4 ms·

Perfect example. French and English are not in the same "larger family". French is a Romance language and English, while influenced by French, is a Germanic lan

by zcw100 7y ago

Perfect example. French and English are not in the same "larger family". French is a Romance language and English, while influenced by French, is a Germanic language. Learning it in 25 weeks depends on your definition of learning. You might be able to communicate basic ideas in 25 weeks but very few people are going to ever master a language in that time. The same goes for programming languages. The syntax may be easy, depending on your language of choice, but mastering it is another story.

thrower123 7y ago
Many of us are no doubt coding in the equivalent of trader's pidgin - good enough to get the job done on a day-to-day basis, but not really mastery. There's more than enough examples of people writing C or Java in other languages.
AshamedCaptain 7y ago
They are in the same "larger family" in the sense they even use mostly the same structure and alphabet. Compare with Korean, which will surely require more than a couple of months. The CEFR/EU consider you only need around 800h to reach Advanced/C1 french level as an english native speaker, which is around 30 weeks full time. That is way more than "communicate basic ideas", which is more like an A. In fact, the oft-shared [1] map from the US' FSI considers than 24 weeks is enough for a US diplomat to reach _proficiency_ in French. [1] https://img.theculturetrip.com/1440x/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/language-difficulty-map.png https://img.theculturetrip.com/1440x/wp-content/uploads/2017... I think people seriously understimate the amount of hours a single month has. Programming languages are much easier to learn. Very likely you can even memorize the entire specification of your average programming language (save for a couple exceptions) in such time. Which I wouldn't do to learn a language, but just saying to prove the point.

4 ms·

Perfect example. French and English are not in the same "larger family". French is a Romance language and English, while influenced by French, is a Germanic lan

by zcw100 7y ago

thrower123 7y ago
Many of us are no doubt coding in the equivalent of trader's pidgin - good enough to get the job done on a day-to-day basis, but not really mastery. There's more than enough examples of people writing C or Java in other languages.
AshamedCaptain 7y ago
They are in the same "larger family" in the sense they even use mostly the same structure and alphabet. Compare with Korean, which will surely require more than a couple of months. The CEFR/EU consider you only need around 800h to reach Advanced/C1 french level as an english native speaker, which is around 30 weeks full time. That is way more than "communicate basic ideas", which is more like an A. In fact, the oft-shared [1] map from the US' FSI considers than 24 weeks is enough for a US diplomat to reach _proficiency_ in French. [1] https://img.theculturetrip.com/1440x/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/language-difficulty-map.png https://img.theculturetrip.com/1440x/wp-content/uploads/2017... I think people seriously understimate the amount of hours a single month has. Programming languages are much easier to learn. Very likely you can even memorize the entire specification of your average programming language (save for a couple exceptions) in such time. Which I wouldn't do to learn a language, but just saying to prove the point.