Printer-friendly version
Well, I have a quandary that is story related and I was hopeful the folks hereabouts could be of some help. I know that everyone learns at a different pace and that every language is different so it's not something that can be easily measured, but I'm wondering how long it might take a person to learn a language when they suddenly find themselves living in a foreign land. Obviously when we're dealing with a total immersion sort of environment it's going to go by much more quickly than it might in say a classroom.
Author:
Blog About:
Taxonomy upgrade extras:
What is a reasonable amount of time to learn a new language?
Well, I have a quandary that is story related and I was hopeful the folks hereabouts could be of some help. I know that everyone learns at a different pace and that every language is different so it's not something that can be easily measured, but I'm wondering how long it might take a person to learn a language when they suddenly find themselves living in a foreign land. Obviously when we're dealing with a total immersion sort of environment it's going to go by much more quickly than it might in say a classroom.
So in the above scenario how long do you folks think it would take for an individual to be able to hold a conversation? They wouldn't necessarily have to have a firm grasp on grammar, word choice or syntax, but they would have to understand and be understood.
And finally how long would it take to become fluent?
Comments
In my opinion learning to
In my opinion learning to think in the other language is the biggest challenge which is why total immersion is so effective. Pronunciation is probably the easiest part of a new language. I have a friend who is half Japanese and living in Texas he brain farts when he hears Spanish because the pronunciation is almost identical and his head is trying to convert the word into something Japanese. The learning time would vary on how desperate the situation is I think. One who has no food or water would get it pretty quick and fluency would probably take a few months although subtleties and correct syntax might take a bit longer.
Upon my liar's chair
Full of broken thoughts
I cannot repair
Learning a language.
Firstly there are two types of brains when it comes to learning. There seem to be those brains that can easily and readily pick up science and mathematics easily and then some brains find it unbelievably easy to pick up languages. There have been instances of people learning a foreign language well enough to function socially in under a week whilst others have lived a lifetime immersed in another country and still failed miserably. (Think of some of the English who lived in India for over 40 years and never spoke Hindi or Urdu.)
There are just too many factors affecting the situation, for example:- related language, hunger, acceptance, social mobility, survival, exposure to multiple languages from an early age, etc, etc.
There are however, definite and confirmed instances of individuals learning a foreign language to complete fluency in under six months. Usually however the other language is a sister language like French and English for example. There are over 3000 words in common usage that are common to both French and English whilst there are over 30,000 words in the OED that are spelt identically in French. (Mind you that's not many when compared to the 1,000,000 words in the OED today.)
Without a doubt, the best way to learn a language is to marry somebody who speaks the language, pillow talk is by far the best language school.
Get learning girl!!
X
Bev.
Absolutely
I have a sort of sponge-based brain, and they just drop into place, so I can't really give advice on how other folk learn!
Language learning
Besides English, I speak Vietnamese and Spanish at some level of competency. I've also put some time into studying French, German, Swedish, Japanese, and Mandarin and have played around with some other languages, just for fun.
Getting really fluent requires daily use, not just study and for people who have the knack (I don't, I'm just good at studying) a new language can be picked up at a startling level of competency in a few weeks! Honest! More likely, a couple of months to reach an everyday competency sufficient for living an ordinary life. Real deep fluency still might take years even for people with the talent.
For people like me who are good at languages but have to actually study, it might take six months or a year in an immersive environment to reach everyday competency and a couple of years to get fluent enough to make public speeches and compose competent prose. Probably more time than that for hard languages (for English speakers) like Mandarin and Arabic.
For people who only have determination and need without any noticeable amount of talent, double those figures or halve them, it's hard to say.
Then there are the unfortunates whose only real time for learning languages was prepubertal, despite adult immersion they never become truly competent let alone fluent in a new tongue.
I know a man who as a child spoke Armenian at home and street Arabic where he lived. He learned cultured Arabic and French in school then emigrated to the US and learned English in his fifties. After twenty years here though, he is merely competent in English, not fluent. But he can still speak the street Arabic he learned as a child. :)
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Learning foreign languages
Contrast if you will, myself and the best man at my wedding. First factor, he grew up in a home that routinely spoke English, French and Polish. He didn't add English until he was about three. I on the other hand, grew up with my mother, who would not acknowledge the we had a nationality beyond "American" until I was in my teens. They say that learning a second , or third language is a skill best learned early, not the language, but the ability to learn foreign languages. Gary speaks a dozen languages, while my academic career was marked by the failure to grasp five different languages. Gary now speaks about fifteen languages fluently, including several totally unrelated to any Indo-European ones. I've seen him gain a very good facility in under a week, and fluency in 3 months of living in the country.
I am by trade, among other things, a recording engineer. I have always known how to listen carefully and completely. It makes me a good mimic, so that I have a great accent, even though I don't understand what I'm saying. I once found myself, alone, in a remote Canadian village where only French and Inuktuk were spoken. I was able to function in a about five days. I functioned very well in Quebecois in about ten. It would have taken me longer in Parisian French. God, I hate the sound of that language. Instead Slavic languages really "sing" to my ear. I hate opera, but go to the HGO whenever they have a Russian opera, just for the joy of hearing slavic languages well sung, especially by Russian basses.
About ten years ago, my wife and I decided to move to Italy. It recently turned out to be a fools errand, and we will end up in Virginia instead. I will miss the excellent, and free, medical system and the tolerance of political views beyond the middle of the road, but that's another story. We started with classroom lessons in Italian and then rosetta stone. Both of these worked very well for her, and not at all for me. We did find, of course that on short, 1-3 week visits to Italy, I gained a massive increase in vocabulary, much larger than hers, in the same time. It did sadden me that I knew that I would never have an adult conversation with anyone except my wife for the rest of my life, as we were the only English speakers in our town. Functioning in a language is one thing. Fluency is another. For me, functioning well is two weeks, fluency is two lifetimes!
Elizabeth Anne Reynolds
(EAR for short)
In my case ...
... it seems a life time. I took 7 'O' levels at 16 back in 1956. My best result was Maths somewhere around 90% with Physics close behind. My worst result was French when I scraped the pass mark of 45%. I remember 'Froggy' Marshall, our French master, happened to be in the school office when I picked up my certificate and he congratulated me :) So I'm OK with techie stuff but rubbish at languages except English. Although I dropped Latin after 2 years I can still parrot a few conjugations and declensions but it made no sense to me. Funnily enough I got quite a good mark for English Language (I didn't take English Literature).
French is still the only language I have any skill with apart from English (never had much trouble with English grammar either) but it's very weak. I can read it better than speak or understand it. However I suppose I'd pick it up quite quickly if I was alone in France for a couple of months. The only German I know is from listening to Schubert lieder so not much use :)
So perhaps you're right Bev. There are different sorts brains and mine's not a language one.
Robi
What is a reasonable amount of time to learn a new language?
If you have those language learning tapes, depends on the product. I'd look into them. http://www.rosettastone.com/ Time Frame--Rosetta Stone claims that 55 hours of their instruction is the equivalent of one semester of college study. Berlitz's online self-study courses allow for up to 2,000 hours of study, while their CDs and the Living Language offerings for sale on Amazon.com vary widely. Read more: A Comparison of Language Tapes | eHow.com http://www.ehow.com/facts_6782312_comparison-language-tapes.... or you can have a translater bot to help.
May Your Light Forever Shine
It depends
If this is someone who is dropped into a completely alien culture, it's going to be hard, but as you say total immersion does help. The problem in situation is that there is no one to work as a bridge between the two languages and the lack of aids such as English to whatever.
It also depends on the tonality of the language. Some have sounds and pronunciations that are difficult for ears accustomed to other tone bases for some to understand. An example is the infamous R and L English sounds for Asians.
As someone who has a hearing problem, age and associated problems can increase the difficulty. If you just can't hear that sound, it's tough duplicate it.
And you have to factor in if this person has every learned a language before. It's a kind of learning to learn thing, and the younger you pick up your second tongue generally, the easier it is learn more.
I for instant never took any language even in high school and never tried until I was an adult. While I learned enough words to get by while in other countries, I never came close to speaking any of them. My poor brains refused to bend that way. Learning disabilities suck!
College German almost sunk me, but I managed to fake enough to pass, and that's after having spent some time there. :)
With a dictionary, a few days can get you to a point you gesture and stumble your way to most anywhere you need to go. Most of that time is learning how to pronoun the words from the print in a mostly understandable fashion. Think the letter J in Spanish for an example.
hugs
Grover
Some people just never do
I tried three different languages until a professor figured out that I couldn't retain it for longer than two or three weeks at a time.
Even fully immersed in Vietnam, I only learned the very basics that were used every day. If I didn't hear a word or phrase on an almost daily basis, I would not understand it the next time it came up in use. It is defined as "Linguistic Inability" by the military and I was given an "Honorable Flunk" so I didn't just get sent to be a cook or a cop and got better choices.
On the other hand, I've known people personally that can listen to tapes for a week or two and speak almost fluently, with only dialects being the tripping stone, at the end of it.
I guess, full immersion is best. If you're good at it, you catch on in no time. If you're fair at it, you'll still catch on. If you're like me, don't go to that country.
Hugs,
Erica
Languages
When I was working South of the Border, I got fairly fluent in Espanole in a matter of weeks.
I was Muslim for 7 years and only learned about a dozen Arabic words. I think that Muslims in the US use Arabic to conceal what they are saying to outsiders.
G
Thanks folks
Thanks folks the responses thus far have given me more or less what I hoped to learn and given me a few other points to consider.
Have delightfully devious day,
It Depends..
It depends on how you go about it and/or how motivated you are and/or what you define as learning.
I can tell you that US Military and/or State Department officials who are going to be sent overseas where they need to speak another language are generally sent to the "Defense Language Institute" for six (6) months, and occasionally longer before being sent overseas. At the end of that time, they are proficient in the language both technically and socially.
This is obviously "faster" than most of us learn languages... But, it's their full time job for that time frame.
The next consideration - you say "dump a person in a foreign country and have them learn. Two considerations there. 1) Does anyone there speak the language of the person being "dumped" who can help translate, initially. 2) is it learning from scratch or does the person have some "high school" training to kick start things.
It makes a big difference where you start, when learning a language. If you don't learn in an academic way, it's more than likely one will think that different tenses for a word are actually different words (like "voy" "vas" "va" etc. for "ir" in Spanish - I go, you (familiar) go and you (formal) or it go.) From scratch with nobody to act as even a partial translator, will take a LOT longer (unless the learnee happens to be a linguist) than if one of these leg ups is available.
Another factor - the more languages a person already knows, the easier it is to pick up another.
Annette
As a graduate of DLI, I can
As a graduate of DLI, I can tell you it varies depending on the language. Also are you looking to have technical proficiency or just conversational ability? Conversational, for someone who is immersed in the language can be fairly quick, in the order of 3 months. To have decent working level would be about 1 month. Fluency could take 3 months for conversational.
http://www.fluentin3months.com/
That site covers someone's adventures in language learning and he reaches conversational fluency in about 3 months with varying degrees of reading ability.
Heather
We are the change that will save the world.
DLI
That makes me recall the number of DLI washouts that flowed into my MOS when I was in the Army. Most had already been cleared for their security clearance, but had a little problem with the language part. This was back at the beginning of the old volunteer Army and recruiters were desperate to fill positions. Some of the poor people who found themselves way over their heads trying to do something they weren't equipped to do very well all because of a guy in green offering very green bonuses.
Hugs
Grover
What was your mos Grover? And
What was your mos Grover? And why so many into it other than clearance?
Upon my liar's chair
Full of broken thoughts
I cannot repair
Many years ago and far away
I was a 96D which was then an aerial photography interpreter. With all the infra-red, FLIR, radar and what have you, it was changed to image interpreter. Since it involved spatial perception and visual stuff, most of the ex-DLI didn't have a problem. Many also went 96B which was order of battle analyst.
Heck I was a washout too. Couldn't take Morse code to save my life which is in retrospect also a language.
As to why I think it was what I said above. That type of job used a different set of talents. I don't remember any who washed out of the Delta's.
Military intelligence jobs does tend to pile on the stress at my first service school, AIT, Advance Individual Training, we had several students attempt suicide. None succeed while I was there, but one was a very near thing. That experience helped me understand Japanese students who also tried to take their own lives because of academic pressures.
My room mate back then used to mumble Russian in his sleep from his time at DLI. He lived and breathed it and yet still failed in the end.
Life is too precious for such things, but when you're enveloped by the moment its hard to see the way out. Sigh...
Sorry for my ramble. :)
Hugs
Grover
I still respond to things in
I still respond to things in Arabic without thinking. Things just come to mind and I say them, then I realize that it is not in English. My wife is busy learning a mishmash of languages thanks to my muttering things or blurting them out in several languages. She is at least a good sport about the fact that sometimes I have no clue what language I am speaking in.
Heather
We are the change that will save the world.
a lifetime
Learning a new language takes a liftime.
Paula
Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.
The Coda
Chapterhouse: Dune
Lots of variables.
By personal experience it would appear that the earlier in life you learn a language, the easier it seems and the faster you progress, and the better you retain the knowledge all your life.
I had the opportunity to be in Germany at the end of WW2 (1946), at the age from nine to fourteen. I don't know how long it took me to learn German, but I did so, and became quite comfortable using it. When we returned to the US, that was the end of my using or learning any more of the language.
In the late 1990s I had the opportunity to travel to Germany again. Within about 2 -3 days I was again able to communicate adequately, and also found that the consumption of some wonderful German beer greatly increased my fluency.
Here's an article on that subject.
There are a lot of variables. Try this article. http://drsaraheaton.wordpress.com/2011/02/20/how-long-does-i...
The short story is 10,000 hours to become fluent. But it's not as simple as that.
Hugs
Patricia
Happiness is being all dressed up and HAVING some place to go.
Semper in femineo gerunt
Ich bin eine Mann
What is a reasonable amount of time to learn a new language?
Individual differences DO matter; the famous Jean-François Champollion learned Arabic in two weeks, chatting in Paris with an Egyptian neighbor; my son learned enough to speak Spanish fluently in five weeks. And when I came to America at the not so young age of forty years, I could understand and speak English (which I had not learned until then) more-or-less fluently in between two and three months.
And the differences and possible similitudes beyween a laoguage you know well and the language you are trying to learn is VERY important. When I came to America I knew French, Spanish, Russian and German, all of which are Western European languages like English. If I had been trying to learn Magyar, Eusquera or !Kosa, I am sure I would have had a much harder time, and taken much, much longer.
And motivation, the will to learn, is decisive. An acquaintance of mine is an expert in languages from Southeast Asia; he says the best students he ever had were those send by the US Army and the USMC; probably because they knew very well it was their necks that were on the line, not just a grade on a transcript. In general sudden and total immersion is a good motivator; when you need to learn, you learn faster.
Ana
Some great comments.
I think it depends on the person.
I read Japanese much better then I speak it but I think it might be more of being afraid for me to ever jump in the deep end like I should. Strangely my retention of Japanese was good, getting back into it after over 10 years and not actively trying to keep it up.
I think to some extent it depends how much you really want to push it. When you get it almost to the point of being a reflex to a comment that can help tremendously(I'm thinking of when I played DDR on Catas at 9 steps and one's a little lowers. People would tell me the pattern and I repeated it till I got it but that took me quite a while.). The physical point is that once you do it enough and know it you will reach a breakthrough though I'm sure my verbal language learning skills are much better then my hand-foot coordination. ;-)
In terms of immersion really jump into the deep end. I know someone who lives in Japan and I suspect his Japanese is for shit because he doesn't try since he has a wife and son who can translate for him. Kinda shameful but I expect that sort of laziness out of him. It sounds like he's making an attempt now which is sad in the fact that apparently classes around him are something like $15 a class, not terribly priced. Heck it might even be cheaper.
So D.A.W. do you want help with Japanese or something? ;-)
For me as it stands I'm looking at multiple languages as a career viewed through the lens of Journalism in doing Political talk. Japanese, Korean, Ainu, Hindu or Hebrew, Kiswahili, Cantonese(for interning in film in HK hopefully), etc. I would like to learn Danae desperately but from what I'm told if you don't hear it as a baby or very young child you might as well give it up since you really won't be fluent in it. I know when I have a kid he/she WILL have a Nanny that speaks said language.
edit: If anyone wants to learn Japanese I will try to help you find resources.