Hi there, how many hours do you think it takes to go from A1 to B1 in chinese ? How many words do you think one have to know to be around B1 in chinese ? 2000 ? 3000? Is Linqg accurate on this ?
2 Likes
Based on what I have read and experienced I would say about 2000 hours of active study plus a ton of listening time.
1 Like
What’s your experience with Japanese? Should be similiar or maybe even a little bit easier, right? I got to a 1000 in six months with maybe an hour a day (I use Lingq while commuting), mostly reading, very little listening. I feel like the language doesn’t seem that strange as at first, but I am WAAAY off from even A2. I suspect to get from zero to B1 at my pace would be 1,5-2 years. 3000-5000 known words?
I’m picking words faster now, but it’s still an uphill battle. I consider getting in touch with a teacher to practice some speaking and/or going though some book that teaches standard stuff like going to restaurant, asking for directions etc. I am also tempted to stick with Lingq and seeing how far I can take it:) I feel like I need one solid push, maybe some 6 months more to get in a much more comfotable place with Chinese. I don’t expect B1, but at least I should learn most of the most frequent characters.
By the way, I’ve hit some interesting plateaus and I wonder if you had the same experience in Japanese. First tough moment was one month in, around the first 100 known words. I had a feeling that I am just painting pages yellow and that I am not learning anything. What helped me immensely was when I got my hands on a list of 3000 most frequent charactes. To my total suprise that I kept scrolling page after page and I discovered that I have at leas some familiarity with most of early stuff. I really didn’t expect that. I thought I was wasting my time.
Another wall was at 500. By that time I’d read through all the ministories and was fishing for content. I realized that getting to a 1000 would take still a lot of work. It tured out that going back to some easier, elementary stuff was a great help at that time. Again, it was a pleasant suprise - I’ve found confirmation that my work has paid off and I was noticably more confident in engaging with that type of material.
1000 words is also a rough spot for me. I would like to comfortably follow Chinese news and tv some day, but I don’t have a short-term goal right now. However, the initial hurdles were MUCH bigger. I use to look for purpose, now I am looking for content:)
1 Like
known words would probably be around 15,000 if I were to guess. This matches up pretty close to the completion of Intermediate 2 on LingQ with some extra thrown in to account for the high amount of redundancy. It also depends on what your LingQ habits are like. For example I dont count most numbers (including numbered items)/fractions or many proper nouns as known words. If you mark everything as known the total words may be a bit higher but if you choose not to mark many items as known that you view as redundant the number may be less.
5 Likes
While the numbers are different for everyone, I happen to be on a B level at 15k. At 10k+ I started to become somewhat of an “independent user”. However, some people might be better at speaking than I am while at a lower word count. With 5000+ in Japanese I can barely form sentences.
2 Likes
It took me roughly 1.5 year with japanese to reach B1. On lingq I was maybe at around 3/4k known words but I use a lot of other sources, not just lingq…So not everything is counted…
I think I should be able to reach B1 within a year max in chinese since I’m already familiar with most of the characters and I have a very basic knowledge of chinese grammar and I will be living in China…but idk if it is realistic or not that’s why I’m asking.
Forming sentences is always really hard in japanese, I got an N1 now and even then it is though to form more complex sentences.
1 Like
Yeah, 2000 hours is probably about right. If you know Japanese is will help you comprehend reading more quickly, but it won’t help your listening or speaking at all. Similar to my situation with Cantonese. I could read fairly well in Cantonese, but speaking and listening were another matter.
2 Likes