How Long Should it Take to Learn a Language?

Wow that made me lol – thank you 🙂

Seriously, 10 hours a day? Back to back? For 72 days? You’ll either be fluent or suicidal. I’m on a much slower pace – for me it’s important to find enjoyment in it to reach a point where I look forward to plowing thru those verb conjugations again. Can’t do it on willpower, shame or guilt.

Wow, 10 hours a day. Good for you! Just imagine if you could do 20 hours a day – that’s only 10 short hours more per day. You’d be “done” in just a few weeks.

I’ve only tried to learn one second language, Spanish. I have put thousands of hours into it, listening to tapes, stays of up to three months in language schools in Mexico, Guatemala and Costa Rica. Plus for the past ten years I read for pleasure only in Spanish, e.g. the entire Harry Potter series, every book written by the prolific detective story writer John D. McDonald. I’ve read approximately 5-10 books per month in Spanish for ten years. Yet after all this I can’t say I’m truly fluent. Unlike most American students of Spanish I can usually get the subjunctive right, although I’m still never sure when in the past with the adverb phrase “despues de que” I need subjunctive, when the indicative, and when I can get my choice. The bottom line is that becoming truly fluent, i.e. like an educated native speaker is almost impossible. I read an interesting study that concluded that most people, even after years living in a Spanish-speaking country, are stuck somewhere between levels 2 and 3 on the Foreign Service Institute scale. People at this level can have conversations on most topics, but they are mutilating the language with a plethora of grammatical mistakes, strange sentence structures, and unusual word choices. Think of the gadzillions of nuances in English that most immigrants never pick up. E.g. “Gotcha!” can mean that you caught someone doing something they shouldn’t, but it can also mean “I understand you.” Partly people get stuck because of what’s called fossilization, which is when a person get “fossilized” on a particular error, e.g. misusing a verb tense, and never improves, despite living in country in a sea of native speakers. To correct fossilized errors is extremely difficult and takes focused training. Use a sports metaphor, like a quarterback who keeps leaving the pocket too soon. The only fix is if the coach drills and drills and drills him. The other reason people don’t advance is simple mathematics. There isn’t enough time. Estimates are that a reasonably educated native speaker of English has a vocabulary of 20,000 to 40,000 words, and I’ve seen higher estimates. So how long would it take you to match a native speaker’s 20,000 words if you could learn a word in 5 minutes and remember it perfectly forever? 1,666 hours, or 208 eight-hour days. Whew! And of course no one can memorize words that fast and hold on to them. Even if you memorize the simple “flash card” meanings, some words will have dozens of meanings depending on context and “helping” words. Think about “gotcha.” The bottom line is that you’re unlikely to ever achieve true fluency. My own unscientific impression is that the 480 hours to reach “basic fluency” is about what you need to ask where the bus is and then not understand the answer! Think about it. If you can recognize and grammatically understand 500 words, and 2,000 words are commonly used in everyday speech, you’re only going to understand 1/4 of what you hear, probably not enough to understand. It’s been my experience that, even though I have a large vocabulary after so much reading, that missing only one or two words in a sentence is enough to get me completely lost. “It sounded to me like Juan said his sister threw a baboon off the patio, but that doesn’t make sense.” My advice is to have realistic expectations. If your goal is to communicate basic needs while traveling, that should be doable with a few hundred hours of study and quick access to an internet dictionary on your phone. But if you want to be mistaken for an educated native, that’s a lifetime slog. Think about it, how long does it take for an English speaker to become a college-educated speaker in his/her own language?