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These language categorizations are famous and have been around since the 50's - not sure what the colored map really adds. When looking at the suggested number

by xaybey 9y ago

These language categorizations are famous and have been around since the 50's - not sure what the colored map really adds. When looking at the suggested number of hours, keep in mind that these measurements are for: * a Foreign Service Officer (read: elite, meritocratically-selected diplomat, usually with a background in humanities, who is probably in command of another foreign language already). * 5 hours/day of continuous study, with classroom instruction at the FSI's internal language school (which is considered the gold standard in language education). Don't expect the same results from self-study with a textbook and some subtitled movies. * Reaching a B2-C1 level of proficiency. That's certainly conversational, but far from fluent. Consider that for Russian, the passive vocabulary of someone with a C2 proficiency is about twice that of someone with a C1. I would never want to discourage someone from learning a foreign language, but the notion that one could reach professional proficiency in French within ~6 months is unrealistic for 99% of learners. Even if you lived there and devoted your entire days to study, it would be difficult to ramp up that quickly.

ramblerman 9y ago
> 1) Don't expect the same results from self-study with a textbook and some subtitled movies. > 2) Even if you lived there and devoted your entire days to study, it would be difficult to ramp up that quickly. These are 2 wildly different scenarios. If you stay with a family, immerse yourself and go to class every day you would have an advantage over an FSO officer. As to not being professionally fluent in that time, that is definitely true. But you should reach a level where you can be independent enough to get around, speak and understand.
- x0x0 9y ago
  I think results will vary depending on if you've learned another language before. Having to understand a grammar from the outside is a rough exercise the first time. I'm a native english speaker and conjugating verbs in eg Spanish wasn't hard, but really feeling the difference between the indicative and subjunctive moods takes a lot more work. I found Russian very approachable for a 3rd language. And it's really cool to be able to eg read Pushkin; I can't read Shakespeare without more footnotes than poetry.
  - aquadrop 9y ago
    A bit offtopic, but can you advise an English language poet with Pushkin style poetry? I'm native Russian language speaker and even though I can easily understand regular English, I have hard time with poetry and find it quite different from Russian.
    - bzbarsky 9y ago
      There are some structural differences (e.g. the lack of using endings to indicate grammatical structure in English) that make creating the sort of "it all rhymes and flows really well" poetry you get a lot in Russian much more difficult in English. That said, I'd say some of Coleridge's work is in that general vein, in my opinion. And some of Byron's, actually. So maybe try those?
- Arnt 9y ago
  You can do that in a single-digit number of weeks if you're willing to never back down. Never fall back to a different language. It's a pain for yourself and the people you speak to. You'll have to apologise often. But the locals don't really mind, they approve of your goal.
  - peoplewindow 9y ago
    I wouldn't say they don't mind. People approve of the goal of you learning their language in the abstract, but if you're slowing down their day or worse their line of customers, you're just going to annoy everyone around you in a way that they will be too polite to make explicitly clear, but will be apparent from their tone of voice, their insistence on answering in English and so on. The real difficulty of learning a language is thus in my view nothing to do with the language itself, but rather, how good at English the speakers of that language tend to be. If you're in a part of the world where they speak an obscure language and thus all learn English from childhood, the chances of you ever getting fluent are close to zero. Nobody really cares enough to struggle through with you.
    - endless1234 9y ago
      It's not just that nobody cares enough to struggle through with you, but people actively will try to speak English with you as a way to get more proficient in English.
      - dazc 9y ago
        This is the problem I have in Spain, the few people I know who speak a bit of English use me to practice on.
      - Arnt 9y ago
        Yes, people will want that. My stock answer was "thanks, but anyone who lives in <x> should get used to speaking <y>" and that always settled it. That problem is more of an excuse for failing to learn proper <y> than a reason. (There are a lot of expats among the parents at my children's school and it's easy to tell who persisted and who didn't.)
TomK32 9y ago
Yes, social background plays a big role. In the English language words for food have German roots as long as they are in the kitchen, once on the table it most likely has French roots. Science, it's full of Latin and Greek. There's a fantastic documenation: The Adventure of English, it covers how the language grew and got infusions from those conquering the British Isle.
- bipson 9y ago
  Isn't it that way: On the field, the language of the common man prevailed: sheep (e.g. german: Schaf). When being prepared in the kitchen, the meat becomes the mutton (french mouton). As far as I was told, this is from the time when the when french was noble and the noble recipes where prepared in the court's kitchens for the noble people.
  - xiaopanga 9y ago
    This is true only after the Norman invasion.
brailsafe 9y ago
The coloured map adds a coloured map. Maps are interesting.
- sushid 9y ago
  It's not even the entire map of the languages listed in the article. It's a small subset of the languages with an unintuitive coloring scheme.
  - brailsafe 9y ago
    Allow me to suggest a few possible courses of action you might take: 1) Make a better one. 50 years in isn't too late and the data is there. 2) Introduce a modicum of specificity into your critique. I understood it to show a small subset of languages primarily in Europe, clearly marked by contrasting colours. You clearly disagree that this is valid, and you may be right, but saying ~"this map isn't another map" and ~"this map sucks" doesn't add anything to the conversation.
    - sushid 9y ago
      1) Do you tell movie critics or book reviewers to direct/write a better one for pointing out some obvious flaws? 2) The original comment wasn't even posted by me. I never said the map sucks but did specifically point out a few things.
      - brailsafe 9y ago
        1) It depends. If the author indicated a specific goal and didn't reach it because they didn't go into more detail in one area, then I'd say something along the lines of "I got the sense that the author's goal was to try and convey x, but didn't seem to fully reach it. More time was spent on y, which could have allowed her to flesh out more detail in the backstory of x". Otherwise, if it were their goal to discuss the geo-political exchange of Greenland between Scandinavian countries, I probably wouldn't remark on the exclusion of India from the discussion as a detractor from the quality of the literature. If the latter is the approach a book or movie reviewer took, I'd critically evaluate their review. Not that the remark wouldn't have value, but it would have much more value in an addendum, feature request, or new creation. See John Siracusa's OSX reviews for Ars - https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7/ 1a) My problem is not pointing out flaws — if they were truly obvious, they wouldn't need to be pointed out —, but in the potential value derived from the critique. The exercise in explaining how something could be done better increases the robusticity of the answer. For example, you could say "the colour scheme is unintuitive" or "the colour scheme might be difficult to process for red-green colour-blind people. It might be better to do x". Especially if you consider a subject that is obvious to you but not someone else, more detail would help. 2) I'm not trying to personally attack you, would likely agree with your sentiment, and didn't suggest that you literally said the map sucks. Simply that saying something has a subjective trait, when communicated as objective, doesn't produce much value in my opinion.
vidarh 9y ago
Your personal difficulty with a language will also obviously drastically shift once you've picked up another language. E.g. I've never learnt Dutch, but I can read it passably because of my combination of Norwegian, German and English. While getting to proficiency written and oral would take some work I'd certainly be far easier than starting from the base of a single language. Same with e.g. Spanish or Italian because of the bits I remember of French from school..
- IMTDb 9y ago
  It's not that easy, as a native french speaking person, I have close to 0 understanding of Italian and Spanish. I also learned Dutch and English and those two are much closer.
  - dep_b 9y ago
    French is really different from Italian, Spanish and Portugese. Or even Romanian. If you know Spanish you kind of get the idea of what people write in the other four languages. But I think you get a lot of English during your life if you live in Europe which makes it easier for you to pick it up. There are still more Latin derived words in English than French derived, Spanifying English words is not a bad strategy if you're learning to speak Spanish and you have a feel for Latin sounding words in English. Dutch? Perhaps if you're Belgian? Not so much overlap with French even though there are influences.
    - pif 9y ago
      > French is really different from Italian... It's just because of their funny pronunciation :-) I was born and raised Italian, and got French nationality as an adult. I was able to read French well before I could understand it.
  - vidarh 9y ago
    I think you underestimate the similarities with Italian and Spanish, and overestimate the similarities of Dutch and English because it's easier to notice similarities when you're looking at two foreign languages where it's the similarities that will stand out, than when looking "closer to home" where the differences tends to stand out. Though Dutch and English are really quite similar, they're not all that much closer related than e.g. French and Spanish. During my French-lessons, my French teacher often used Spanish (which none of us knew) as a means of explaining French vocabulary for us by means of demonstrating the transitions in sounds from the latin origins of both, and the same works between French and Portuguese, Italian, Romanian, as well as with many languages further removed from latin that still has plenty of loan words. The same also does work between English and French because of the number of French and latin words in English, but much less so between the other Germanic languages and French. E.g. try to go to www.repubblica.it (a random Italian paper) and cut and paste a paragraph or two into Google translate with French as the target, and look at how many words are similar. Then try to change the target to e.g. Dutch or German, and you'll see far fewer similarities. Switch to English and you'll tend to find something a bit in the middle. It does vary a lot - more formal texts tend to be more similar. I can pretty much straight up read very formal Italian by picking up context, based on French + knowing a handful of other Italian words, but I'd certainly find it much harder to read casual comments.
ekidd 9y ago
> Reaching a B2-C1 level of proficiency. That's certainly conversational, but far from fluent. Consider that for Russian, the passive vocabulary of someone with a C2 proficiency is about twice that of someone with a C1. C1 is good enough for a first-year undergraduate student to be admitted into some of the most competitive universities in the world. (Graduate students, notoriously, can get admitted with less.) Even my French DELF B2 exam certificate would be enough for most French universities, though my first year would have been miserable. To give you a more concrete example, my DELF B2 oral exam required me to draw a presentation topic from a bowl. My topic was "Should Paris institute congestion charges to improve traffic in the city?" I was given ~20 minutes to prepare, with no dictionary and no other resources. I then had to give a 10-minute presentation, with no outline allowed, presenting my opinion and defending it. Afterwards, the examiners spent another 10 minutes asking me questions like, "Yes, your plan would be good for the environment. But wouldn't it hurt the poor?" Obviously, neither my presentation nor my responses were brilliant at B2, but I could do it. (And yes, the DELF B2 may be harder than some other B2 exams.) I think that worrying about "near-native fluency" is a waste of time for most language learners. Nearly everybody would be better served by trying to reach a level where they can socialize agreeably and work professionally. The very highest levels of proficiency normally require years of immersion at school or work. But if all you want to do is hang out with friends, or sign up for a gym, or get a job, or read books for fun, C1 is great. It's just a matter of putting in the hours.
- BjoernKW 9y ago
  > I think that worrying about acheiving "near-native fluency" is a waste of time for most language learners. Learning a language can be about much more than mere pragmatic considerations like "Will I be able to get my point across to my peers.". Language also is about culture and aesthetics. So, while native proficiency might be a waste of time if you simply want to use a language as a communication tool it becomes a worthwhile endeavour if you see a foreign language as something that in a broader sense helps you to grow as a person. Most non-native speakers probably will never reach that level of proficiency but to quote a French philosopher: "La lutte elle-même vers les sommets suffit à remplir un coeur d'homme." ("The struggle itself is enough to fill a man's heart.")
chupasaurus 9y ago
Laughed pretty loud about learning Russian in 24 weeks for B2 level. In russian schools language course for B2-C1 level is done in 4 years (A1/not-so-A2 is done in elementary school, but it's included in that course IIRC) with minimum of 245 hours per year, 4*245=980 hours. Nowhere near 600.
- dougmwne 9y ago
  Russian and all the slavic languages are classified at 44 weeks, not 24 weeks. FTA, the hour estimate is 1100, very close to your 980.
  - chupasaurus 9y ago
    My bad, I should check my color blindness.
cltlz3n 9y ago
Great comment. I just moved to France 3 years ago, it took me a year to reach B1 level (no classes) and I speak fluent Spanish, so yeah 6 months to have reading and speaking proficiency seems hopeful at best.
davidzweig 9y ago
Professional proficiency could mean almost anything, though. It could require quite a low level of linguistic skill if you are limiting your conversations to a narrow domain, and speaking with a person who also understands the relevant ideas and concepts. In this case you are just 'indicating' some state, as opposed to composing free-form descriptions. 'A word to the wise', so to speak. There are some very useful language materials produced by the FSI on the net, hosted on this site: https://fsi-languages.yojik.eu/ https://fsi-languages.yojik.eu/ The French course in particular is very thorough, and the Chinese looks very good too, although I haven't used it yet. I am making a special audio player for such materials, some info here: http://smallworld.press/ http://smallworld.press/
alisson 9y ago
I think that the main reason people don't learn another language fast is the fear of making mistakes. Kids don't have this fear yet so they learn fast, so the more shameless you are the faster you will learn, besides consistently practicing and wanting to improve.
- mbroncano 9y ago
  I don't know why this is down voted - I found this to be the case for successful adult learners
  - jessaustin 9y ago
    In my experience this is also the biggest obstacle facing older people using modern devices like smartphones. I try to explain that when they're confused they should just poke, press, or swipe something and see what it does. Some older people are simply unable to do that. It's just a machine; it doesn't care if you hit the back arrow a lot! Relatives of mine have written long lists of instructions in preparation for smartphone use on trips. In fairness, this is similar to many young people when forced to drive in less familiar areas without GPS.
    - macintux 9y ago
      I taught a "computers 101" lab with several adult learners many years ago, and I had one student walk out when I told him I simply couldn't teach him exactly what to do in every situation. I felt badly, and I'd probably with 20 more years under my belt be able to help a bit more now, but it's still the same quandry: you can't expect to use any computer/mobile device without experimenting to figure out the way to do something, and there are a lot of adults (I assume some children too) who aren't willing to do the wrong thing.
jdmichal 9y ago
This helps me makes a lot of sense on why German is ranked longer than all the romance languages. Most of the learners in the data set we're probably already familiar with a romance language, and probably with a higher level of formal training than their mostly intuitive knowledge of English.
- mullen 9y ago
  But German is not a romance language and neither is English. Theoretically, as an english speaker, it should be easier to learn German than French or Spanish (But is not).
  - jdmichal 9y ago
    That's my point. If all one has is informal but native English, German theoretically should be faster. Though not as fast as, say, Dutch to German, thanks to the large import of romance vocabulary into English, along with other grammatical drift... However, if one has informal but native English, but also formal training in a romance language... I could see such a person picking up new romance languages faster than German. The romance languages are more consistent with each other than English is with German.
FRex 9y ago
You will also sound very off and instantly recognizable as a foreigner when speaking some of them. I.e. here's Stephen D. Mull[0] speaking Polish: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nRVUZpi660 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nRVUZpi660 He is REALLY good at it for a foreigner. It's 100% understandable (both content as a whole and every single word on its own) but it still sounds clearly off (a bit too soft and very American, Polish accents vary a lot in places but no native Polish speaker has one like his) and he makes some mistakes with conjugations and weird phrasing that no Pole would use. [0] - American ambassador to Poland at the time who also says he has no Polish ancestry so I assume he learned via this American program at the minimum (plus his own practice in Poland).
stoolpigeon 9y ago
With the organization I work for, new Americans arriving in Hungary spend 2 years in full time language learning and at the end of it are at about a 5th grade level of Hungarian.
corg890 9y ago
German matches up with my experience, 8-10 months, 5hrs a week of classes to be professionally proficient. I’m not elite and didn’t have much prior language experience. I did put a lot of effort in, wasn’t easy.
apendleton 9y ago
> * a Foreign Service Officer (read: elite, meritocratically-selected diplomat, usually with a background in humanities, who is probably in command of another foreign language already). This is true, I suppose, but it's worth noting that this list does not differ that drastically from the DLI's, which is the uniformed equivalent to the civilian FSI and trains military translators, and they have no such requirements as far as background, education, status, etc. You can end up a translator just by scoring well on their standardized test in high school.

by xaybey 9y ago

ramblerman 9y ago

> 1) Don't expect the same results from self-study with a textbook and some subtitled movies. > 2) Even if you lived there and devoted your entire days to study, it would be difficult to ramp up that quickly. These are 2 wildly different scenarios. If you stay with a family, immerse yourself and go to class every day you would have an advantage over an FSO officer. As to not being professionally fluent in that time, that is definitely true. But you should reach a level where you can be independent enough to get around, speak and understand.

x0x0 9y ago
I think results will vary depending on if you've learned another language before. Having to understand a grammar from the outside is a rough exercise the first time. I'm a native english speaker and conjugating verbs in eg Spanish wasn't hard, but really feeling the difference between the indicative and subjunctive moods takes a lot more work. I found Russian very approachable for a 3rd language. And it's really cool to be able to eg read Pushkin; I can't read Shakespeare without more footnotes than poetry.
- aquadrop 9y ago
  A bit offtopic, but can you advise an English language poet with Pushkin style poetry? I'm native Russian language speaker and even though I can easily understand regular English, I have hard time with poetry and find it quite different from Russian.
  - bzbarsky 9y ago
    There are some structural differences (e.g. the lack of using endings to indicate grammatical structure in English) that make creating the sort of "it all rhymes and flows really well" poetry you get a lot in Russian much more difficult in English. That said, I'd say some of Coleridge's work is in that general vein, in my opinion. And some of Byron's, actually. So maybe try those?
Arnt 9y ago
You can do that in a single-digit number of weeks if you're willing to never back down. Never fall back to a different language. It's a pain for yourself and the people you speak to. You'll have to apologise often. But the locals don't really mind, they approve of your goal.
- peoplewindow 9y ago
  I wouldn't say they don't mind. People approve of the goal of you learning their language in the abstract, but if you're slowing down their day or worse their line of customers, you're just going to annoy everyone around you in a way that they will be too polite to make explicitly clear, but will be apparent from their tone of voice, their insistence on answering in English and so on. The real difficulty of learning a language is thus in my view nothing to do with the language itself, but rather, how good at English the speakers of that language tend to be. If you're in a part of the world where they speak an obscure language and thus all learn English from childhood, the chances of you ever getting fluent are close to zero. Nobody really cares enough to struggle through with you.
  - endless1234 9y ago
    It's not just that nobody cares enough to struggle through with you, but people actively will try to speak English with you as a way to get more proficient in English.
    - dazc 9y ago
      This is the problem I have in Spain, the few people I know who speak a bit of English use me to practice on.
    - Arnt 9y ago
      Yes, people will want that. My stock answer was "thanks, but anyone who lives in <x> should get used to speaking <y>" and that always settled it. That problem is more of an excuse for failing to learn proper <y> than a reason. (There are a lot of expats among the parents at my children's school and it's easy to tell who persisted and who didn't.)

TomK32 9y ago

Yes, social background plays a big role. In the English language words for food have German roots as long as they are in the kitchen, once on the table it most likely has French roots. Science, it's full of Latin and Greek. There's a fantastic documenation: The Adventure of English, it covers how the language grew and got infusions from those conquering the British Isle.

bipson 9y ago
Isn't it that way: On the field, the language of the common man prevailed: sheep (e.g. german: Schaf). When being prepared in the kitchen, the meat becomes the mutton (french mouton). As far as I was told, this is from the time when the when french was noble and the noble recipes where prepared in the court's kitchens for the noble people.
- xiaopanga 9y ago
  This is true only after the Norman invasion.

brailsafe 9y ago

The coloured map adds a coloured map. Maps are interesting.

sushid 9y ago
It's not even the entire map of the languages listed in the article. It's a small subset of the languages with an unintuitive coloring scheme.
- brailsafe 9y ago
  Allow me to suggest a few possible courses of action you might take: 1) Make a better one. 50 years in isn't too late and the data is there. 2) Introduce a modicum of specificity into your critique. I understood it to show a small subset of languages primarily in Europe, clearly marked by contrasting colours. You clearly disagree that this is valid, and you may be right, but saying ~"this map isn't another map" and ~"this map sucks" doesn't add anything to the conversation.
  - sushid 9y ago
    1) Do you tell movie critics or book reviewers to direct/write a better one for pointing out some obvious flaws? 2) The original comment wasn't even posted by me. I never said the map sucks but did specifically point out a few things.
    - brailsafe 9y ago
      1) It depends. If the author indicated a specific goal and didn't reach it because they didn't go into more detail in one area, then I'd say something along the lines of "I got the sense that the author's goal was to try and convey x, but didn't seem to fully reach it. More time was spent on y, which could have allowed her to flesh out more detail in the backstory of x". Otherwise, if it were their goal to discuss the geo-political exchange of Greenland between Scandinavian countries, I probably wouldn't remark on the exclusion of India from the discussion as a detractor from the quality of the literature. If the latter is the approach a book or movie reviewer took, I'd critically evaluate their review. Not that the remark wouldn't have value, but it would have much more value in an addendum, feature request, or new creation. See John Siracusa's OSX reviews for Ars - https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7/ 1a) My problem is not pointing out flaws — if they were truly obvious, they wouldn't need to be pointed out —, but in the potential value derived from the critique. The exercise in explaining how something could be done better increases the robusticity of the answer. For example, you could say "the colour scheme is unintuitive" or "the colour scheme might be difficult to process for red-green colour-blind people. It might be better to do x". Especially if you consider a subject that is obvious to you but not someone else, more detail would help. 2) I'm not trying to personally attack you, would likely agree with your sentiment, and didn't suggest that you literally said the map sucks. Simply that saying something has a subjective trait, when communicated as objective, doesn't produce much value in my opinion.

vidarh 9y ago

Your personal difficulty with a language will also obviously drastically shift once you've picked up another language. E.g. I've never learnt Dutch, but I can read it passably because of my combination of Norwegian, German and English. While getting to proficiency written and oral would take some work I'd certainly be far easier than starting from the base of a single language. Same with e.g. Spanish or Italian because of the bits I remember of French from school..

IMTDb 9y ago
It's not that easy, as a native french speaking person, I have close to 0 understanding of Italian and Spanish. I also learned Dutch and English and those two are much closer.
- dep_b 9y ago
  French is really different from Italian, Spanish and Portugese. Or even Romanian. If you know Spanish you kind of get the idea of what people write in the other four languages. But I think you get a lot of English during your life if you live in Europe which makes it easier for you to pick it up. There are still more Latin derived words in English than French derived, Spanifying English words is not a bad strategy if you're learning to speak Spanish and you have a feel for Latin sounding words in English. Dutch? Perhaps if you're Belgian? Not so much overlap with French even though there are influences.
  - pif 9y ago
    > French is really different from Italian... It's just because of their funny pronunciation :-) I was born and raised Italian, and got French nationality as an adult. I was able to read French well before I could understand it.
- vidarh 9y ago
  I think you underestimate the similarities with Italian and Spanish, and overestimate the similarities of Dutch and English because it's easier to notice similarities when you're looking at two foreign languages where it's the similarities that will stand out, than when looking "closer to home" where the differences tends to stand out. Though Dutch and English are really quite similar, they're not all that much closer related than e.g. French and Spanish. During my French-lessons, my French teacher often used Spanish (which none of us knew) as a means of explaining French vocabulary for us by means of demonstrating the transitions in sounds from the latin origins of both, and the same works between French and Portuguese, Italian, Romanian, as well as with many languages further removed from latin that still has plenty of loan words. The same also does work between English and French because of the number of French and latin words in English, but much less so between the other Germanic languages and French. E.g. try to go to www.repubblica.it (a random Italian paper) and cut and paste a paragraph or two into Google translate with French as the target, and look at how many words are similar. Then try to change the target to e.g. Dutch or German, and you'll see far fewer similarities. Switch to English and you'll tend to find something a bit in the middle. It does vary a lot - more formal texts tend to be more similar. I can pretty much straight up read very formal Italian by picking up context, based on French + knowing a handful of other Italian words, but I'd certainly find it much harder to read casual comments.

ekidd 9y ago

> Reaching a B2-C1 level of proficiency. That's certainly conversational, but far from fluent. Consider that for Russian, the passive vocabulary of someone with a C2 proficiency is about twice that of someone with a C1. C1 is good enough for a first-year undergraduate student to be admitted into some of the most competitive universities in the world. (Graduate students, notoriously, can get admitted with less.) Even my French DELF B2 exam certificate would be enough for most French universities, though my first year would have been miserable. To give you a more concrete example, my DELF B2 oral exam required me to draw a presentation topic from a bowl. My topic was "Should Paris institute congestion charges to improve traffic in the city?" I was given ~20 minutes to prepare, with no dictionary and no other resources. I then had to give a 10-minute presentation, with no outline allowed, presenting my opinion and defending it. Afterwards, the examiners spent another 10 minutes asking me questions like, "Yes, your plan would be good for the environment. But wouldn't it hurt the poor?" Obviously, neither my presentation nor my responses were brilliant at B2, but I could do it. (And yes, the DELF B2 may be harder than some other B2 exams.) I think that worrying about "near-native fluency" is a waste of time for most language learners. Nearly everybody would be better served by trying to reach a level where they can socialize agreeably and work professionally. The very highest levels of proficiency normally require years of immersion at school or work. But if all you want to do is hang out with friends, or sign up for a gym, or get a job, or read books for fun, C1 is great. It's just a matter of putting in the hours.

BjoernKW 9y ago
> I think that worrying about acheiving "near-native fluency" is a waste of time for most language learners. Learning a language can be about much more than mere pragmatic considerations like "Will I be able to get my point across to my peers.". Language also is about culture and aesthetics. So, while native proficiency might be a waste of time if you simply want to use a language as a communication tool it becomes a worthwhile endeavour if you see a foreign language as something that in a broader sense helps you to grow as a person. Most non-native speakers probably will never reach that level of proficiency but to quote a French philosopher: "La lutte elle-même vers les sommets suffit à remplir un coeur d'homme." ("The struggle itself is enough to fill a man's heart.")

chupasaurus 9y ago

Laughed pretty loud about learning Russian in 24 weeks for B2 level. In russian schools language course for B2-C1 level is done in 4 years (A1/not-so-A2 is done in elementary school, but it's included in that course IIRC) with minimum of 245 hours per year, 4*245=980 hours. Nowhere near 600.

dougmwne 9y ago
Russian and all the slavic languages are classified at 44 weeks, not 24 weeks. FTA, the hour estimate is 1100, very close to your 980.
- chupasaurus 9y ago
  My bad, I should check my color blindness.

cltlz3n 9y ago

Great comment. I just moved to France 3 years ago, it took me a year to reach B1 level (no classes) and I speak fluent Spanish, so yeah 6 months to have reading and speaking proficiency seems hopeful at best.

davidzweig 9y ago

Professional proficiency could mean almost anything, though. It could require quite a low level of linguistic skill if you are limiting your conversations to a narrow domain, and speaking with a person who also understands the relevant ideas and concepts. In this case you are just 'indicating' some state, as opposed to composing free-form descriptions. 'A word to the wise', so to speak. There are some very useful language materials produced by the FSI on the net, hosted on this site: https://fsi-languages.yojik.eu/ https://fsi-languages.yojik.eu/ The French course in particular is very thorough, and the Chinese looks very good too, although I haven't used it yet. I am making a special audio player for such materials, some info here: http://smallworld.press/ http://smallworld.press/

alisson 9y ago

I think that the main reason people don't learn another language fast is the fear of making mistakes. Kids don't have this fear yet so they learn fast, so the more shameless you are the faster you will learn, besides consistently practicing and wanting to improve.

mbroncano 9y ago
I don't know why this is down voted - I found this to be the case for successful adult learners
- jessaustin 9y ago
  In my experience this is also the biggest obstacle facing older people using modern devices like smartphones. I try to explain that when they're confused they should just poke, press, or swipe something and see what it does. Some older people are simply unable to do that. It's just a machine; it doesn't care if you hit the back arrow a lot! Relatives of mine have written long lists of instructions in preparation for smartphone use on trips. In fairness, this is similar to many young people when forced to drive in less familiar areas without GPS.
  - macintux 9y ago
    I taught a "computers 101" lab with several adult learners many years ago, and I had one student walk out when I told him I simply couldn't teach him exactly what to do in every situation. I felt badly, and I'd probably with 20 more years under my belt be able to help a bit more now, but it's still the same quandry: you can't expect to use any computer/mobile device without experimenting to figure out the way to do something, and there are a lot of adults (I assume some children too) who aren't willing to do the wrong thing.

jdmichal 9y ago

This helps me makes a lot of sense on why German is ranked longer than all the romance languages. Most of the learners in the data set we're probably already familiar with a romance language, and probably with a higher level of formal training than their mostly intuitive knowledge of English.

mullen 9y ago
But German is not a romance language and neither is English. Theoretically, as an english speaker, it should be easier to learn German than French or Spanish (But is not).
- jdmichal 9y ago
  That's my point. If all one has is informal but native English, German theoretically should be faster. Though not as fast as, say, Dutch to German, thanks to the large import of romance vocabulary into English, along with other grammatical drift... However, if one has informal but native English, but also formal training in a romance language... I could see such a person picking up new romance languages faster than German. The romance languages are more consistent with each other than English is with German.

FRex 9y ago

You will also sound very off and instantly recognizable as a foreigner when speaking some of them. I.e. here's Stephen D. Mull[0] speaking Polish: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nRVUZpi660 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nRVUZpi660 He is REALLY good at it for a foreigner. It's 100% understandable (both content as a whole and every single word on its own) but it still sounds clearly off (a bit too soft and very American, Polish accents vary a lot in places but no native Polish speaker has one like his) and he makes some mistakes with conjugations and weird phrasing that no Pole would use. [0] - American ambassador to Poland at the time who also says he has no Polish ancestry so I assume he learned via this American program at the minimum (plus his own practice in Poland).

stoolpigeon 9y ago

With the organization I work for, new Americans arriving in Hungary spend 2 years in full time language learning and at the end of it are at about a 5th grade level of Hungarian.

corg890 9y ago

German matches up with my experience, 8-10 months, 5hrs a week of classes to be professionally proficient. I’m not elite and didn’t have much prior language experience. I did put a lot of effort in, wasn’t easy.

apendleton 9y ago

> * a Foreign Service Officer (read: elite, meritocratically-selected diplomat, usually with a background in humanities, who is probably in command of another foreign language already). This is true, I suppose, but it's worth noting that this list does not differ that drastically from the DLI's, which is the uniformed equivalent to the civilian FSI and trains military translators, and they have no such requirements as far as background, education, status, etc. You can end up a translator just by scoring well on their standardized test in high school.