I have done this with Spanish. LingQ made it possible. One day I’m going to finish the article about it.
Technically, I considered myself at “intermediate” rather than beginner when I found LingQ because I had taken Spanish/French in school, but so does everyone.
I have a number of other life things happening at present so I’m just using my Spanish a few times a week at work and random articles I find here and there. Once the dust settles, I plan to use LingQ to do French or Russian next.
You have similar interests to mine (Russian, Spanish, French).
I dare to say I have. My ability to articulate English has improved drastically. Not that my level is top-notch but it’s not that bad, either.
Well you can’t be sure just by checking their known words compared to their LingQs learned. I almost never use the flashcards system and I’m always reluctant to manually move a word from LingQs to known words so I have a very low learned LingQs number. I imagine there are other people like me out there.
LingQ has definitely helped me understand more(currently at 19000 known words), but I’ve still got a long way to go.
Even more so, actually. I took a look at your profile and see that you have Mandarin and Arabic as longer term interests, which I do as well. I’ve put them off farther because I was more interested in finishing the Spanish and taking up Russian and French; and also because I wanted the Mandarin and Arabic capabilities to improve a bit more at LingQ and for Steve to try Arabic. (Getting there on both it seems!)
With regard to whether or not to go French or Russian next: on the one hand, I like the idea of knowing the language similar to French (Spanish) and getting the French “done” right away and becoming trilingual soon. On the other hand, the Russian is less likely to be “confused” with the Spanish because it’s not as close to it and there may be some particular work or travel opportunities available to me with Russian. On the other hand yet again, the French is probably different enough to not worry about confusion, I heard mixing them up is more of an issue with output anyway, and I might not even bother with the travel/work stuff anyway so I might as well do French.
Decisions, decisions.
PS: On your long-term goals, I’m not sure whether you have particular reasons for shooting for those respective passive word counts, but based on the my own experience in Spanish, assumptions for French, and following others in Russian, my longer-term counts will probably be 33-35,000 in French and 90-100,000 in Russian.
Great question!
I have been working on French for some time now (Nowhere near fluent). But I decided to take a break from it and started Russian up again. And I must say Russian is much more difficult than French. But still very doable. Both are so fun! Let us know what you decide.
Oh indeed I shall!
When you have said that you are more interested in finishing Spanish, what do you mean by that?
I mean, when do you think you are done in a language?
And a last one, how long do you think it is going to take?
The specific answers to these questions will vary with the individual learner because each person’s goals for what they want to achieve in the language will be different. However, thanks to Master Steve’s teachings, I do think two general “rules” apply to everyone. 1) No matter what your proficiency level is, no matter how good you are, you can always improve; and 2) No matter what your proficiency level is, no matter how good you are, you will always WANT to be better. In other words, you are never really “done,” learning languages, like any learning, is a lifelong process.
That being said, if you want to learn more than one foreign language, at some point the second foreign language is going to have to get priority attention and the language you were previously learning has to take a back seat. In the past Steve has suggested your time be split at least 80%-20%. In my case that would be 80% work on Russian or French and 20% on Spanish.
Now, more specifically to your first question of how do you know when it’s time for that first foreign language to take a back seat: I think it is when you have met your goals in that language. For me and my Spanish, that was, at a minimum, fluency. I wanted to be able to converse comfortably with my Spanish-speaking peers on a wide variety of personal and professional topics of interest to me. I also wanted to be able to understand a lecture on a professional topic of interest to me, watch movies and telenovelas, documentaries, talk shows, and the news (especially the Mexican weather girls). I wanted to be able to read the newspaper, novels, and nonfiction books on topics of interest. I can do all that now.
But remember, you can always get better, and want to be better, so I wanted to find some numerical, definable benchmark by which to measure myself, as well as to know when it was okay to say “I’m done.” For me that was the Advanced Level 3 All Time LingQ stat goals, and then some of my own: 33,200 Known Words; 45,000 LingQs made; 500 Hours of Listening; 16,000 words of Writing, 50 Hours of Speaking; and especially 2 million words of Reading.
Most importantly, I wanted to spend enough TIME with the language, so I counted every hour of my learning, eager to put in the 960-1,000 hours required to learn Spanish for an English speaker as measured by the Defense Language/Foreign Service Institute. (24-25 weeks, 40 hours of study). Right now I’m at 1,300-1,500 hours.
So, in summary, I’m there. The only real things left on my Spanish to do list are taking a solo trip to a Spanish speaking country (as a reward and vocabulary activation effort) and maybe passing a C level DELE exam. I’m not sure I’m going to bother with the latter, the diagnostic test, which I took “cold,” put me at Level C1.1-C1.2. Since I have a lot of other things going on right now, and have put all language activities on the back burner for the moment, I have some time to decide whether I want to pursue those last two items or move on.
Thank you for your thorough answer.
Sorry to reply so late. I’ve been wrapped up in work. It doesn’t look like you’ve started French yet, but I think when you do start you’ll be surprised at how fast you will fly through it. The first week or 2 may seem slow but after that it’ll be smooth sailing. On the other hand, Russian will be an uphill battle for a long time, but it can be a great gateway into other slavic languages. With that said, I think you could easily take on both languages simultaneously. The time spend in Russian will need to be fully engaged in order to make good progress, and when you do French it will feel much more relaxed. French‘s similarities to English and Spanish make it feel like you’re learning only 1/4 of a language.
Regarding Arabic and Chinese, I probably won‘t even start them for a couple years (or until after Russian, Spanish, and French have reached Advanced 2). Both languages have aspects that I’m not crazy about. I generally don’t like the sound of spoken Chinese, and I don’t like the large variation in spoken dialects of Arabic. However, I think reaching an advanced reading level in both would be fun.
Other than these 5 languages, I have a little interest in German (because of Schubert lieder and love of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms). A language that I think could be oddly fun if I can find enough study material would be Cherokee or another Native American language. Also Japanese has growing interest for me.
I have not used this site so I have no idea in terms of the quality and quantity of the resources listed but it could be of interest to you if you are interested in Native American languages.
Wow thank you! I’ll add this to the archives.
Good to know. Thanks for the encouragement!
Yes, I can attest to this from going to Ukraine and having many Skype lessons. I still have a long ways to go.
LingQ is great but needs to be augmented by something like Italki for you to become conversational.
I am a premium member here since 2013, and I’ve learned a bunch of languages to different ‘levels of fluency’ here on LingQ.
I’ll give you my best ‘success story’:
I started Polish here from scratch to fluency, it took me around 4-5 years I think.
Importing interesting content to LingQ has been the most effective way for me.
Besides that, making Polish friends and watching Polish content on the internet really helped me out aswell.
I ‘enjoyed the ride’, the whole process of learning has been just as fun as ‘reaching fluency’.
A few months ago I even decided to move to Poland, and the language has never been an obstacle since my arrival here.
Very impressive!
How is the Assimil German course? I thought about pulling the trigger and buying it, but I’ve not yet.
I thought “near native level” fluency was ~10K words? I don’t understand how you would still have a “long way to go” if you have almost doubled the average fluency number.
This is my first time learning a new language so excuse me if this is incorrect.
Cheers!