Hi there, Steve Kaufmann here.
Today I want to talk about how long it takes to learn a language.
It's a question I get all the time.
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So I get this question quite often,
how long does it take to learn languages in general?
Which is a very difficult question to answer, or how long does it
take to learn Spanish or Chinese?
So my first reaction is, what's the hurry.
And I'll explain why.
Now there are some evaluations by authoratative, uh, sources
of information like the American Foreign Services Institute,
and I'll leave a link in the description box and you can look up
how many instructional hours they think is necessary, or based on their
experience is necessary, for an English speaker to learn different languages.
And you will see there that obviously languages that are closer
to English that share vocabulary with English, uh, are easier, you
know, French, Spanish, and so forth,
even German.
Languages that are more different from English take significantly longer.
And there's an indication there of how many hours are required.
Now I have a few problems with that and I'm going to go through those.
First problem is their evalua...
or their, uh, you know, estimate of how long it takes
is based on instructional hours.
All of my experience in language learning is that what you do outside the
classroom is, or can be, more important than what you do in the classroom.
Because as MAnfred Spitzer famously said, got his book here, uh,
language learning takes place in our brains, not in the classroom.
So just looking at instructional hours to me is not a good indication of how
long it takes to learn a language.
So that's point number one, point number two is, you know, to me, language
learning is a continuum, you know?
Yes you start at a certain point, but you never finish.
Um, There is no language that I speak, other than English let's say where
I don't worry about mistakes I make, but there is no sort of second, third,
fourth, fifth language that I speak as well as I would like to speak it.
I make mistakes in all of them.
So, but I enjoy them.
So, you know, how long does it take to achieve what becomes the question?
And if you enjoy the process of language learning as I do, does it really matter?
You will learn as quickly as you learn.
I think for example, of my wife who enjoys playing the piano,
she's been at it for years.
I don't know, 20 years.
She learns on her own.
She enjoys it.
I hear her music in the house.
I'm happy.
I enjoy listening to it.
She's no concert pianist.
She is slowly improving, but the whole process to her is enjoyable.
Otherwise she wouldn't do it.
I'm much the same, even in languages, the most recent languages that I'm
learning like Persian and Arabic.
I've been at it now for quite a while.
It's amazing.
It's it's two, three years.
Um, I enjoy listening to those simple mini stories and picking up on something,
picking something out, noticing something that I hadn't noticed before.
I enjoy the sensation of being able to understand a podcast in Arabic or a
story about Iranian cuisine in Persian.
But I'm a long way...
and I enjoy, if I happen to find a checkout person at the supermarket who
speaks Arabic or Persian, and I can speak to them in that language, I'm very happy,
but I'm enjoying the whole process.
And I am still a long way from being fluent.
Even that term "fluent" is a little bit subjective because some people
are motivated to want to speak
and to say even simple things, even if they don't understand
what the other person is saying.
I enjoy what I'm able to do in Arabic and Persian, which is listening
to things and reading things.
There aren't that many people that I can speak to, I'm not going to spend
my evenings out, looking for people that I can inflict myself onto so that
I can practice my Persian and Arabic.
So it depends also on what our goals are.
I was in some discussion and the people who were involved in language
instruction were talking about interlanguage, which is a concept that
language teachers or linguists of the academic variety have come up with.
And it sort of refers to the fact that as we learn a language, you know, when we
begin we're, we're very much dominated by our native language or a language we know
well, and we can gradually transition into a situation where we more naturally use
the target language.
So while we're in that transitional period, the, the sort of academic, the
teachers, they talk about interlanguage where the native language is influencing
the language that we're trying to learn, but that's almost always the case.
There's nothing special about that because the whole process of learning
a language is to gradually transition to a situation where you can naturally
think a naturally use the new language.
I mean, uh, I have always done business with non-native speakers of English.
They have the trace of their native language.
So Germans say "I have been living in, uh, Canada since many years"
which of course is not correct.
English speakers speaking French, they have trouble,
even those who speak very well, they make mistakes in gender, for example,
or they'll make other mistakes that reflect their native language.
It was quite amusing to me...
i, again, I follow different people on Twitter.
And there's one Twitter account, which talks, uh, which has something to do with
modern foreign language instruction in the UK, and apparently in the UK for what
they call the GCSE, which is a general certificate for secondary education,
they have come up with a list of words that someone should know and
different sort of intricacies of grammar that people should be tested on in
order to get their GCSE certificate.
One of which was "joue du" and "joue au", so "joue du"/ "joue au".
In French when you play, when you play an instrument it's "joue du piano".
When you play a sport, "joue au football", whatever, it's "au".
Ah, okay.
Minor point.
So you're gonna really mark down a student who communicates well, who
understands well, because they didn't touch on these specific grammar points
that some bureaucrat has decided should be the criteria for, uh, either
passing someone or not passing someon?
It's ridiculous.
Learning a language is a continuum.
Hopefully we can enjoy it.
Uh, the objective is comprehension, to understand more and more to acquire
more and more words to gradually get enough confidence in the language.
So then we can have meaningful conversations.
So, but if people are looking for some kind of rule of thumb, some
kind of, um, you know, encouragement that it's worth the effort,
my experience has been that for languages that are similar to ours with the same
writing system, with a lot of common vocabulary and if we're motivated, whether
we're in a classroom or learning on our own, I think that in three months you
can make a breakthrough, three months.
On the other hand, if we're dealing with a language where the writing
system is different, in the case of say Chinese or Arabic or Hebrew, or,
uh, you know, Korean, very different.
If there's essentially no common vocabulary, then to reach that sort
of breakthrough point where you feel now I've really achieved something
and I'm not talking about just being able to say a few things, you can
do that after a couple of days, I'm saying you have enough of a sense....
now, maybe you understand some of the mini stories.
You have that confidence: I'm going to make it.
That can take six to nine months in these more difficult languages.
And it can seem at times as if we're not getting anywhere.
And I can remember in Russian in Czech now in Arabic, in Persian, it
seems that I'm forever, you know, treading water, spinning my wheels.
And yet that's not true.
If we continue with the language, we eventually improve.
And so the, the key is to enjoy the process, to be satisfied with
whatever level you have achieved.
Now, obviously, if you have to pass the GCSE then, you know, in addition to your
reading and listening and enjoyable study of the language, you may want to get a
hold of a list of the particular points of grammar that they're going to test you on.
Or the particular, the particular vocabulary list, the TOEFL list, but
by and large, the learning pro...
and that's specific only for the exam, because when it comes to learning the
language in order to be able to use the language, to communicate with people, the
key is not to worry about how long does it take but rather to find a way to enjoy
the language, to engage with enjoyable content, to give yourself credit for what
you have achieved and simply stay with it.
And you will continue to improve as long as you continue doing those things.