fantastic reply my god if I could do all that is mentioned above in Spanish and any other European languages I would be very very happy with myself!!
Thank you for answering my question I do seem to see you pop up a lot when it comes to Spanish thanks for all the advise and I am sure you see my name a lot too pooing up everywhere haha!
Muchas Gracias amigo!
No prob. De nada, mate.
And if that’s the level you are happy with and comfortable with–or at least to acquire the known words to “potentially” reach that level if you were to “activate” the language (living in the country, etc.)–you’ll be able to move on to other languages faster. For me, I could have moved on to others sooner, and it’s the Spanish learning that seems to have taken the longest (i’ve dragged out my 7-900 hours over years). However, because I am in the US and this was the first language, I want that to be the “best.”
I have heard stories of english speakers learning Spanish or Portuguese to a high level in 6 months with an obsessive level of study… but after studying Korean like gangbusters for the past 3-6 months… I can say that 6 months of chinese or arabic will probably not get you to fluency.
@usablefiber I became fluent in english within 8 months studying one hour a day, but I had some help on grammar because I studied in school. So, if a person is putting a lot of time in order to learn a latin language - knowing english - this would be achievable.
I’m curious to know why are you learning portuguese over spanish? I know in USA there’s more spanish speaking people than portuguese and it’s quite common see someone that learn spanish first and then learn portuguese.
Yea, My point was that a romance or related European language can be learned well in 6-8 months, but Chinese, Korean, or Arabic, which the OP asked about, you just can’t reach native fluency in 6 months which I can say from experience. There is just too much to get used to: grammar, writing, pronunciation, the vocabulary… is all wildly different. It takes time. It’s fun, but it takes time.
As for Portuguese? I just thought Brazilian Portuguese sounded really cool and it would be fun and exotic to learn.
Unfortunately, this decision has backfired on me. I moved into a apartment this week in a completely Spanish speaking neighborhood as In the past year and a half I basically studied every language BUT Spanish.
@usablefiber: “Unfortunately, this decision has backfired on me. I moved into a apartment this week in a completely Spanish speaking neighborhood as In the past year and a half I basically studied every language BUT Spanish.”
Similar backfire: I’ve been teaching ESL to adult professionals for 10 years. 90% of my clients speak Spanish. I studied Latin, German, and Japanese in school. I’ve thought since I was a kid that Spanish is a beautiful sounding language. In addition, I find Latin American culture absolutely fascinating.
YET: Despite the professional advantage for me, I put off learning Spanish for 8.5 years! Why did I procrastinate for so long ?!? I could have been totally fluent by now!!
毫无疑问你是对的:) An obsessive 4-6 month Mandarin study (10-12 hours every day) could lead to recognizing a meaning or two and being able to pronounce around 3000 individual characters (4000-4500 is enough for complete fluency outside literature or very specific fields). But to be able to read even a simple new text relatively comfortably at acceptable speed, add another 6 months. That’s just the writing. And there’s no way to get fluent (at least efficiently) without the ability to read. Listening, another obsessive period of 1 year (could partly overlap with learning to read), slowly getting used to Chinese people’s weird ways of trying to speak standard mandarin (depends on which part of China you want to interact with). A substantial amount of 成语 (usually 4 character phrases) that they love to use, add another period of 1 year exposure to massive amounts of texts. It’s actually very rewarding to get more and more advanced in Chinese, as learning new vocabulary gets easier and easier (combinations of already known characters’ meanings). It just takes enormous amount of time to get up to speed. I would say I already devoted well over 2000 hours to the language in my 26 months of studying it, yet I cannot listen to news or watch tv series freely, and having longer conversations is still difficult. The pronunciation varies too much in real life and it takes big effort to get enough exposure in this regard.
“slowly getting used to Chinese people’s weird ways of trying to speak standard mandarin”
Glad someone said it!
It’s quite frustrating really
<<I’ve been teaching ESL to adult professionals for 10 years. 90% of my clients speak Spanish.>>
I’m curious as to under what conditions this is happening. Are you in a Spanish-speaking country training businessmen to come to the US? Because I would think that Spanish/Mexican companies doing business in the US would already have English speakers at their disposal.
Here in the US, foreign-born professionals with limited English capabilities tend to be Indian, Pakistani, or from other Asian countries.
Where are you learning it?
2000 hours? That is really a lot! Chinese is like a black hole, it literally takes all of your time and energy. In order to truly master Chinese one needs to move to China and stay there forever, because moving back to our native country will again worsen your skills. Of course this is not about you, but my general observation of people studying Chinese. I’m yet to see anybody with C2 level in Chinese who lives outside of China.
Haha, I can identify with this, I frequently test between B2-C1 on placement tests for immersion courses but the truth is I can barely string a sentence together and I literally get nothing when I listen to the radio.
I’m in the USA, teaching executives, politicians, business owners, doctors etc. Many clients work for multinationals like GE, P&G, Johnson & Johnson, etc. The personal goals of my clients vary a lot. For the multinationals, English is used at the global level. So when the client is promoted from a local level position (say Sales Manager) to a position with more responsibility, increasing proficiency in English goes with it. The small business owners are often interested in trading outside of LATAM and have suppliers in China and want customers in North America. So they want to be able to negotiate in English.
Annoyingly they removed access to the course for certain countries (including mine). Not sure if anyone knows where to find it elsewhere?
This guy said it took him 1 year of hard study followed by 1 year of living in Taiwan…
You can be the judge of his fluency. 老外中國週報：女學者美國離奇失蹤、華語版深夜食堂、9成失竊！重慶共享單車倒閉│老外看中國│郝毅博 Ben Hedges│新唐人電視台 - YouTube
Is that 2 years after he started studying? Or is it longer and he just claims to already have been fluent after 2 years? His pronunciation is good, and he is very likely fluent now in other aspects of language than just reading news, but I have a strong feeling that video is not after 2 years of him doing Chinese.
I have been studying Korean. It is grouped with Chinese and Arabic in being one of the languages which take perhaps the longest for an English speaker to become proficient in. So I’ll tell you where I am at and you could possibly use it as a data point for the other languages similarly grouped in terms of ‘difficulty’.
I have about 500 hours worth of total ‘study’ in the language. I spent the first 300+ hours almost exclusively doing reading and listening before reviewing my progress and realizing my deficiencies. (And then doing some changes to my approach to language learning).
So without going into detail about what I changed and why, heres where I find myself at after about 500 hours of Korean (250-ish of this is listening practice):
I am generally unable to understand native speakers - aside from catching individual words or odd phrases here and there. For me to engage a native speaker and understand what is being said to me, they need to either use simple sentences or speak slower than their native speaking speed. Lack of vocabulary is a big hindrance, and it means native speakers may have to restate things using different word choices for me to understand.
For my reproduction of the language - both spoken (of which Ive admittedly had little practice) and written (which I have much more practice) I am confounded both by lack of grammar and vocabulary. Were I to think about all the everyday situations and conversation topics I engage in, I could say a bit about many of them in Korean… however I could not say the kinds of things I would say in English on those topics.
So I can speak or write simply on a variety of topics while making some grammatical errors, but lack of vocab and grammar prevent me from having a normal adult conversation on everyday topics.
Currently I am doing a review of my progress thus far, but tentatively I will give myself a solid A2 on the CEFR scale. I’m no expert, but just going by the descriptions of what A2 entails.
Sounds about right. Steve studied full time (40 hours a week+) as his job. After 10 months he passed the diplomatic exam and visited the canton trade fairs in the following years and was fluent.