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Chiming in to say that stating "I learned X language in two weeks" is kind of an ambiguous statement without any real meaning behind it. How are you quantifying

Chiming in to say that stating "I learned X language in two weeks" is kind of an ambiguous statement without any real meaning behind it. How are you quantifying "learned a language"? Are you merely stating that you learned the grammatical aspects or are you claiming communicative fluency? I've heard that to be moderately fluent in Spanish you need to have mastered anywhere between 5000 and 10000 words. Even at the low end of fluency, that would mean you're memorizing approximately 350 words every day - not to mention the upkeep necessary to maintain it assuming you're using some kind of SRS. Do you actually know how many words you know? Speaking as someone who first memorized a substantial subset of the vocabulary of a language (in my case Chinese) before learning to communicate in it, I will also state that one needs a lot of time digesting the language from a real-time auditory standpoint. Knowing the vocabulary is a far step from being able to understand the language spoken to you at a native speaker's pace. I'm not trying to be overly harsh, but unless you're some kind equivalent of a synesthesia Tammett, there is simply no way you came even close to fluency in Spanish in two week. Hell even studying 12 hours a day would only net you 168 hours of language study. On the other hand, if by "learned Spanish", you mean that you know the grammar, numbers, asking for directions, food, simple questions, etc then yeah, 2 weeks is ambitious but definitely doable.

qwerty456127 8y ago
What I mean under having learnt a language approximately is being able to understand the news (a newspaper or BBC-style TV news) and express yourself in any ordinary tense in quotidian contexts. This means having intuitive understanding of the basic grammar and an active vocabulary of 500-1500 words. AFAIK the vocabulary of an average newspaper is always below 1000 words, also Spanish and English have thousands words in common. > Do you actually know how many words you know? No. > Speaking as someone who first memorized a substantial subset of the vocabulary of a language (in my case Chinese) before learning to communicate in it I adore you, I would never manage such a boring way. I really need a constant sense of a practical achievement (not a metric like "now I know n words" but something I can apply like "now my degree of freedom of expression in the language has grown to the level when I can say this and that and the exact phrases were not in the textbook") as a reward to fuel my effort.
- throwaway675309 8y ago
  heh, I get what you're saying. I'm actually horrible at rote memorization but since Chinese is pictographic, each character is composed of radicals (like little building blocks) which can be used to construct prosaic and flowery mnemonics that assist you in remembering the meanings and also makes the entire task less tedious. For me, being able to use quantitative metrics like vocabulary is really helpful. Additionally, I like to think of vocabulary as "ingredients in my linguistic refrigerator". The more I have, the more recipes I can concoct allowing me to express myself better in conversation.

qwerty456127 8y ago

What I mean under having learnt a language approximately is being able to understand the news (a newspaper or BBC-style TV news) and express yourself in any ordinary tense in quotidian contexts. This means having intuitive understanding of the basic grammar and an active vocabulary of 500-1500 words. AFAIK the vocabulary of an average newspaper is always below 1000 words, also Spanish and English have thousands words in common. > Do you actually know how many words you know? No. > Speaking as someone who first memorized a substantial subset of the vocabulary of a language (in my case Chinese) before learning to communicate in it I adore you, I would never manage such a boring way. I really need a constant sense of a practical achievement (not a metric like "now I know n words" but something I can apply like "now my degree of freedom of expression in the language has grown to the level when I can say this and that and the exact phrases were not in the textbook") as a reward to fuel my effort.

throwaway675309 8y ago
heh, I get what you're saying. I'm actually horrible at rote memorization but since Chinese is pictographic, each character is composed of radicals (like little building blocks) which can be used to construct prosaic and flowery mnemonics that assist you in remembering the meanings and also makes the entire task less tedious. For me, being able to use quantitative metrics like vocabulary is really helpful. Additionally, I like to think of vocabulary as "ingredients in my linguistic refrigerator". The more I have, the more recipes I can concoct allowing me to express myself better in conversation.