How long did it take you to learn a language?

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2 hours active - 1 active listening/1 hour hunting for known words
6 hours+ passive listening to content that I already actively listened to.

In the reality, it would take about 4x the amount of work just to get a 1x amount of result in a easy language such as spanish for ex. In this case, I probably have to reach 10,000 hours total if I want full fluency in the major areas:

Speaking fluency - low intermediate (just started italki)
Reading fluency - low advance
Listening fluency - low advance
Writing (typing fluency) - high intermediate

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22

2 hours active - 1 active listening/1 hour hunting for known words
6 hours+ passive listening to content that I already actively listened to.
I listen while I’m at work too so that’s how I get the 6 hours

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I’m new here - but I’m not new to language learning. I’ve been learning Russian for three years with poor results. I decided to ask my language exchange partners for the secret: how long did it take them to learn English and what precisely did they do…

  1. Roman - Businessman
  • Time to fluency: 1 year to fully fluent conversation in English, listens to any podcast and understands most words, can’t write in English, still getting to grips with sayings/slang.
  • Method: Every evening after work he read a book on politics for two hours and he didn’t care that it wasn’t a beginners book. Then at 3 months he listened to an interesting podcast on politics every night, and continued reading. At 1 year he speaks with a conversation partner in English, every evening for one hour, with a full afternoon of back to back conversation on Sunday (not sure how long this phase was, but I started speaking to him when he was one year in).
  1. Igor - School teacher
  • Time to fluency: 1 year to fully fluent conversation in English, listens to any podcast and understands most words, can read and write in English, still getting to grips with sayings/slang.
  • Method: Every evening after work reads a history fiction book, particularly likes Bernard Cornwell Warrior Chronicles, and started with this series as a complete beginner. Then at 3 months, spoke with 2 - 3 conversation partners per evening and if free time, also on a weekend.
  1. Nikolai - IT Technician
  • Time to fluency: Set a daily schedule to learn English when he found himself out of work. Six months to fluency.
  • Method: Morning routine - grammar book. Achieved B1 at 3 months and B2 at six months. Afternoon - reading a variety of interesting books including novels/detective stories. Spoke to 2 - 3 English people per day, noted down all phrases he didn’t know, put them in flashcards, and knew them for the next speaking session. Now works as an English speaking IT technician…
  1. Dima - Full-time PhD student
  • Time to fluency: 18 months to conversational fluency. Enjoys reading, can watch most movies and listens to podcasts.
  • Method: Likes to read English boy stories such as Gulliver’s Travels, but also loves reading Harry Potter. Watches USA videos about air/car/boat crashes obsessively (no idea). Watches quiz shows, favourite is ‘The Weakest Link’. Also likes to read about IT and goes to sleep every night clutching an IT book in English… Speaks with a language partner every evening and hates writing in English.

I noticed my language exchange partners placed a high importance on lots of reading, and using real materials that interested them. I decided in January 2023 to do things differently after seeing my language exchange partners excellent progression. I read about language learning theories, which led me to this site. And I’m also copying my Russian language exchange partners methods beginning with reading real stuff. I’m excited about the next stage of language learning and I’m feeling positive about achieving my goals. I hope this post is useful :slight_smile:

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24

Thanks for such a thorough response! It looks like they all have reading and speaking with someone in common!

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Thank you !!

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Thank you !!

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Thank you !! Yes I see a lot of people are consuming books or movies/content. What is Destinos? I wanted to start watching this 90s spanish show my friend recommended but I can’t find it anywhere !

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damnnnn 8 hours a day!! good for you!

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Thank you !!

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Thank you !! Yeah my reading is pretty good but then I put a movie on and they talk so fast I can barely catch anything LOL

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Thank you !! Yeah I find a lot of words are similar & I took French in school cause I’m Canadian & even though I’m not fluent, a lot of words overlap !

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Thank you !! That’s amazing! Do you import the words into LingQ? Or how do you read "sentence mode withsubtitleS?

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This is so useful! Thanks for this!

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That’s probably Destinos that your friend recommended. It was made sometime in the early 90’s (so the fashion styles are funny, which is hilarious to me, and the video quality isn’t very good, but that’s not important). It’s a 52 episode Telenovela, each episode is 26 minutes with a review episode every 10 episodes. It’s all in Spanish (except for a little bit early on explaining what it is). It starts out with simple Spanish and deliberately creates strong context so you can understand what’s going on. The Spanish gets more complicated as it goes on… I watched the entire thing through 4 times then branched out from there(I understood more each time though. But there wasn’t lingq back in those days with lots of good beginner content). But I could already understand French and Spanish is very similar. You might want to watch 10-20 episodes, then start over. Start over if you ever feel like you’re totally lost and not getting anything out of it, that’s how I would approach it (but you come up with your own way, be sure to check out the lingq library). You can find Destinos either on learner.org (it’s official home) or on youtube here
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmgeOynOoiri9KP91GIbMrFERzGEpJAIL/

You can find the transcripts here
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1PbzA-AsLM1IMyrz6oPCynSSvyA3ZjKo-

They’re in a weird format, so it might be “fun” importing them into lingq (Maybe I’ll give back to the community and try to import them and share them, if I find the time).

At some point you’ll definitely want to do the lingq ministories, they’re excellent.

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cool dude

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Brazilian portuguese, but I can understand european portuguese, spanish and a little italian now just with my brazilian portuguese.

I did like 2 2 hour sessions of studying a day, and about 1 to 2 hours of anki flashcards, about 3 italki lessons a week, and then listening all day probably about 4 - 6 ish hours of listening.

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Have any tips to activate passive vocabulary to usable active vocabulary more efficiently when you’re speaking with your Italki teachers?

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For a beginner Mondly is far better than Duolingo. I will say Duolingo can supplement courses and other ways of learning, but I met a guy who completed DuoLingo in Swedish and he really struggled. It took him four years! He would have been far better off taking an online course, getting some books for learning Swedish, then finding an interest he has that he wants to pursue in Swedish. For the time put in, Duolingo gets very little real results.
Spanish is so simple to learn when it comes to resources, you have BBC Spanish service, you have culture like THOUSANDS of songs, you have books, and you have a native speaker population who aren´t really annoying when it comes to you making mistakes. Some people say “oh you can learn Spanish really quickly” but that is nonsense, it is a really complicated language, but due to Spanish speakers generally being friendly, happy you have an interest in their language and kind hearted, they make the effort to think “what they probably mean is…”
If you have hobbies that go alongside Spanish culture like dancing or music it will make it about 10 times easier.
When it comes to Lingq you need to decide what you like in your native language, then find articles (wikipedia, how to guides, Improve your Spanish pronunciation using YouTube) and really start hitting the subjects you already have some understanding of. That makes it so much faster than getting involved in abstract subjects.
Don´t get too caught up in the grammar until you have a good understanding of vocabulary, otherwise you´ll be hitting your head into a wall for a long time. I had an ex who was Spanish and her English sometimes got held back because she was really stubborn when it came to why Spanish grammar rules didn´t apply in English. Something about the verbs to be and why English says it is. It took her ages to get to grips with “it is, it´s, its” but when you let go of these small things you will progress to a point where later you can answer these questions.

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39

I’m a bit lazy so it’s taken me ten years to learn Arabic, although Lin has made it abundantly easier.

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The problem that I had with Duolingo is that I was trying to learn Hebrew, Hindi, Chinese etc, y’know languages that use different scripts andromeda the first quiz, it was testing me on characters that it hadn’t even taught me yet and then penalised me by removing my hearts/lives when I made a mistake, as though they think I’m stupid enough to purchase more hearts/lives, so I gave them a one-star rating.

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