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What are your hairy goals? | ||
Tags: Goals | Advanced Level | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4634 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes  Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 57 of 111 16 August 2014 at 7:39pm | IP Logged | |||||
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My maths is a little rusty, but maybe it's like a graph that starts out like a straight
line graph with a positive slope, and then gradually rounds to a not quite horizontal asymptotic curve, always increasing, but slowly, slowly, slowly. Hence the so-called 80-20 "law" coming into effect, the better you know a language, or in other words, diminishing returns setting in, when seasoned HTLALers start looking for another language (or digging one off the shelf / out of the drawer, that they've been saving for this time). EDIT: This was in response to Patrickwillens' post here: here Edited by montmorency on 16 August 2014 at 10:24pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4815 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 58 of 111 16 August 2014 at 7:41pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I would say the realistic fast-pace-learning times for cefr levels in european languages go like this:
A1: two or three weeks from the beginning A2: a month-six weeks from A1 B1: two-four months from A2 B2: six months-a year from B1 C1: a year or two C2: passive skills in a year as well, active after several years or never for many of us. For exemple, I don't believe I'll ever have all the active skills at C2 level for any single language as I would need a long time immersion. But this table of mine counts with two prerequisites: 1.It is a standard european language (I mean slavic, Germanic or romance). German, French or Polish could be, in my opinion, following this pattern for natives of other european languages. Celtic and other such languages could be a different story. 2.It is a language with enough resources of various kinds. Even some larger languages have a huge gap of quite nothing for the intermediates and the native material is hard to get from abroad. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4474 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 59 of 111 16 August 2014 at 9:44pm | IP Logged | |||||
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For Swedish and Norwegian, you can get from 0 to B2 in 6 months' time provided that you study 5-6 hours per day. Edited by Medulin on 16 August 2014 at 9:57pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4513 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 60 of 111 16 August 2014 at 10:26pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I did it in that time and without that amount of study ;)
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| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5140 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 61 of 111 16 August 2014 at 11:57pm | IP Logged | |||||
Yes, but you are hardly normal. And you know that I say that with all possible love and affection :-) 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4513 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 62 of 111 17 August 2014 at 11:41am | IP Logged | |||||
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No, I am Dutch, it helps.
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| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 4936 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 63 of 111 17 August 2014 at 7:05pm | IP Logged | |||||
How long did it take you to get where you are now with Mandarin? I'm going on the assumption that you are not yet at a B2 level, since it's still listed under "studying", but maybe I'm mistaken (HTLAL's method of listing what one speaks vs studies is not all that flexible, IMO). I think I've mentioned this before in a previous thread, but it took me a good four years of studying Turkish before I moved it to "speaks", and even then it was a year after I took and passed my B2 TELC exams. R. == 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4513 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 64 of 111 17 August 2014 at 8:01pm | IP Logged | |||||
We were talking about Swedish. Mandarin is another story entirely but I have just started and as such I'm pretty much A0. I started like 1,5 weeks ago. I don't find it terrifying at all and I have no idea what everyone else is complaining about. Sure, the tones take some work, and I can imagine the writing posing a problem. Other than that, I don't see the trouble? The thing is that it is partly dependent on mentality. Mandarin gets a bad rap because of the writing system (and I can say that that is something you might struggle with), however I don't find it that bad apart from the characters. The tones are certainly a unique aspect and you do have to work on them diligently, but it's perfectly doable and I find that tones always assimilate in a way to the suprasegmental sound of a language (much as the Swedish melody sounds different in isolation than in longer spoken material). Will it take longer to assimilate? Yes, but that's more to do with the fact that you have to deal with alien vocabulary. That means you can take less shortcuts. But even then it's perfectly doable, and Mandarin has certain advantages in vocabulary - shorter words, some words play different roles depending on the context (e.g. a word may be a noun or a verb simultaneously depending on context etc.). There's much less explicit morphology to learn. Mandarin stacks words together more logically too (pig meat instead of pork, etc.). Eventually, learning another language consists of tricks and tips like this. Nor am I afraid of Turkish, Finnish, Hungarian or whatever else outlandish language you wish to throw at me. All I need is a connection to the language and a practical part of my life in which I can set aside time for its use. As I will probably be going to China, in the case of Mandarin that's guaranteed. I don't really consider languages more in terms of intrinsic difficulty - I hate that terminology. The biggest step in language learning is not any intrinsic trick to grammar or vocabulary - that's a cognitive aspect you can internalise and learn. It's about mentality and posing yourself challenges and striving to improve. Certain things, like 5 B2 in 1 year, is something you don't have the time for - brains do have a capacity limit - but in a few years it's definitely possible. It's all up to how well you use your time. Saying 4 years actually doesn't mean much to me - 4 years of what? Consistent immersion? Sitting around and listening to the radio? It all matters. B2, I find, is a particularly nice goal because it allows you to function relatively autonomously without too much strain involved. But I have different goals for different languages and sometimes professional skills are required, sometimes they're not. Failure and success are way more dependent on the way you measure them than the actual level you attain. Edited by tarvos on 17 August 2014 at 8:12pm 5 persons have voted this message useful |
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