@EABurgess,
“but I met a guy who completed DuoLingo in Swedish and he really struggled. It took him four years!”
This might be saying more about him than Duolingo 
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I know this place is anti anki, but for real with anki i got fluent way faster.
If you can understand a word when listening or reading but cant remember it when speaking that means you need to practice from your native language to your target language. Basically doing flashcards that way will force you to create the language in your brain when talking.
As far as italki lessons go I tell every teacher to correct every little mistake and word im looking for, and then make flash cards for both. And then obviously you just need to practice speaking them. I speak every one of my flash cards.
Doing this for about 3 ish years has made it so i have zero fear talking to people and can talk almost about anything.
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Honestly, that’s not lazy. We all define ‘learned’ differently. There are people who will tell you they learned Arabic in 18 months, but their “learned” is no more than a weak B1 (at best). As a native English speaker, I’d imagine it’d take many thousands of hours to learn a language like Arabic, maybe even 10k? So yeah, 10 years sounds about right if you’re being consistently exposed to it.
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I do not think time is a useful measurement in the terms of months, years or decades…
For me the measurement that matters is:
How much time did you spend engaged with the language where you just slightly out of your comfort zone? In that context, I started to feel comfortable in regular conversation at 500 hours, and at over 1.000 I am totally comfortable listening and speaking.
that is why it is good if it goes along with a course
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I don´t know! If you´re English and you languages are seen as a punishment at school, it is very hard to find a language course as you have no idea what to look for. All of a sudden people suggest Duolingo as if it will replace a language course and you think, “Why not?” but it really doesn´t. In his situation his wife was Swedish but had almost no understanding of Swedish language rules so couldn´t explain anything and didn´t know what to recommend. It isn´t the end of the world, but to put four years into an app and never get a book/language mother you will end up with very strange results.
I think it can be the same in all extremes, I asked someone with a really massive word count on LIngq how their language skills are and they said “Well, I am good at reading.” People need sparring in order to learn a language and duolingo doesn´t provide that.
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I don´t know! It is about numbers to a degree, how much “load under pressure” do you actually have and how interactive is it. I have seen students picking up languages really quickly depending on how they do it and what their motivation is. The more abstract the harder it will be. If you have a student who moves countries, lets say to Germany and they then have 5 hours lessons a day 5 days a week, that is 25hr minimum of contact time a week, with your sole purpose to learn the language. If you compare that to people who take a class at work 1-3 hours a week, the student has done 1000 hours a year (at least) and the 120 with no guarantee they do anything in the language outside of lesson time. That means in half a year the student has got about 500 hours, something it would take the office worker about 5 years to do!
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Specifically for Spanish:
With about 2-3 hours a day of equivalent to watching easy youtube videos plus anki it took six months till I could understand slowly spoken Spanish and speak very simply. At that stage if anybody spoke at normal speed with normal language I was lost. I also could not understand movies at this point. I’d say I was at about high beginner at that stage.
Then after about another six months of practising an hour daily (ish) with very patient native speakers and (trying to watch) telenovelas I could more or less hold a conversation as long as it didn’t go into anything technical. I still couldn’t understand movies.
After about a year of telenovelas (1-2 hours a day) and at least another 5 hours a week speaking practice Spanish was more or less burned in to my brain.
So about a year and a half to “learn” the language with 1-2 or 2-3 hours a day of effort.
BUT… I still couldnt understand movies.
I kept up the speaking practice (around 5 hours a week) for about five years more or less at which point I could have conversations about anything AND watch movies.
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Right. I decided to learn either Russian, Arabic or Mandarin. I
figured that it was Russian, Mandarin and Arabic in that order of difficulty.
Respect is due to anyone trying to learn Arabic.
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Interestingly I notice that half of them listened to a bunch of podcasts.
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Keep it at everyday. That is the key.
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Bear in mind some languages are easier than others for an English. Spanish is way easier than Japanese.
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Right. Numbers absolutely do mean something. The FSI says it takes about 500 hours of effort for an English speaker to learn Spanish or French. It’s 1100 to learn Russian and 2200 to learn Arabic.
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Look up Extr@ Spanish on youtube. Also look for “TPRS Spanish”. Do those first. When your done a big chunk of TPRS find youtubers with “Slowly Spoken Spanish”.
Do it in that order.
PS: Note that “destinos” looks similar to Extr@ so do that along with the TPRS.
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Ha Ha yeah.
I’m some in intermediate land with Russian.
And it is not good enough for me.
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This is my experience. Being able to “speak” the language takes exactly this amount of time. Movies is the pinnacle.
I’d go for a much lower target.
In Russian for example my target is very, very specific:
I want to be able to understand two TV shows on netflix.
I’m not even attempting movies.
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You gotta stay focused on what’s relevant,
Learn the words and phrases that are prevalent,
Immerse yourself in the culture, that’s the key,
And don’t be afraid to make mistakes, you’ll see.
© Dr.GPT
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Maybe you don’t know but I do!
As I said, it says more about him than Duolingo.
If people navigate the world blaming others for their own lack of success, they run an even greater risk of losing their way. Blaming the educational system at school when he was a boy, his Swedish wife now that’s he an adult, his 4-year use of the Duolingo app, sounds like he is not taking responsibility for his own actions, his own learning.
For a native English speaker, Swedish - like Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese - happens to be one of the easiest languages to learn.
You mention he spent 4 years on Duolingo, do you have any idea how much time per day or week he spent? Are we talking about an hour a day five days a week? Several hours a day? An hour a week? Many hours in one year and relatively few in the next?
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I shifted my focus from reading to speaking and listening. In addition to what I study here, I meet with my Russian teacher twice a week. I am comfortable with simple conversations and I am challenging myself to talk about more complex topics.
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For me it was about six months before I could comfortably listen to music and intermediate podcasts. At nine months I could understand the news somewhat. And now at a year and a half I can understand a lot of El Dollop, a podcast about weird American history in Spanish that’s for native speakers. Almost all of this through primarily listening. I did maybe ten minutes of study a day and then listened to How to Spanish pretty much the rest of the time. I would lay in bed, get high, and listen to it for hours. I really didn’t use LingQ. But now that I’ve been using it for the passed few months and also reading novels my learning has accelerated pretty significantly. I’ve made more progress in a couple months using lingQ and also reading and listening while forcing myself to NOT translate in my head then I ever did in a year and a half. And now I’m also learning Mandarin using LingQ and focusing on reading at the beginning and I’m confident I’ll be much farther along in it than I was in Spanish in the same period of time regardless of the difference in difficulty.
Also, I gave up marijuana. It made it easy to stick with Spanish because I just enjoyed listening to the sounds. I could listen to music all day in Spanish without caring that I didn’t know what they were saying. But now that I’m over the hump of getting comfortable in a second language I know it was doing more harm than good.
My advice overall. Use the mini-stories here and learn songs. You need short material that will stick in your head. I don’t know what type of music you like but Daniela Romo, Amanda Miguel, Yuri, and Jeanette were what I mostly listen, and Manu Ciao. And How to Spanish Podcast, of course. If every language had its own How to Spanish type podcast I’d be in heaven now that learning languages has become more of an ongoing hobby for me.
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