons the hours are in general much higher than my above estimates (based on ILR numbers) is that the learning occurred over many years or decades, and was therefore subject to a continuous process of forgetting and recuperating. Language Subjective level IRL Level Year / Age Hours Portuguese / Native / 5 / 2003 / 8,232 Spanish / Semi-native fluency / 4 / 2010 / 2,018 French / Advanced Fluency / 3 / + 2 months / 1,220 Mandarin / Total beginner / 0 / - / 170 English / Native (maternal) / 5 / 12 yrs / 23,660 I have records of exactly how I reached these rough estimates, and can provide a lot of further context, details, and interpretation on my personal language studies / acquisition if anyone is interested. One of the many reasons I am interested in this issue is to better contextualize my hypothesis of an estimated 1,200 hours to reach an low intermediate to intermediate level of oral Mandarin comprehension through my experimental approach (exclusively watching authentic videos). Please share your thoughts, opinions, and personal experiences! Edited by victorhart on 01 November 2014 at 9:49pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Ezy Ryder Diglot Senior Member Poland youtube.com/user/Kat Joined 4145 days ago 284 posts - 387 votes Speaks: Polish*, English Studies: Mandarin, Japanese | Message 2 of 15 01 November 2014 at 9:13pm | IP Logged | ||
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The problem is, as we say in Polish "godzina godzinie nie równa." Meaning, "one hour isn't equal
to another." So, an hour's of FSI classroom effectivity might be different to this of an average college class', which may be different to that of immersion's. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| victorhart Bilingual Tetraglot Groupie United States mandarinexperiment.o Joined 3503 days ago 66 posts - 155 votes Speaks: English*, Portuguese*, Spanish, French Studies: Mandarin | Message 3 of 15 01 November 2014 at 9:16pm | IP Logged | ||
That is one of the many reasons these are rough estimates. That does not preclude the utility of having parameters. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Henkkles Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4049 days ago 544 posts - 1141 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: Russian | Message 4 of 15 01 November 2014 at 11:03pm | IP Logged | ||
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I have my own entirely arbitrary yet somehow neat reference thing for how long it actually will take. I usually use "hours" but as pointed out by mr. Ryder one hour is not necessarily equivalent to that of another in terms of effectiveness and such, so I will use the word 'pollywog' in its stead (hereon abbreviated as pw, not to be confused with picoWatts).
I'm using the CEFR scale here even though it's totally arbitrary as well. A1 - 32 pw A2 - 80 pw B1 - 200 pw B2 - 500 pw C1 - 1250 pw C2 - ??? The logic here is that in order to advance into a new level you'll have to multiply your study hours by 2,5 (or add 150%). So in order to advance say, from B1 to B2 you'd have to first spend 200 pollywogs studying yourself to B1, 100 pollywogs strengthening what you already know and 200 pollywogs learning new stuff, and that would constitute an increase in level. Whenever I'm about to start a new language project I just think to myself "do I want to spend 500 pollywogs doing this?" and I find that it's a nice rule of thumb. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cabaire Senior Member Germany Joined 5395 days ago 725 posts - 1352 votes | Message 5 of 15 01 November 2014 at 11:39pm | IP Logged | ||
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That's nice, pollywogs usually gather themselves in big quantities, as should your learning sessions in order to reach a high scale.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| epictetus Groupie Canada Joined 3678 days ago 54 posts - 87 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 6 of 15 02 November 2014 at 3:35am | IP Logged | ||
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The idea of quantifying learning into discrete units is amusing:
25 minutes of intense focus and analysis is worth 10 LU (language units). 2 hours of lazy reading with haphazard and infrequent dictionary referencing is worth... 5 LU? A 5 minute conversation with a native yields 10. But when it directly follows formal instruction, their is a 1.3 multiplier effect! Daily study adds a baseline multiplier of 1.1; missed days incur penalties. Not useful, obviously, but I do know that for Anki's statistics and my own personal records, I can pretty much take whatever times Anki gives me and multiply it by 1.5 to get the actual time. I'll spend 30 minutes on Anki and it shows 20 in the program. For the same reason, it makes more sense to count the number of pages read rather than time spent reading - one is inherently more reliable than another. Of course, there's another way to see things, too. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6393 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 7 of 15 02 November 2014 at 6:23am | IP Logged | ||
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Can one be a pollyglot without knowing the word pollywog? ;) I don't even know it in Finnish :(
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5226 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 8 of 15 02 November 2014 at 6:32am | IP Logged | ||
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I think that the figures in the OP are basically irrelevant to the experiment at hand. All these figures are based on
some form of instruction or structured learning. What is sorely lacking is figures on purely self-learning and, more specifically, on the proposed method of learning exclusively by watching authentic videos in Mandarin. I don't know how correct the figures are but if my understanding is correct after 170 hours of this method with Mandarin there has been virtually no progress. I'll admit that 170 hours is not a lot but that's the equivalent of three hours a day for nearly two months. A lot can be learned of a language in that time. But more importantly there is no evidence that this method of just looking at incomprehensible videos can produce any significant kind of receptive knowledge at all! I'm totally in favour of experimentation but I don't see the point of this so-called experiment when everything we know about language learning says that it can't work. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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