That's it! You people have stood in my way long enough. I'm going to clown college!

[rdearman]

@smallwhite you did your calculation on 5000 words in 90 days. I was using 13000 as my number of words.

It is true I focused on vocabulary and glossed over grammar and other studies. I know there are people who could do this vocabulary but my point was in this article people like Tim Ferris say you can break down a language learn the important parts and voilà your fluent. So I called bullshit, and still do. I used the math to illustrate you need 5 hours a day just for vocabulary.

I doubt your muscle memory would build up enough to get good pronunciation and wrap your tongue around them crazy foreign words.

I know a fat 45 year old can complete a marathon, I also know it took me 12 months of training.

[smallwhite]

@smallwhite you did your calculation on 5000 words in 90 days. I was using 13000 as my number of words.

I know. You don't need to SRS all 13k words so I reduced it to 5k.

I used the math to illustrate you need 5 hours a day just for vocabulary.

(5 hours just for vocab and then fluent in 3 months is actually good by my books. It took me more hours than that, for 3 years, and all I got was an Accounting degree...)

1. How many more hours a day do you think you'll need for grammar and other things?

2. SRSing 5 hours a day is one way to do it. Reineke would watch cartoons instead and Igunamon would multi-track instead. Do you think those methods would make it in 3 months? I remember Reineke mentioning 3000 hours so that won't fit into 90 days, but what about multi-tracking?

[BalancingAct]

I agree that one doesn't need two minutes to learn one word.

[rdearman]

1. How many more hours a day do you think you'll need for grammar and other things?

2. SRSing 5 hours a day is one way to do it. Reineke would watch cartoons instead and Igunamon would multi-track instead. Do you think those methods would make it in 3 months? I remember Reineke mentioning 3000 hours so that won't fit into 90 days, but what about multi-tracking?

Well, I'm far from being a wizard at language learning. I made an analogy once about language learning and moving a mountain on the old HTLAL.com site. Worth reading, not my part but the brilliant replies I got.

I'm learning French & Italian and I've been doing that for 5-10 years with varying degrees of diligence. People always say learning a language is like climbing a mountain, but I have a different analogy.

I believe that learning a language is like bringing a mountain back to your house. You start at the top of the mountain with a shovel and a wheelbarrow and you dig up a chunk of the mountain and bring it back and dump the soil in your garden. You lose a bunch of soil on the way, but you carry on.

Little by little a tiny bit of the top of this huge mountain is moved into your back garden, and people get really impressed by the amount of dirt in your garden. But you keep looking at the little pile of dirt in your garden and you compare it to this huge freaking mountain.

Now I've been looking at all these people who know all these languages and I'm thinking that I'm moving my two mountains with a teaspoon and everyone else has a shovel, but Serpent and Iversen and lots of other people seem to have a high-powered mining machine.

So I'm wondering how long is it going to take me to move these bloody mountains! Or is there some point at which I say, "I've got enough French and Italian mountain in my backyard now so I'm going to go over to Mandarin mountain with my teaspoon and get started on that."

So I suppose the question I would put to you for discussion is: How do I get a shovel or mining machine like the rest of you...

My point about this article was that while I realise there are people with the time and the talent to accomplish learning a language to B2 level (although I read fluent as C1) in a language, most people do not have this dedication or time available. So to answer your questions, I'm going to build a strawman for people to poke holes into. I'm going to break it into categories of learning, although in reality they all are very much related and mix together. But you build your strawman anyway you want, I'm building mine like this.

1. Vocabulary/SRS
2. Output Practice and accent correction
3. Output practice and grammatical correction
4. Grammatical knowledge
5. Input

I've already covered vocabulary and I think it would take minimum of 450 hours. All the numbers I'm presenting with my strawman are minimum numbers. In my actually language learning I seem to be approaching infinity. Wherever possible I've tried to find some study or reference rather than just pick a number out of the air.

For output and accent the UK Government believes immigrants should have at least a B1 level in English with clear English pronunciation.

Huan Japes, deputy chief executive of English UK, a trade body for language colleges, says a rule of thumb is 360 hours - 120 hours for each of three stages - to get to the standard the government expects benefit claimants to reach.

I expect that grammatical correction of your output is happening at the same time as the accent reduction and pronunciation practice, I'm also assuming spending time with a native who is doing the correction. So although I have separated it as a category, timewise it would be rolled up into the 360 hours above.

Grammatical knowledge (reading grammar books) may or may not be required, and experts seem to be divided.

Some studies conclude that instruction does not help (or even that it is counter-productive); others find it beneficial. The picture becomes clearer if two distinctions are made. First, researchers may address one or both of two issues: the absolute effect of instruction, on the one hand, and its relative utility, on the other. Second, studies need to be subclassified according to whether or not the comparisons they make involve controlling for the total amount of instruction, exposure, or instruction plus exposure—that is, for the total opportunity to acquire the second language.

However, my strawman says you should be doing it, and you should be doing it for at least 90 hours.

Lastly is input. Now you can count the vocabulary training as input and you might know all 13k words but that isn't going the help you when a native hits you with a machine gun fire of sentences. You need to train yourself at catching these words, parsing them, and changing them into meaning, all while the native is still throwing more words your way. I think for this you need input like TV or films or conversation. My strawman uses the Super Challenge film scale which is 150 hours of input in addition to the other work above.

This works out to:

1. 450 hours - Vocabulary/SRS
2. 320 hours - Output Practice and accent correction
3. include in above - Output practice and grammatical correction
4. 90 hours - Grammatical knowledge
5. 150 hours - Input

Total = 1010 hours

So my total sort of averages the amount you see in those FSI language difficulty scales.

That is my strawman.

[reineke]

The article is not the best, but it offers some clues how to approach the 3-month mission successfully. No 1 I think, would be to choose something reasonable (Spanish vs Chinese).

B1 in 14 Days – II

https://smartergerman.com/german-langua ... n-14-days/

The tutor advertises his regular courses here:

https://smartergerman.com/private-german-lessons/

"Duration: 2-3 months from A1 till B1
24 x 45mins tuition + 2hrs daily homework
No travel time
24 x 30mins conversation with native speaker
One on one only
97% chance to pass your B1 exam"

viewtopic.php?f=14&t=3501&hilit=Smarter+german

[blaurebell]

I personally skipped the whole vocabulary stuff with French and just did the reading part of the Super Challenge with Learning with Texts instead, so intensive reading with a dictionary. I didn't do a single vocabulary flash card and still read without a dictionary now. The advantage is that all vocabulary is automatically relevant and occurs in context, both in the sense of meaning and in the sense of grammar. Most frequent words are repeated most often. And since you have to add every single word form you get the most practice with the words that change the most - verbs usually and wherever there are cases then those too. 450h of SRS for words without context is a waste of time if I can pick up just as many or more in grammar context in 330h of reading. That's how long it took me to finish the reading part of the Super Challenge for French. As for parsing content in spoken language. I've found that Gabriel Wyner's pronunciation trainer is a huge help because you get to train your hearing on all the different subtle differences important in a language. That and the Super Challenge listening part of course.

[rdearman]

I personally skipped the whole vocabulary stuff with French and just did the reading part of the Super Challenge with Learning with Texts instead, so intensive reading with a dictionary. I didn't do a single vocabulary flash card and still read without a dictionary now. The advantage is that all vocabulary is automatically relevant and occurs in context, both in the sense of meaning and in the sense of grammar. Most frequent words are repeated most often. And since you have to add every single word form you get the most practice with the words that change the most - verbs usually and wherever there are cases then those too. 450h of SRS for words without context is a waste of time if I can pick up just as many or more in grammar context in 330h of reading. That's how long it took me to finish the reading part of the Super Challenge for French. As for parsing content in spoken language. I've found that Gabriel Wyner's pronunciation trainer is a huge help because you get to train your hearing on all the different subtle differences important in a language. That and the Super Challenge listening part of course.

So how many hours do you estimate you spent doing the reading part of the super challenge? Because the vocabulary estimate just means the number of hours required to learn the words, the method is irrelevant. Was it near my 450 estimate and do you think you knew 13000 distinct words at the end of it?

[reineke]

5000 words...

(5 hours just for vocab and then fluent in 3 months is actually good by my books. It took me more hours than that, for 3 years, and all I got was an Accounting degree...)

1. How many more hours a day do you think you'll need for grammar and other things?

2. SRSing 5 hours a day is one way to do it. Reineke would watch cartoons instead and Igunamon would multi-track instead. Do you think those methods would make it in 3 months? I remember Reineke mentioning 3000 hours so that won't fit into 90 days, but what about multi-tracking?

I mentioned that the combined running time of my favorite shows was over 3,000 hours. The language difficulty was comparable to a Cat III language on the FSI scale. I was able to watch TV only during summer vacations.

Reineke would do what he would do. He would not count minutes or "learned" words.

[iguanamon]

...2. SRSing 5 hours a day is one way to do it. Reineke would watch cartoons instead and Igunamon would multi-track instead. Do you think those methods would make it in 3 months? I remember Reineke mentioning 3000 hours so that won't fit into 90 days, but what about multi-tracking?

I have never said that what I do is efficient, or will help someone learn a language quickly. I can't give hours involved because I don't keep track of them. Then again, I'm not interested in tracking hours or how quickly I can learn a language. If I had 90 days to learn a language, of course I'd add in native material too, as soon as I would be able to do so. That's my srs. That being said, I don't see myself ever needing, or wanting, to learn a language in 90 days. "I just do what I do.":

[smallwhite]

This works out to:

1. 450 hours - Vocabulary/SRS
2. 320 hours - Output Practice and accent correction
3. include in above - Output practice and grammatical correction
4. 90 hours - Grammatical knowledge
5. 150 hours - Input

Total = 1010 hours

So my total sort of averages the amount you see in those FSI language difficulty scales.

I absolutely enjoyed reading your analysis

My experience is 1000 hours, too. If you get an Operations Management Specialist to look at your workflow then maybe 900 hours would suffice, ie. 10 hours x 90 days. Not impossible! That's shorter than my working hours both 3 years ago and when I first graduated.

What would you do with such an analysis?

I've been following a study plan for 1~2 years. Each language's got 18 items plus an overall time limit. I stare at it multiple times a day to make sure I am on track or better. (It's possible because you can always do more intensive activities or go further out of your comfort zone to speed things up when you're behind schedule).

Will you apply your schedule to Finnish?