Silvance Diglot Groupie United States Joined 5507 days ago 57 posts - 81 votes Speaks: English*, Pashto Studies: Dari
| Message 1 of 15 25 November 2014 at 3:43pm | IP Logged |
I came out with a 3/3/1+ after 64 weeks in this language, so I am finally done with DLI. My question is: How does that DLPT score translate to other, more popular and more widely used language proficiency scales, such as the ones you see at popular language schools?
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emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5545 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map
| Message 2 of 15 25 November 2014 at 4:36pm | IP Logged |
Congratulations! And welcome back. That must have been a pretty intense experience.
To compare proficiency scales, you can start at Wikipedia. This claims that ILR 3/3 corresponds to C1. I'm not sure how ILR and DLPT compare, however.
The Council of Europe also has a CEFR self-evaluation checklist with detailed descriptions of skills, but it will score you a bit hard.
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Silvance Diglot Groupie United States Joined 5507 days ago 57 posts - 81 votes Speaks: English*, Pashto Studies: Dari
| Message 3 of 15 25 November 2014 at 6:52pm | IP Logged |
After doing some research, I found that IRL and DLPT are pretty much exactly the same. DLPT is based off ILR. So is C1 in 64 weeks pretty fast then? In a cat IV language anyway?
To tell the truth, the course wasn't as intensive as people make it out to be. Once you get past Pashto script (Arabic script plus an additional 20 letters) and the fact that present and future tense verbs conjugate off the subject and past tense conjugates off the object, it's a fairly easy language. Very few cognates, but rote memorization is something I'm not too bad at.
Were I to have gotten an Asian language, this post would probably have a different tune. A third of the students in the recent Korean class failed, and Chinese doesn't look much better.
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emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5545 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map
| Message 4 of 15 25 November 2014 at 7:11pm | IP Logged |
Silvance wrote:
After doing some research, I found that IRL and DLPT are pretty much exactly the same. DLPT is based off ILR. So is C1 in 64 weeks pretty fast then? In a cat IV language anyway? |
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Yup. C1 in 64 weeks is very fast for a cat IV language. It's kind of amazing how quickly the adult brain can learn languages when not otherwise preoccupied with life. :-)
There's a downside to learning languages very quickly, though. When I did A2->B2 in four months, I would up with a lot of recently-memorized knowledge that needed to be "stabilized" before I forgot it. I think this has something to do with the forgetting curve and spaced repetition. And I've heard stories of FSI graduates who learned a language in 6 months, and then lost quite a bit while waiting for the State Department to post them overseas. So maybe it wouldn't hurt to get a Pashto newspaper, or whatever the military considers appropriate reading material?
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Xenops Senior Member United States thexenops.deviantart Joined 3838 days ago 112 posts - 158 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Japanese
| Message 5 of 15 25 November 2014 at 11:17pm | IP Logged |
Silvance wrote:
I came out with a 3/3/1+ after 64 weeks in this language, so I am finally done with DLI. My question is: How does that DLPT score translate to other, more popular and more widely used language proficiency scales, such as the ones you see at popular language schools? |
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Congrats! How many hours do you think you studied during this course?
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tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4720 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 6 of 15 26 November 2014 at 4:42pm | IP Logged |
I think you probably have a very high base level, because you've grinded through all the
base rules that you need to use the language quickly and effectively. Using it in the
real world is another ball game, but given such a solid background you should adapt
smoothly. Stabilization and consolidation of knowledge takes a lot of time. Especially
upholding a high vocabulary size is very hard, if you've studied the grammar well you
probably won't forget it as easily (it's like learning to ride a bicycle, the
circumstances change but the bike feels the same)
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ericblair Senior Member United States Joined 4724 days ago 480 posts - 700 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French
| Message 7 of 15 27 November 2014 at 2:11am | IP Logged |
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Language_Proficiency_Te sts
From that, DLPT of 3/3/1+ = ACTFL of Superior/Superior/Intermediate-High
http://www.comoto.com/us/blog-us/4796/
From that, ACTFL Superior/Superior/Intermediate-High = C2/C2/A2
With my experience of testing results for the government/military, I'd say rounding
down the scores a bit would be more realistic. I find that people testing at the
lowest end are usually a bit better than they test and those at the high end are
usually a bit worse than they test. Think of the accuracy of the test as a bell curve
with it being more and more off the further from the center you get.
Regardless, a very good achievement. Congrats!
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Silvance Diglot Groupie United States Joined 5507 days ago 57 posts - 81 votes Speaks: English*, Pashto Studies: Dari
| Message 8 of 15 27 November 2014 at 6:23am | IP Logged |
Xenops wrote:
Silvance wrote:
I came out with a 3/3/1+ after 64 weeks in this language, so I am finally done with DLI. My question is: How does that DLPT score translate to other, more popular and more widely used language proficiency scales, such as the ones you see at popular language schools? |
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Congrats! How many hours do you think you studied during this course? |
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That's a difficult question to measure. I was a Spanish major in college, and I calculated in my Pashto class, that shortly after 4 months in I had the same amount of hours in Pashto as I had after 4 years of Spanish. Using quick calculator math I'm getting 2200 hours, which is fairly accurate, give or take a few government holidays.
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