Disclaimer I tell you how you can calculate how your language learing aptitude improves over time. This is through a lot of intuition, research, but it’s still my own opinion and needs to be taken with a grain of salt.
Language learning aptitude myths:
Myth 1: Your language learning aptitude is set in stone
Myth 2: Your language learning aptitude is the same for every language
Myth 3: Your language learning aptitude is based on how quickly you can start speaking a language
Myth 4: Your language learning aptitude is how good you are at learning vocabularly
Myth 5: Your language learning aptitude is how good you are at memorizing grammatical rules and being able to do exercises based on such.
Here is the liberating truth. I’ve taken a basic language aptitude course (trust me basic courses aren’t that much different from the expensive government ones).
And they test you on your natural ability to be able to connect your native language to a language you are unfamiliar with:
Lets pretend you’ve never learned French.
For example: What is the French word for pig.
is it for the French a) chat?
b) Boeuf?
c) porc
d) cygne?
e) mouton
Lets say your like okay porc sounds like pork…so that must mean pig. CONGRATULATIONS YOU HAVE DISPLAYED INCREASED LANGUAGE APTITUDE.
They will give you questions like guess the meaning of these foreign words.
Use this foreign language sentence to make a new sentence using the words below…(i.e tests your ability to use phrases your already familiar with, to create new sentences and stuff, without having to learn grammar)
What does your new sentence mean (they will put a really obvious English cognate in there, and it will be multiple choice)
Select the Chinese character corresponding with the English word. I got them all right, simply because I selected whatever character looked like what I was visualizing in my head…
Like I said language learning aptitude is about being able to see similar connections between your own language and the target language.
Use the alphabet key to guess the meaning of these Russians words that are cognates for English.
SO HERE’S WHAT YOU NEED TO GET FROM THIS:
If language learning is about your ability to make connections between languages, then it stands to reason that your aptitude for a language close to your native tongue is going to be a lot higher. I know this is common sense but it needs to be stressed.
Second it needs to be stressed that the more you learn a language, the more connections you form in your brain, and thus the better your language learning aptitude gets for languages in that same family.
Lets take the Romance family.
Lets say French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Esperanto, Romanian,
You could start off with a low language learning aptitude, and learn a so called easy language like Esperanto and making those connections in your head would bring your language aptitude up. And it would get better and better.
Your brain picks up patterns naturally, and that’s why you should NOT be surprised when you only spent 4 weeks on Spanish, yet were able to take months off your Portuguese just by learning Spanish for 4 weeks.
You have to realize that language learning aptitude develops quicker than your ability to actually speak the language; because of your brains ability to recognize patterns, even if it’s not sure how to get the words out of your mouth. Then once you get to a certain level in your target language, your language learning aptitude is so good, you can make connections across your target language, that make perfect sense; and not in just your native language.
I’m going to give you an example of possible gains someone can make. Lets pretend this person is a low aptitude language learner for the Romance families. We will call him Lee. This information is taken from the FSI Language aptitude tables.
It takes Lee 720 hours of learning French before he can pass his C2. Lee is Chinese and so he has a low aptitude because French is completely different from his own language.
Someone with average aptitude…i.e a native English speaker, where French is the first language they are learning will only take 600 hours. If French is the second romance language they are learning it will only take them around 480 hours.
I.e 4-8 whole months less at an hour a day.
However once Lee has learned French, he has made so many connections in his mind, that his language learning aptitude increases so that when Lee went to learn Spanish it only took him 480 hours to pass his C2 in Spanish. That’s 8 whole months less.
I have a special way of calculating how your language learning aptitude can increase over time. But it’s very complicated and I would need time to put it on a different post. And to really simplify it, so you could understand it, be able to use it, and to rate it.
THE CALCULATOR DOES NOT MEASURE WHAT YOUR LANGUAGE APTITUDE IS…BUT HOW MUCH YOUR LANGUAGE APTITUDE CAN IMPROVE IN A SET AMOUNT OF TIME FOR CERTAIN LANGUAGES. SO IF YOUR A LOW APTITUDE LANGUAGE LEARNER, YOU CAN SEE THAT IT WILL ONLY TAKE YOU A FEW MONTHS OR A FEW WEEKS TO BECOME A SUPERIOR APTITUDE LANGUAGE LEARNER.
I.e you might calculate that if you learn Spanish for 2 weeks, your language learning aptitude will increase enough to take 2 months off your Portuguese.
After I’ve created the increasement of language aptitude formula. Please rate me based on your own language learning experiences, intuition, and your own research how accurate you feel my calculator is.
I’m not aiming for 100% super mathematical computer accuracy…but something that’s pretty accurate, but still need to be taken with a grain of salt…i.e similar to LingQ’s levelling up system.