The necessary hours to get to B2

General discussion about learning languages
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aokoye
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Re: The necessary hours to get to B2

Postby aokoye » Mon Apr 24, 2017 7:00 pm

-JM- wrote:I don't believe in the time scales. Not everybody has the same understanding in languages or anything. Some people are better or worse at some specific things. I have never seen something like "you need 50 hours study to solve differential equations." Maybe I won't understand it in 100 hours and my friend will get it the first time he hears it. So I think the numbers are too abstract and they shouldn't be paid much attention.

It can be argued that language learning is more of a memory thing which doesn't require much intellectual input (something with which I don't agree). Then the numbers might mean something.


I agree. I think it also points to a very cookie cutter shaped model as opposed to an individualized one. For better or worse we don't all learn exactly like one another.
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Re: The necessary hours to get to B2

Postby PeterMollenburg » Tue Apr 25, 2017 11:34 am

My 3000 plus hours of French has not been much of a steep learning curve at all. Thing is, I didn't know how steep it was 'meant to be'. I was riding along an almost flat bike path with an occasional slight rise, practising my peddling technique and improving bike position and aerodynamics, which are indeed great and have made for a solid foundation, but I've come to realise there's no way around that mountain range on a real road- I just didn't know how steep they really were. You really do need to train harder!

100km flat rides free of traffic and doing so most days will put one in a better place to climb huge mountains on actual roads when one decide's to actually turn down that road that takes you there, than having done no training, but even training on steep foothills will provide improved strength, or better still, the mountains themselves, which will leave you much better equipped for, well, riding mountains.

Challenge yourself. Get your technique down and start climbing those mountains.
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Re: The necessary hours to get to B2

Postby Carmody » Tue Apr 25, 2017 5:57 pm

Peter

Many thanks for the very insightful comment; as always.

What you do and how you do it is always so instructive for me.

So, now I just need to remember to tell myself: "You really do need to train harder!"
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Re: The necessary hours to get to B2

Postby YtownPolyglot » Tue Apr 25, 2017 6:47 pm

So how consistent are these hours? If I take two days off in a row without Portuguese (it's almost finals week at the university where I work), I may want to put that many more hours into my target language when I have the chance to pick it up again.

If I have learned a few closely related or similar languages in the past, I might make faster progress.

Am I feeling well and happy when I am studying? If so, my progress will come faster.

What sort of success have I had, if any, with previous languages? That matters.

How helpful are the materials and people I am working with?

Ultimately, any scale of hours is only an approximation, an educated guess. If you don't hit the time targets, don't let it trample your enthusiasm or your self-esteem. Hang in there!
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Re: The necessary hours to get to B2

Postby Dylan95 » Tue Apr 25, 2017 10:55 pm

Hugo wrote:I have been through both French In Action and Assimil NFWE, first wave. I am pretty diligent in my study with native materials found on YouTube and the study of grammar. So far I have about 1200 hours (plus high school-2 yrs.) invested in my learning of French.

FSI suggests that 800 hours is the amount of time necessary for getting to "mastery."

Could any of the professional polyglots around here tell me if 3,000-5,000 hours is a more reasonable amount of time for getting to B2 in my French?

Thanks.


That's 800 class hours in FSI classes. FSI is way more efficient than any high school or college class. Plus those 800 class hours don't include all of the outside of class studying that FSI students do.

FSI students also tend to be "experienced language learners" a.k.a. they have done it before and figured out what works for them and what's a waste of time. this is not to be underestimated.
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Re: The necessary hours to get to B2

Postby aokoye » Tue Apr 25, 2017 11:34 pm

A few other things about FSI that I don't think I've seen mentioned - the motivation for people in FSI courses is extraordinarily high for a number of reasons. Higher than I think most self learners probably would have (there's so much more to their motivation wanting to function in an environment where the L2 is spoken, signing a pledge where you aren't allowed to speak a language other than the TL, or, in my case, wanting to get an MA at a school that requires I have X proficiency level). There's also likely a lot of control of what students are learning, when they're learning it, and what they're doing at the FSI. I have a feeling that allows for the specificity in their numbers. Additionally they are picking people who have shown an "aptitude" for learning languages (whether or not that test is accurate for all of the people who it's given to is something I'm not sure of).
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Re: The necessary hours to get to B2

Postby Voytek » Wed Apr 26, 2017 12:26 pm

Hugo wrote:I have been through both French In Action and Assimil NFWE, first wave. I am pretty diligent in my study with native materials found on YouTube and the study of grammar. So far I have about 1200 hours (plus high school-2 yrs.) invested in my learning of French.

FSI suggests that 800 hours is the amount of time necessary for getting to "mastery."

Could any of the professional polyglots around here tell me if 3,000-5,000 hours is a more reasonable amount of time for getting to B2 in my French?

Thanks.


I just reached B2 in Swedish and I can say that it took me about 700 hours to get there:
- 100 hours to learn the pronunciation and prosody
- 200 hours with Anki creating a deck with 5000 words
- 100 hours to learn about 4000 words from it
- 100 hours for the Glossika course
- 25 hours learning from a basic Swedish course and the FSI one
- 125 hours of listening and reading (the TL/Polish).
- 50 hours of listening to the radio and reading articles also a bit of TV.

It would have taken me much less time if I had used a well prepared card deck from the Internet, I guess, but I'm creating my deck acording to the frequency word list and words taken from other materials. Besides, when one is creating their own deck one is learning on it too.
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Re: The necessary hours to get to B2

Postby Carmody » Wed Apr 26, 2017 2:16 pm

Well, the people from Cracovia must be very smart people to learn a language so quickly. Did you test for B2?

The rest of us will just have to keep on keeping on.
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Re: The necessary hours to get to B2

Postby smallwhite » Wed Apr 26, 2017 3:14 pm

Voytek wrote:I just reached B2 in Swedish and I can say that it took me about 700 hours to get there:
- 100 hours to learn the pronunciation and prosody
- 200 hours with Anki creating a deck with 5000 words
- 100 hours to learn about 4000 words from it
- 100 hours for the Glossika course
- 25 hours learning from a basic Swedish course and the FSI one
- 125 hours of listening and reading (the TL/Polish).
- 50 hours of listening to the radio and reading articles also a bit of TV.

I love it when people give numbers :P

The hours look reasonable. Makes Swedish look very accessible. It's numbers like this that wake the evil that is wanderlust. "100 hours of pronunciation? I can handle that. 100 hours of SRS? I can live with that". And plop! I wander into yet another pool of quicksand :oops:

At least this time I'm safe 'cos I'm already in this pool of quicksand. I'm already studying Swedish and I have numbers for it as well. Got B2 in reading and listening in a recent mock test, but I can only say simple sentences (about Tom) at the moment.

111 hr Textbooks and grammar
088 hr Extensive reading
100 hr Vocab-mining and other vocab work, excluding SRS reps
068 hr LingQ for vocabulary and listening
021 hr TV
049 hr Speaking
016 hr Admin stuff
------------
453 hr
plus SRS reps maybe 80 hours and audio in the background sometimes
after good English and intermediate German
=======

This is not my typical study schedule, in case anyone was wondering.
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Re: The necessary hours to get to B2

Postby aokoye » Wed Apr 26, 2017 3:53 pm

Carmody wrote:Well, the people from Cracovia must be very smart people to learn a language so quickly. Did you test for B2?

The rest of us will just have to keep on keeping on.

For better or worse the Swedish classes at my school are one of two language classes that use textbooks aligned with the the CEFR for all of the levels that use textbooks - there are only two years of Swedish taught at my uni. That said, in said two years of classes they work through the Rivstart A1-A2 and Rivstart B1-B2 textbooks. Each four credit class at my university expects that a student will spend 12 hours outside of class (more often than not how long I spend is solely dependent on the material and subject, not the credit hours). That means that, it ideally takes a total of 720 outside of class hours for students to finish the two books at my university (and I honestly can't imagine that most if people spending 12 hours working outside of class in the first year class). That doesn't mean that they have taken the TISUS or Swedex tests to prove their level, but they have worked through the two books.
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