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That sounds like a very pragmatic approach. > The main thing is being realistic about the speed that you can acquire language.... Expect to take at least 10 ye

That sounds like a very pragmatic approach. > The main thing is being realistic about the speed that you can acquire language.... Expect to take at least 10 years for your first foreign language. Nobody ever seems to mention this explicitly about language, nor the fact that you need to apply yourself consistently to the task over that time. I think that's because it's off-putting to hear you won't achieve high level language for a very long time. The point is though, you can get yourself to a level of mutual understanding within fairly short time (a few month to a year.) The rest of the time is spent increasing vocabulary, improving grammatical understanding and learning the myriad of unwritten grammatical (and often ungrammatical!) constructs and idiomatic use that people actually use to communicate.

mikekchar 11y ago
There are some very unfortunate beliefs around language acquisition which torpedoes people's attempts to learn language, I think. One of the most damaging and prevalent beliefs is that memorizing 2-3000 words of vocabulary will make you "fluent". When I taught English, my co-workers would even tell their students this outright. But 2-3000 words gets you to the level of a 3 year old child. Even 10,000 words will bring you up to the level of a 8-10 year old only. If you further dilute your vocabulary with useless words like "unemployment" and "discrimination" like they often do in schools, you will have the working vocabulary of a 5 year old -- i.e., you can talk at length about Pokemon (as long as you watch it over and over again), but not much else. "Communication" is such a tenuous concept. You don't need any formal language to communicate in a convenience store, for instance. Hand gestures will do nicely. I had a friend who learned Japanese primarily by chatting up girls at the train station. At first he communicated any way that he could and slowly made progress. He supplemented that by reading science fiction novels in Japanese. It's a crazy way to study, but was very effective (I should mention that his success rate with the girls was absolutely dreadful).

mikekchar 11y ago

There are some very unfortunate beliefs around language acquisition which torpedoes people's attempts to learn language, I think. One of the most damaging and prevalent beliefs is that memorizing 2-3000 words of vocabulary will make you "fluent". When I taught English, my co-workers would even tell their students this outright. But 2-3000 words gets you to the level of a 3 year old child. Even 10,000 words will bring you up to the level of a 8-10 year old only. If you further dilute your vocabulary with useless words like "unemployment" and "discrimination" like they often do in schools, you will have the working vocabulary of a 5 year old -- i.e., you can talk at length about Pokemon (as long as you watch it over and over again), but not much else. "Communication" is such a tenuous concept. You don't need any formal language to communicate in a convenience store, for instance. Hand gestures will do nicely. I had a friend who learned Japanese primarily by chatting up girls at the train station. At first he communicated any way that he could and slowly made progress. He supplemented that by reading science fiction novels in Japanese. It's a crazy way to study, but was very effective (I should mention that his success rate with the girls was absolutely dreadful).