Success Stories of Learning Category 5 Languages?

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Xenops
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Success Stories of Learning Category 5 Languages?

Postby Xenops » Thu Jan 05, 2023 5:58 pm

I would be interested in browsing the old HTLAL site for this, except the site is very slow to load now. :|

Either from this forum or from other sites, what are some success stories of learners studying a category 5 language (as defined by FSI)? Let's say to B2 level, or high intermediate.

I'm also aware of leosmith's The ‘I don't Hate Korean’ Thread.

If you have a success story, please share:

--length of time, hours per week, studying regularity
--resources
--use of tutors and/or teachers
--if you were in TL country or elsewhere.

Thank you. :)
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Re: Success Stories of Learning Category 5 Languages?

Postby gsbod » Fri Jan 06, 2023 5:02 pm

In December 2012 I sat and passed JLPT N2 for Japanese. I'm not sure if this maps adequately to B2 (actually, this is probably an issue for all Cat 5 languages, since CEFR is less influential on curriculum design for non-EU languages) but it is definitely higher intermediate. I logged quite a bit contemporaneously on HTLAL, but now 10 years later I give you the rose-tinted spectacles version.

By the time I sat the exam, I was able to comfortably follow J-dramas without subtitles, and read short stories by Murakami with some effort. I could comfortably converse with language exchange partners, but was uncomfortable talking to strangers. On the JLPT exam itself, I sailed through the listening section but found the vocab/grammar and reading sections more challenging.

--length of time, hours per week, studying regularity
From zero to N2 took four and a half years. I have no idea how many hours, but I studied a lot and did something almost every day. I was also working full time for all but the first couple of months, and I also spent two years successfully getting a masters degree in a field relevant to my job. My job was less demanding than it is now but even so, looking back, I don't know how I fit it all in!

--resources
This list is not exhaustive, but it's everything that comes to mind at the moment. There are also many things I tried and wouldn't recommend, that I haven't listed here:

Completed cover to cover:

All of Pimsleur - 1 lesson a day for 90 days - useful for pronunciation and developing a study habit, but in retrospect I don't think I got that much out of the 45 hours I spent on it
Genki I & II - a solid textbook for beginners, works well for self study with a really nicely paced introduction to hiragana/katakana

Other useful resources used:
Anki is the big one. I probably spent too much time on Anki, in retrospect, but this being the first language I properly studied on my own, a good chunk of time spent was necessarily spent on learning how to learn.

Basic Kanji Book 1 and half of Basic Kanji Book 2 - a solid introduction to the Japanese writing system, expensive but worth it (I regret not finishing the second volume due to my own impatience...)

Japanese for Busy People Vol 3 - I wouldn't recommend the earlier volumes as your main course, but the third volume (a set text for a class I took) was useful to consolidate the more advanced topics covered in Genki II.

Various JLPT preparation books. I didn't manage to do any of them from cover to cover, but many were useful nonetheless. Special mention to the New Kanzen Master reading books for N3 and N2, the Unicom reading and listening books for N3, all of which which I would recommend at the intermediate level whether you're preparing for the exam or not, and the 日本語パワードリル books which were very useful (and cheap!) for exam practice for the vocab/grammar section, but I wouldn't recommend for general study. Also the N1 Soumatome Kanji book. I didn't like the other Soumatome books so much for N3/N2, but the kanji book for N1 is actually quite special, with lots of focus on easily confused kanji and homophones that I simply haven't seen elsewhere at the advanced level.

JapanesePod101 podcasts - I found these really useful for listening practice and a helpful stepping stone to reach a good enough level to follow those J-Dramas. They're probably a bit dated now though!

J-Dramas. I spent a lot of time watching TV. Fan subs were a lot more easily accessible back then and with soft subs I could start out watching a show with English subtitles and then, if I enjoyed it, watch it again (and sometimes again and again) without subtitles.

Resources I have more mixed feelings about:

Kanji in Context - Promises to teach you all the kanji you need up to N1, through a dictionary, word lists and example expressions and sentences. I've tried and failed to complete this course many times over. I've finally come to the conclusion that the problem is not me.

Children's books - I think the biggest hurdle with Japanese is the combination of vocabulary and writing system. You have a lot of new words to learn (although if you're familiar a Sinitic language you'll get some discount on loan words from Chinese), and a lot of those words are written in kanji. If you encounter a word you don't know written in kanji, you can't be 100% sure how to pronounce it without looking it up (although over time you can make educated guesses). Looking up vocabulary written with kanji you don't recognise in a dictionary can be fiddly and time consuming. Any books aimed at adults, even the trashy ones, assume you can already read kanji at a high school level. Books aimed at children, however, often have furigana above kanji, telling you how to pronounce the word and making dictionary look ups an awful lot easier. So why not read children's books? Mainly, because, at least for me, they are really, really boring.

--use of tutors and/or teachers
At the start I was adamant that I was going to do it all by myself. I did spend a lot of time setting up online language exchanges, but all that meant at the beginning was spending a lot of time talking about Japanese with Japanese people in English, which in retrospect wasn't a great use of time. Once I reached an intermediate level, I did find a brilliant online language exchange partner and we kept up regular Skype exchanges for some time, but eventually my circumstances changed and I found it too difficult to schedule a regular session around the time difference with Japan. I regret that.

Over time my attitude to tutors/classes softened. I took a face to face class once a week for a year in the run up to sitting N2. The level was a bit too basic for me (but the most advanced available), but it was still worthwhile and I met a fairly decent language exchange partner as a result of doing the course (although they've long since returned to Japan). I also took some online classes and one to one lessons with tutors online, set up through online Japanese language schools rather than iTalki. The online classes were ok and useful enough for exam preparation, but I don't think I got the most out of them.

--if you were in TL country or elsewhere
I still haven't been to Japan.

--some final thoughts
I managed to reach a higher intermediate level in Japanese in around 4 years, mostly through self study and never having been to the country. That's definitely a success story. But then I hit a wall. I was comfortable in certain domains (watching J-Drama, polite conversation with friends), but struggled to extend into others. Weakness in reading really held me back. I moved on to German, which also took around 4 years to get to a higher intermediate level, but that included a few false starts and less hours overall than I spent on Japanese.

At the beginner level, there wasn't much between German and Japanese. Whatever the language, you have to put in the hours and be able to deal with the humiliation of not being able to do very much despite the effort you are making. It was at the intermediate level where things really started to diverge. Simply put, I could do more with less in German. I remember back in 2016, when my German level was maybe B1+, having an intense but good natured debate with a German taxi driver about the then recent Brexit referendum, something hard enough to pull off in English given the emotions at the time, and certainly impossible for me in Japanese. Thanks to a combination of linguistic and cultural similarities, dilligent study of grammar on my part at the beginner and intermediate levels, and plenty of opportunities and motivation to use the language, once I'd reached an intermediate level (B2) in German, getting to an advanced level (C1+) became something of an inevitability.
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Re: Success Stories of Learning Category 5 Languages?

Postby Axon » Fri Jan 06, 2023 7:35 pm

I currently have a level of Mandarin that defies easy alignment with the CEFR scale.

I can easily and without much thought participate in casual conversations with native speakers for hours on end, picking up new words from context and expressing what I want to say most of the time. I can give an hour-long English lesson and rapidly switch between Mandarin and English, explaining subtleties of usage and pronunciation in Mandarin without searching for words. I can (slowly) read academic articles in Chinese in one specific subfield (Chinese dialectology and historical linguistics). I can watch and enjoy Mandarin travel vlogs. I can sometimes (not always) understand Classical Chinese poetry if there's a translation into modern Mandarin. I can laugh at Chinese memes and internet comments.

I can't read Chinese novels, follow talk shows, watch movies or documentaries, or understand more than half of any given TV news broadcast without constantly looking up words. I can't easily read a newspaper, transcript of a political speech, or press release from the government. I can't understand interviews with people who are speaking semi-formally about non-general topics. I can't perform well on grammar tests that require me to choose the correct word in context among close synonyms, meaning that I certainly can't write lengthy text with clarity and precision.


--length of time, hours per week, studying regularity
I'm now going into my 9th year of "study," though in the grand scheme of things I don't do hardcore study very often. It comes in waves. I'm often exposed to Mandarin for at least an hour a day, sometimes as many as five or six hours. Though I live in the US, many of the people I hang out with are Chinese. I don't have the kind of friendships with them where we text frequently, so it's just in-person conversation when it happens.

--resources
Anki and Memrise at the very beginning, supplemented with random YouTube videos and the Chinese Grammar wiki. When I took classes I used a textbook called Chinese Link, which I would not recommend.

Over the years I've picked up lots (20+) of Chinese textbooks, read through them briefly to see what I could get from them, then rarely looked at them. Now I mostly consume native media and learn new words from it.

--use of tutors and/or teachers
My wife is Chinese, but not particularly interested in helping me perfect my Mandarin in the role of a teacher. She explains words and usage to me every so often, but I also have a polyglot friend who is a native Mandarin speaker and trained interpreter, and he's much more eager to explain subtleties of usage.

I've had great language exchange partners before who lasted months, and taken a few private lessons to try to push myself to a more advanced level, but this is irregular due to time constraints.

--if you were in TL country or elsewhere.

Since meeting my wife in 2016 I've always had somewhat of a TL environment. I lived in China on and off from summer 2016 through summer 2019, with a 10-month break in Indonesia (where I still spoke Mandarin regularly and actively studied it). Since 2019 neither of us have been back to China, but I socialize more and at a higher level of Mandarin now compared to back then.

Actually, someone asked me recently how hard Chinese has been for me to learn compared to other languages. I answered honestly that I could remember when it was hard, but for the last several years it's just been a fun, if sometimes slow, process of learning new vocabulary and usage.
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Re: Success Stories of Learning Category 5 Languages?

Postby Fuerza » Fri Jan 06, 2023 9:44 pm

I’d be curious as to how others are fairing also so I can live vicariously. I’m unlikely to ever tackle a level 5, simply because I have no interest in any of the languages on that list. I have trouble investing myself in languages to which I have no connection, whether ethnically, culturally, or religiously, and I have no such connection to any of the level fives. I suppose one day I may take a shot at Maltese, which we could probably call a “technical 5” given its place in the Arabic family, but I have too many others to get through first.
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Re: Success Stories of Learning Category 5 Languages?

Postby kanewai » Fri Jan 06, 2023 10:24 pm

STT44 wrote:Having given up on Japanese more times than I care to remember, my conclusion is that category 5 languages don't sit well with polyglottery. You cannot mess about with 5 other languages if you want to learn Chinese or Japanese. I have no experience with Arabic or Korean, so cannot comment.
I had a similar realization with Arabic. It was either make it a major commitment to the language for the next three to five years, or be comfortable never rising above being a talented beginner.
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Re: Success Stories of Learning Category 5 Languages?

Postby gsbod » Fri Jan 06, 2023 11:13 pm

kanewai wrote:I had a similar realization with Arabic. It was either make it a major commitment to the language for the next three to five years, or be comfortable never rising above being a talented beginner.


Well, the time passes anyway. And although ultimately I was able to take my German further than Japanese, getting to an intermediate level in German was not as quick as I would have imagined based on the often quoted FSI figures, relative to how long it took to get to a similar level in Japanese.

I wouldn't want anyone to feel discouraged from taking a category 5 language, or any other language perceived to be difficult. For most people, whatever language you study, it's going to take a while to get to a level where you can do interesting things. I think the most important factors are whether you are actually interested in it (rather than just interested in the idea of it), whether you can keep up the commitment to study over a decent period of time (probably several years), and whether you have the opportunity to make use of it in a variety of ways. That all applies whatever language you study.

In any case, it is unlikely to be a trade off between learning this one difficult language versus a handful of easier ones. You might get two for the price of one, but I'd be surprised if you did any better than that!
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Re: Success Stories of Learning Category 5 Languages?

Postby IronMike » Sat Jan 07, 2023 1:38 am

I don't have any personal stories as I've not studied a Cat 5 language yet, but I've served with countless people who graduated DLI's Arabic, Korean, Chinese courses with 3/3 and sometimes 3/3/3 (CEFR equivalent to C1). I guess if you have 63 weeks of 7 hours classroom and 3-4 hours of homework, you can be successful! ;)
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Re: Success Stories of Learning Category 5 Languages?

Postby David27 » Sat Jan 07, 2023 1:45 am

STT44 wrote:
There's a reason that no famous (YouTube) polyglot has strong Japanese or Chinese.



Steve Kaufman has pretty good Japanese and Mandarin. Lindie Botes’ Korean is good and can get by pretty well in Japanese. Stuart Jay Raj speaks very good Thai and Mandarin. But why compare to other people? I agree with the general sentiment, if studying these very difficult languages for English speakers, the time investment will be so big that it’s less likely they’ll be learning 6-7 other languages
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Re: Success Stories of Learning Category 5 Languages?

Postby louisianne » Sat Jan 07, 2023 11:31 am

I passed a B2 exam of Arabic in 2022. Although I started learning the language a long time ago, it was more like a formal learning of MSA in the usual classroom framework with many students. Then, because of work, I dropped the study, and re-started 4 years ago.

Then I used language tutors, I listened to lots of videos and started to read articles on the internet. I became more confident with the language, meaning that I started to use it for my hobbies. And finally I passed the exam. But I suppose I will need 4 more years to arrive to C1 :roll:
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Re: Success Stories of Learning Category 5 Languages?

Postby Saim » Sat Jan 07, 2023 12:25 pm

louisianne wrote:I passed a B2 exam of Arabic in 2022.


Where did you take the exam, out of curiosity? It doesn’t seem like Arabic has any equivalent of the Cervantes or Goethe Institute.
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