I got hooked on the stories of language learning success. Not the absurd “Fluent in Three Months or Less!” ones, but those which seemed more plausible.
I’m fifteen months into a serious run – 4-5 hrs/day – at French. I’ve certainly made progress, but I can see I am still far from fluency.
You’ve probably seen some of these accounts. What do you make of them?
Here’s one which intrigued me as a French student:
How I learned French from zero to C1 in 10 months / TEF Exam
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3jETmkmUYg
A couple caveats. She’s Russian and has already learned English. After ten months of French she received C1 in reading and listening, B2 in writing, and B1 in speaking. Still impressive, but not C1 across the board.
Her account is not all that clear. I fed her transcript to ChatGPT for a summary:
Step 1: Getting Started
Downloaded Duolingo: A common first step for many when starting to learn a foreign language.
Bought a Textbook: Any textbook in your native language or English will suffice for the beginning. Be wary of grammar and spelling mistakes, which can be harmful for beginners.
Issues with the Textbook:
Unrealistic examples: Phrases like “Le chapeau du roi est jaune” and “Ma camarade Sophie va à sa place” are not commonly used in real life.
Structure: The textbook introduces a rule and then presents exceptions or additional rules in later lessons, which can be frustrating for note-taking.
Study Routine:
One lesson of the textbook per day (20-30 minutes).
Duolingo sessions until the hearts run out (20-30 minutes).
Opinion on Duolingo:
Great as an additional source, but not as a primary one due to limited vocabulary and irrelevant examples.
Useful for practicing listening, pronunciation, grammar, and sentence structures.
Step 2: Preparation
Choosing an Exam: Options included DELF, DALF, and TEF. Chose TEF as it didn’t require choosing a specific level to test for.
Finding Materials: A challenge due to outdated resources and limited availability for TEF preparation.
Focus on Speaking and Writing: Practiced with a person on iTalki, role-playing exam situations and correcting mistakes.
Step 3: Test
Booking the Exam: Scheduled for mid-May, four and a half months after starting to learn French.
Format: Consists of listening, reading, writing, and speaking parts. Speaking involves formal and informal tasks, while writing includes continuing a story and responding to a situation.
Step 4: Increase Difficulty
Daily Routine: Studied 4-5 hours a day, mixing Duolingo sessions, textbook lessons, and activities like watching YouTube videos or listening to songs in French.
New App: Switched to Lingvist for more advanced vocabulary and grammar. It uses sentences from real materials, providing context for the words.
Netflix: Changed account language to French to unlock French audio. Used VPN to access more content. French subtitles don’t always match the audio.
Favorite TV Shows for Vocabulary:
Mad Men: Many episodes and dialogues.
Better Call Saul: Legal-specific vocabulary.
The Crown: Formal language.
Reading: Started with “Harry Potter” series, which increases in difficulty. Noted the frequent use of “le passé simple” tense.
Disney in French Channel on YouTube: Great for grammar and vocabulary. Songs from Disney movies in French with subtitles.
Other Practices:
Wrote down accents in French words hundreds of times.
Repeated after native speakers to practice pronunciation.
Learned linking words and phrases to sound less robotic.
Step 5: Take the Test Again
Second Attempt: In November 2019, 10 months after starting. Received C1 in reading and listening, B2 in writing, and B1 in speaking.
Step 6: Assessing Weaknesses and Strengths
Weakness: Improvisation during language tests.
Strength: Great memory. Used it to memorize dialogues, sentences, and essays.
Preparation for the Next Exam:
Practiced with iTalki sessions, correcting essays and memorizing corrected versions.
Focused on using memorized phrases in various contexts.
2020 Challenges: Due to the pandemic, exam centers were closed, and learning was sporadic.
March 2021 Exam:
Results: Achieved C2 in listening, approximately two years after starting from zero.
Maybe her experience of learning English gave her a boost, maybe she’s a natural polyglot, maybe the CEFR grades aren’t as difficult as I imagine.
I find her results surprising.
I’ll never know if her claim is true or false. There are people that learn languages very fast. There’s also practical shortcuts where a person gets good in certain areas, but remains weak in others. I don’t know if she really passed the CEFR tests. It’s quite possible to make a convincing display of language mastery in a video with editing and reading from scripts.
As soon as someone puts forth a video in that form of “I did X, look at me”, I’m kind of disinterested in what they have to say. It’s like when a stranger comes to me on the street with a story. They approached me. They have some kind of plan. My guard is up.
Even people that are more reserved, like Steve Kauffman, in how they offer language learning advice can only tell me so much. If someone gives me some ideas that sound good, I try them out. If they work, then that’s great. But I figure people’s brains work differently and we learn different ways. So even an honest person describing what worked for them, doesn’t mean it will work for me.
Quite so.
When I started learning French, I assumed it was a straightforward progression. I don’t know French. I learn French. I know French.
Now I know it’s not that simple. I’m quite sure people can game their results as you describe.
*Things are seldom what they seem; *
Skim milk masquerades as cream.
–Gilbert & Sullivan, “H.M.S. Pinafore, Things are seldom what they seem”
Mostly amazing not-true stories.
I now avoid most language videos on YouTube with a few exceptions. Steve Kaufmann is worth watching, even though it is advertising. Richard Simcott too. I like videos in French on language learning and the evolution of language from academic institutions.
One nice aspect of listening to polyglots is that I can see that my French accent is respectable i.e. not native, but good. I have a decent ear for accents, but I’ve never been a good speaker, not even in English, which I first spoke at age 5.
I don’t like language tuition videos, that’s not how I learn. I once signed up for a free ebooklet or some such from a German teacher called Laura. I kept getting offers, 20% off, 50%, hurry, limited duration. Then after the offers expired, I received an email asking me to please explain why I had not taken up the offer. 
She is a wonderfully clear teacher, but it is old style rote memorisation of grammar rules.
If someone learns a language quickly, they are either brilliant, or they do so badly, or they do it well but with a restricted vocabulary, or they are lying to us, and perhaps to themselves. This man has without doubt a special gift for languages:
He is special, but perhaps even among ordinary people there is a variation in ability.
I struggle to understand the lyrics of that video, it makes me feel better about my French song lyrics comprehension. 
This Russian woman has a YouTube channel called Booked Up. Only 1.6k subscribers, not huge, but satisfied. The comments on the video I linked are all positive. Apparently no one doubts her account.
She doesn’t lay things out clearly. Left number is months. Summary:
0 Daily routine: 20-30 minutes Duolingo, 20-30 minutes French textbook.
4.5 Takes TEF exam. Doesn’t report results.
4.5 Daily routine: 4-5 hours – Duolingo, textbook lessons, YouTube videos, French songs, French TV shows. Harry Potter, Disney movies. Practice writing accents to French words.
10 TEF exam: C1 in reading and listening, B2 in writing, and B1 in speaking.
10 Daily routine: Added iTalki sessions, correcting essays, memorizing essays
24 TEF exam: C2 in listening. No other grades listed.
The first four months are about an hour/day of Duolingo and textbook. She increases her immersion to 4-5 hours/day.
Six months later she gets a C1 in reading and listening, B2 writing, B1 speaking. Fourteen months later she is C2 in listening, no report on other skills. She says she has a great memory and has memorized a lot of material.
I find her account evasive and difficult to believe.
I’ve watched a bunch of polyglot videos, and found one recurring theme: real polyglots all use different methods. Once I figured that out, I stopped hoping to find “the best method”, since it is different for different people. I still watch some of the videos, but now my focus is “is this a good method for me to use?”
I tend to discount claims of rapid learning. A person might be in an unusual situation that causes them to learn quickly. But I am not in that situation.
That’s basically the conclusion I’ve come to. It’s why I started the Numbers Game topic.
For a lot of things, even important things, “good enough” is good enough. Aspiring to do the best, most efficient thing all the time has its own costs.
People do learn languages in different ways, maybe not always the most efficient. No matter. They just have to devote enough time to see it through.
Hi everyone, this is my first post on LingQ, i hope it will be useful and interesting for everybody.
This is my brief story: i’m italian and i’ve learn english at the high school, where i passed a b2 exam quite easily, but i’ve barely spoken a single word of english since last summer.
I’ve passed the last 9 years getting better at english only through comprehensible input (i didn’t know that for all that time) and my level got so high than i manage to seduce a french girl who passed a year in australia (if you don’t know, the french people speaks a poorer english than italians, so i was lucky). Obviously i want to know french to communicate better with my gf and with her friends, so i started learning it seriously more or less 5 month ago.
My level now is surely at least c1 for reading, b2 for listening (AT LEAST), a0 in writing (jocking) and more than b1 for speaking (keep on my than i was A0 at the beginning). I don’t speak well by any means but i’ve manage to truly became friend of my tutor on preply beacause i didn’t have any problem to express my opinion and my thoughts about any topic without having to think to much about it.
One important thing: i never, and i mean NEVER, speak with my gf in french because she finds it a bit strange…
Said so, i’m gonna tell you how i’ve made such a great progress in so little time living in italy:
i started with duolinguo but i find it terrible, so i switched to WLingua that i highly advice to anybody now. It gives some detailed explanation on grammar when needed and it introduce you gently to the language at the beginning, no life point like duolingo and so on…
as soon as i’ve got more confident with the langage, i’ve taken the b1-b2 french course on coursera from ecole politecnique that i’ve found very useful because it forced me to write something in french and get exposed to a lot of content.
now i’m taking the c1-c2 course more lightly but i’m going full throttle with lingQ that i find really amazing. In addiction to it, i’ve taken 3 lessons on preply to start to truly speak french
I think i am very lucky to be an italian native in regards to learning french, because vocabulary is not a great problem, most of the writtern word are intellegible.
It’s not the first language that i learn so maybe it can help too.
Ok it’s been a while since i’ve written so much in english so i am a bit fed up of doing so, i will reply without even reading again what i’ve written but i hope it’s clear that is completely possible to reach a quite good level in a fairly short period of time with french.
jt23 bonne chance avec ton apprentissage de la langue !
Thanks for the good wishes!
Perhaps the CEFR levels aren’t as tough as I imagine.
I can get the gist of most French I read. But there are so many secondary/tertiary definitions I miss, strange French expressions (today I learned “de tout poil” which is literally “of all hair” but means “of all kinds”) and odd grammar constructions, that at times I despair that I’m ever going to get this language anywhere near a native.
I’ve come to the conclusion that a lot of language learning is just accepting and learning a usage, and maybe later I will see patterns, maybe not. Some English expressions are nonsensical if you try to take them apart. Thus kick the bucket, over the moon and so on. I find it fun to research the etymology of French phrases, such as avoir d’autres chats à fouetter (to have other fish to fry) which is actually extremely vulgar ! Cacher la merde au chat is taken to literally mean hide the cat poop (sweep it under the carpet), but actually means hide the poop from the cat. And I love words such as se pomponner and décoiffer.
Literally, to have other cats to whip. Vulgar? ChatGPT 4 says its an informal expression for to have other fish to fry.
I think whipping cats is kind of weird, though not necessarily vulgar.
You need to find the etymology of the phrase, not the literal and figurative meanings. I won’t spoil the fun here except to say that it is extremely vulgar. Then again, con, meaning idiot of course, is actually very vulgar too, though most French people do not know the origin.
It has a direct relationship with the painting named the origin of the world.
In the 17th century, when people wanted to show that something was not serious or unimportant, they said "Il n’y a pas de quoi fouetter un chat" (That’s not a reason to whip a cat).
And with time, it inspired the expression: "Avoir d’autres chats à fouetter" which means "To have more important things to do / To have bigger concerns".
Interesting. The explanation that I found is that it literally means to have other women to attend to:
avoir d’autres chats à fouetter — Wiktionnaire, le dictionnaire libre.
Speaking of cats, I saw yesterday that “it is raining cats and dogs” translates to “it’s raining ropes” in French 
I love seeing those differences!
In Wales it rains old ladies and sticks. I think the cold and damp weather isn’t good for the brain.