Need to go from A0-->B1 Spanish in a few weeks

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Re: Need to go from A0-->B1 Spanish in a few weeks

Postby emk » Tue Aug 23, 2016 6:35 pm

s_allard wrote:I should point out that the above course costs 5760 €.

This is actually almost what you'd pay for a high-end immersive language course. The Middlebury Language Schools are a well-regarded immersion program with a good track record, with a tuition of US$9,000 to $11,000 for 7 or 8 weeks of full-time study (including room and board, which is mandatory). Berlitz Total Immersion is an immersive language course aimed at business executives, with a tuition of $13,595 for 4 weeks. It seems to be non-stop, one-on-one conversation with tutors. Some Alliance française chapters in France run immersive courses, and student will typically live with a French host family. Once again, I've heard tuition prices around $7,000 to $9,000 for 5 hours a day of intensive classes plus a home stay for several weeks.

I'm sure some of these programs are better than others. But realistically, if you're a student or a businessperson who absolutely must learn a language right now, this is what intensive courses look like and what they typically cost. You pay a lot of money, you study or converse with tutors for many hours a day, and you spend as much of the rest of your time immersed as possible.

Personally, I think most experienced language learners can do roughly as well on their own (except with maybe fewer opportunities for conversation). But many of these programs have an excellent track record with novice language learners, in part because they take over your life. Middlebury won't even let you speak English for the duration of the program, on pain of immediate expulsion without a refund.

Being plunged deeply into a new language with no other way to communicate does seem to encourage the brain to adapt as quickly as possible! For a while, improving your new language will be the most important thing in your life, because being unable to talk is absolutely unbearable.
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Re: Need to go from A0-->B1 Spanish in a few weeks

Postby s_allard » Wed Aug 24, 2016 8:33 am

As we can see, one can spend a lot of money to get to B1 in a hurry. On the other hand, as was also pointed out, one could do this for free beyond the cost of the self-teaching materials. Why do so many people spend such large sums of money for something they could get for free? The answer is pretty simple: probability of success.

These expensive programs provide a framework for positive outcome. First of all, those high prices are very motivating. I've noticed that the more people pay the more they are motivated, especially if they have to pay out of their own pocket. Second, these courses provide discipline and structure that most people don't have on their own. And thirdly, these courses, to varying degrees, provide individual attention. Success is practically guaranteed. The German teacher speaks of a success rate of 97% for the B1 exam.

Contrast this with trying to learn a language all by yourself with no outside help. All you have is the usual collection of methods, books, recordings and websites. What is the likelihood of passing a B1 exam after two months? I don't know but I suspect it is very low unless you have incredible motivation and self-discipline. Let's say the rate of success is 25%, if that much.

This is where the use of a tutor comes in. You can find a good teacher on iTalki or Verbling for around 25 USD an hour. 20 hours of tutoring will set you back 500 USD. That's a fraction of what those high-end courses cost, and you can do a lot with 20 hours of tutoring. Plus you can spend time practicing with a native speaker for free or for next to nothing over the Internet.

What are chances of passing that B1 exam after two months?. I suspect it would be quite high. Let's say 80%.

So, there we have it. Yes, you can do it alone and sit that B1 exam. The chances of success are low but it is possible. Or you can spend a little fortune and be nearly guaranteed to pass. Or use a good tutor and stand a very good chance of passing.

We haven't heard from the OP in nearly a week. That's a week less to the exam. I would hope that progress has been made.
Last edited by s_allard on Wed Aug 24, 2016 10:58 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Need to go from A0-->B1 Spanish in a few weeks

Postby rdearman » Wed Aug 24, 2016 8:42 am

s_allard wrote:As we can see, one can spend a lot of money to get to B1 in a hurry. On the other hand, as was also pointed out, one could do this for free beyond the cost of the self-teaching materials. Why do so many people spend such large sums of money for something they could get for free? The answer is pretty simple: probability of success.


Not the only answer. Many people would spend the money due to time restrictions.
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Re: Need to go from A0-->B1 Spanish in a few weeks

Postby garyb » Wed Aug 24, 2016 9:08 am

A few weeks I came across a site, through a Facebook ad, that offered online tutoring in Spanish and French with a monthly subscription model: you pay $150 per month and you can take unlimited lessons. Sounds expensive, but if you were doing a few lessons per week it could well work out cheaper than iTalki. Plus they claimed that the tutors were hand-picked, as opposed to the iTalki system where anybody can teach, which in theory at least means you have more chance of finding competent and reliable tutors. It seemed ideal for situations like this where somebody wants to do intense work over a short period with a clear goal, at least if it lives up to the marketing.

Unfortunately I can't find it any more or remember the name: either it's disappeared or their SEO isn't any good. Maybe someone else knows?
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Re: Need to go from A0-->B1 Spanish in a few weeks

Postby James29 » Wed Aug 24, 2016 10:59 am

rdearman wrote:
s_allard wrote:As we can see, one can spend a lot of money to get to B1 in a hurry. On the other hand, as was also pointed out, one could do this for free beyond the cost of the self-teaching materials. Why do so many people spend such large sums of money for something they could get for free? The answer is pretty simple: probability of success.


Not the only answer. Many people would spend the money due to time restrictions.


Or, they simply have money and those sums do not seem too expensive. For many people taking those courses the "value" of knowing the language in their job is huge so those prices seem low compared to what they get.
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Re: Need to go from A0-->B1 Spanish in a few weeks

Postby PeterMollenburg » Wed Aug 24, 2016 11:10 am

PeterMollenburg wrote:....meanwhile.... where's the OP?


s_allard wrote:We haven't heard from the OP in nearly a week. That's a week less to the exam. I would hope that progress has been made.


I suspect doing nothing, even if the original goal was real. Harsh I know, still it's my suspicion and I'm allowed to voice my own suspicions, provided I let myself, which I have. Haven't I? Yes PM, you have. All this talk over fast progress, my brain has melted... or was that because I've left the heater on high for too long? Or read too many forums on Celtic languages and Basque. We ought to stop investing time in this so called mission until we see some kind of appreciation for our MASSIVE efforts. I mean in the time it's taken for us to reply here and deliberate over methods, I could've learned Basque, Breton, Occicitan, West Frisian, Galician, Alsatian, Franco-Provençal, Limburgs, Luxembourgish, Catalan, Asturian... and... no... not Finnish, need more time for that..... *tip toes away realising he just might be going insane* *runs back... and Swiss German!!* *scampers away*... *yells from a distance, seemingly in protest- 'Assimil Assimil! Gaston Mauger! Pimsleur dammit! French in Action!'
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Re: Need to go from A0-->B1 Spanish in a few weeks

Postby emk » Wed Aug 24, 2016 12:37 pm

PeterMollenburg wrote:
s_allard wrote:We haven't heard from the OP in nearly a week. That's a week less to the exam. I would hope that progress has been made.

I suspect doing nothing, even if the original goal was real. Harsh I know, still it's my suspicion and I'm allowed to voice my own suspicions, provided I let myself, which I have.

PeterMollenburg, please refrain from making negative remarks about other forum members, especially novices asking for advice. Yes, we can safely assume that most novice language learners will give up after a few weeks, and that most people with ambitious plans will fail. This includes the people that post here for advice.

And yet, some of them do succeed.

When you offer advice here, assume you do it for other people reading the thread, now and in the future, at least as much as you do it for the original poster. And you can assume that after the first page or so, most advice threads will tend to drift a bit, especially if the original poster disappears. It's OK for this thread, for example, to turn into a general discussion of how to reach B1 really fast in general, and how other people here have done it.

s_allard wrote:This is where the use of a tutor comes in. You can find a good teacher on iTalki or Verbling for around 25 USD an hour. 20 hours of tutoring will set you back 500 USD. That's a fraction of what those high-end courses cost, and you can do a lot with 20 hours of tutoring. Plus you can spend time practicing with a native speaker for free or for next to nothing over the Internet.

What are chances of passing that B1 exam after two months?. I suspect it would be quite high. Let's say 80%.

If somebody is looking for a really tutor who specializes in exams, you should actually ask these questions:

  • "How many of your students have taken a CEFR exam, and which exams?"
  • "How many of them of them passed the exam and earned the certificate?"
My DELF B2 tutor had worked with 7 individual students preparing for the DELF B2 before me, and 6 of them passed. (She told the 7th he wasn't ready and he took it anyway.) If you need to pass a high-stakes exam, these are absolutely fair questions to ask.

Also, to find exam tutors, try searching on iTalki, and type in the name of the actual exam you're going to take. Tutors who work with particular exams will often list it in their profile. And expect to pay more—no $10/hour French tutor is likely to have exam experience, but some of the $25/hour French tutors will specialize in CEFR exams. (French tutors are some of the most expensive. Even hung-over French college students who mumble want $10/hour for conversational tutoring. Blame the cost of living in France and the high demand?)

But because good tutors are so expensive, you need to make very efficient use of them. Their job isn't to teach you the language! You can learn to read and listen on your own, and you can get your writing corrected for free on lang-8 or iTalki up through about B2. (At C1 and above, the free correction sites seem to be much less effective, because nobody wants to correct two-page essays with only subtle oddities of wording. So at C1 or C2, yeah, you might want a tutor to correct essays.) You should use your tutor for two main things: focused conversational practice on exam-like topics, and correcting a couple of sample exams.

You should still expect to do very intensive self-study, and once you reach the B levels, to spend lots of time with native media. The DELF B2 and DALF C1 exams require you to deal with almost any non-political subject you might find in a middle-to-highbrow newspaper or first-year university textbook, respectively. No course will give you that breadth by itself. Unless you're very rich, you can't afford enough tutoring to reach a high level without massive amounts of self-study!
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Re: Need to go from A0-->B1 Spanish in a few weeks

Postby aokoye » Wed Aug 24, 2016 7:49 pm

s_allard wrote:As we can see, one can spend a lot of money to get to B1 in a hurry. On the other hand, as was also pointed out, one could do this for free beyond the cost of the self-teaching materials. Why do so many people spend such large sums of money for something they could get for free? The answer is pretty simple: probability of success.


And yet another reason: Because they simply don't know how to best learn a language. Oh and then another reason on top of that, if we look at places like Middlebury or other academic institutions (Middlebury isn't the only one with this type of program by any means, they're just one of the more well known US academic institutions with it) - because they need the credit for their degree anyways. There are also undergraduate programs (I'm thinking specifically of all of the language flagship programs in the US) that require at least one summer at an intensive domestic foreign language program.

edit: Also it's possible for people to get scholarships to some of these programs. I know one person who got a scholarship to Middlebury and another who got a Boren Scholarship to go to an intensive Russian summer program in Kazakstan.
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Re: Need to go from A0-->B1 Spanish in a few weeks

Postby PeterMollenburg » Wed Aug 24, 2016 10:29 pm

emk wrote:
PeterMollenburg wrote:
s_allard wrote:We haven't heard from the OP in nearly a week. That's a week less to the exam. I would hope that progress has been made.

I suspect doing nothing, even if the original goal was real. Harsh I know, still it's my suspicion and I'm allowed to voice my own suspicions, provided I let myself, which I have.

PeterMollenburg, please refrain from making negative remarks about other forum members, especially novices asking for advice. Yes, we can safely assume that most novice language learners will give up after a few weeks, and that most people with ambitious plans will fail. This includes the people that post here for advice.

And yet, some of them do succeed.

When you offer advice here, assume you do it for other people reading the thread, now and in the future, at least as much as you do it for the original poster. And you can assume that after the first page or so, most advice threads will tend to drift a bit, especially if the original poster disappears. It's OK for this thread, for example, to turn into a general discussion of how to reach B1 really fast in general, and how other people here have done it.


My sincerest apologies to anyone this may have offended, especially the OP. You're right, I was out of line. If I'd have been met with such criticism as a beginner it wouldn't have boded too well for my enthusiasm. And emk, indeed you are correct, many novices or even experienced learners might ask for advice and disappear- best to give the advice than not, best to potentially help someone than not. I needed to be adressed on this matter, thank you emk for brining it to my attention, sincerely.
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Re: Need to go from A0-->B1 Spanish in a few weeks

Postby reineke » Thu Aug 25, 2016 12:15 am

The OP has created a language log and I suspect that he will be back.

The "smarter German" method:

https://smartergerman.com/german-language/how-to-learn-german-quickly/die-binaurale-methode-zum-fremdsprachen-lernen-nach-smartergerman/

If you're familiar with listening-reading, this can be described as listening-listening...reading Eh... just follow the link.

I've read in a few places that Michel Thomas could charge $30k for a week of individual training. He spoke with an accent.

Emil Krebs learned Armenian in 9 weeks. He dedicated 2 weeks to Old Armenian so he really learned the modern language in seven weeks.

Daniel Tammet learned conversational Icelandic in 7 days. His brain is wired a bit differently from the rest of us.
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