I am fully dedicated to studying German for the next 6 months. I am at level B1 now.
I want to master level C1 in understanding and speaking.
I hope to get help from people who have had the experience of mastering German before.
What level of intensity should I reach?
How many words should I aim for?
Is there a suggested roadmap to maximize the benefit of time?
Another question: When people talk about 100,000 known words from Lingqs, what is the real coefficient of this number? Do we divide by 10 approximately to reach the real number of words without repeating the verb conjugations?
It depends what languages you already know. If you are a fluent Dutch speaker, it’ll be easier to achieve C1. If you are a fluent Korean speaker, and don’t know any other languages, you’ll have a much harder time, as the vocabulary is very different. It also depends on your study method and how efficient you are in it.
If you take an intensive language course, the Goethe Institut requires 375 hours of coursework to complete both B2 (225h) and C1 (150h). The Humbolt Institut requires 20 weeks, totaling 450 hours of coursework (30 units of 45 minutes per week). You add in some homework in there and you are looking at maybe 600 hours. That being said, you’ll be at the lower of the C1 and you may only just scrape through passing the exam, if not failing it the first time. If you really want to pass the exam, it’d probably be better aiming for 1,000 hours or more. So over a period of six months, this averages five hours per day of efficient, dedicated study. It’s possible, if you don’t have many other life commitments. You would want to book a lot of conversations partners, if you aren’t already living in Germany.
One thing I’ve noticed about LingQ metrics, is that for each language’s mini stories, whatever they choose to put as advanced 2 is equal to around 4.2% of the unique word count in the LingQ mini stories. This can’t be an exact science for lots of reasons, and what known words mean for you depends a lot on your individual study efforts. Whether you study a lot of colloquial or academic language will greatly impact your fields of comprehension.
So 100,000 known lingQs could, with some exaggeration, mean you’re either highly proficient in a specific field of the language, or ‘merely’ that you have a respectable level of comprehension within most fields of the language lacking profound precision or articulation that could make you feel high and mighty. I wouldn’t get too hung up on those. It’s very abstract and highly individual. (especially since most academic language in European languages are heavily related and thus easily inflate your word count)