Last week, I decided to take a stab at doing a rough approximation of the hours I've spent learning languages, both foreign and native, to get some sense of the relative amounts of time I've spent on each. An excel spreadsheet at hand, I settled on the following rough methodology:
- Tally up all the different activities that have contributed to my knowledge of any given language
- (very roughly) Estimate time spent on each in hours per day
- Weigh by the 'efficacy' of each activity. I decided to put a weight of 1 on active conversation / speaking / listening, as I take this to be the most demanding use-case. Less demanding activities (e.g. reading, Youtube, language lessons) were given weights between 0 and 1
- Sum it all up
What shocked me, and what in a way prompted me to post this was the staggering gap in the orders of magnitudes. For my native tongue, Finnish, I clocked in as reference something like 60 - 70k unweighted hours of usage - the vast majority of which either speaking or listening (I didn't distinguish between the two). For English, I clocked something in the order of 20 - 30k hours - pretty chunky, but still significantly less than Finnish.
But then I started looking at the languages in which I'm not all that proficient (i.e. the rest of them). And what shocked me was how little time all of them amounted to in the end. My combined total for Swedish which I studied for 9 years in school - as long as I did English - came to around 600 - 700 hours; a low B2, if that.
For recently picked up languages, the numbers are about similar. For German, which I'm currently studying (and where I'm currently living in), I calculated roughly 150 - 200 hours, which corresponds to a mid-A2. For French / Spanish / etc. something like 50 - 100 each.
Here's my takeaways:
- It takes really long to get really proficient at a language. Probably not 20k hours but still quite a few.
- Recency has a huge effect on ability - I've studied Swedish 3 - 5 times more than German, but right now (as much as it saddens me!) I'd say I'm much more proficient in the latter.
- It actually doesn't take all that long to reach a reasonable conversational ability. If one put in, say, 4 hours every day on average, one could reach B1 in a month or two. A lot most likely depends on the quality of time spent; I'd imagine if one spent a large proportion of those 100 - 200 hours in active conversation, one could reach much higher levels of proficiency.
- Keeping that in mind, an average language course is peanuts compared to what is needed for proficiency, and should primarily serve as a support to self-study, rather than the main component.
- Living in a country for any length of time has a huge effect provided that one actually uses the language. My daily German usage here clocks in at maybe 2 hours - compared to the 12 - 14 hours in England. Become a barkeep and you'll probably outspeak most degree students in a year.
- Diminishing marginal returns - I'd probably be better off having spent 4k hours on five different languages each and be C2 in all of them, rather than putting in 20k in a single one - but that's life I guess.
This post is getting pretty long so I'm gonna cut it here - interested in hearing your guys' opinions and hot takes!
[link] [comments]
from Languagelearning https://ift.tt/2NA0OZK
via Learn Online English Speaking
Comments
Post a Comment