Learn 12 languages in 12 months? Right.

[tastyonions]

Would it be possible even in theory to reach A2 in 12 languages in 12 months? I highly doubt it.

That would mean a crushing 1500 words in each. Or gaining a working vocabulary of 18000 words over the span of a year. That's 50 words a day. While I am sure there are some memory freaks out there who could do that, they would be unlikely be well rounded enough to handle the other aspects like pronunciation, listening. Nah.

If you pick a bunch of languages from the same family you could fudge pretty well on the number of words. Imagine a native French speaker taking on Spanish, Italian, Catalan, Portuguese, Galician, Sardinian, Sicilian, Neapolitan...

[Kraut]

Being Luca Lampariello: three months to learn one language under these conditions:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sdbf38rGj5c
minute 20:15

can you learn a language in 3 months?
- be an experienced polyglot
- same language family
- live in the country
- a partner that speaks the language
- 10 hours a day of practice

[rdearman]

Would it be possible even in theory to reach A2 in 12 languages in 12 months? I highly doubt it.

That would mean a crushing 1500 words in each. Or gaining a working vocabulary of 18000 words over the span of a year. That's 50 words a day. While I am sure there are some memory freaks out there who could do that, they would be unlikely be well rounded enough to handle the other aspects like pronunciation, listening. Nah.

Actually we did the 30/30 challenge which is 30 vocabulary words in 30 days. It killed me, and I didn't manage to do it.

[orlandohill]

Here's the link to the original blog post, for those that haven't read it yet. The author is just having fun doing language learning as a hobby. The blog is hosted on Substack, but they're not selling anything or claiming to be a language learning guru.

The author has significant prior experience, being at least bilingual (Russian and English), and having done doctoral and postdoctoral research on Oji-Cree. Given such a background, attaining a basic command of a language's phonology and grammar in a month doesn't sound far fetched to me.

Cambridge English estimates that it takes an average of 180-200 guided learning hours to reach A2 in English. That's 6-7 hours of intensive language learning per day for a month. I would add 1-2 hours of less intense listening. For example, watching TV and movies, listening to podcasts and music, and spending time listening to native friends and family. That sounds sustainable, if done as a full-time job.

Even if I had the time, I wouldn't want to follow such a schedule for 12 different languages in a year. Maintaining the knowledge would be easy enough using an SRS, but I would rather focus on quality over quantity.

Anyway, the author isn't trying to rush to a certain level in each language, and they're not following a strict schedule or even tracking hours. They're literally just exploring, having fun, and writing about the experience.

[emk]

That would mean a crushing 1500 words in each. Or gaining a working vocabulary of 18000 words over the span of a year. That's 50 words a day. While I am sure there are some memory freaks out there who could do that, they would be unlikely be well rounded enough to handle the other aspects like pronunciation, listening. Nah.

1500 words in a month is 50 words a day. And 50 words a day is a lot. But I remember reading the blog of an FSI Chinese student (taking the real FSI course in person) who was sometimes given something like 80 Chinese words to learn in a day, and who was expected to be able to use them the next day. Of course, she was also doing 5 hours of classes and 4 hours of homework a day.

So 1,500 words in a month would be pretty punishing for most learners. But (1) you may be able to pick some up via cognates if you know a related language, and (2) some of them can safely remain passive at A2.

[bombobuffoon]

That would mean a crushing 1500 words in each. Or gaining a working vocabulary of 18000 words over the span of a year. That's 50 words a day. While I am sure there are some memory freaks out there who could do that, they would be unlikely be well rounded enough to handle the other aspects like pronunciation, listening. Nah.

1500 words in a month is 50 words a day. And 50 words a day is a lot. But I remember reading the blog of an FSI Chinese student (taking the real FSI course in person) who was sometimes given something like 80 Chinese words to learn in a day, and who was expected to be able to use them the next day. Of course, she was also doing 5 hours of classes and 4 hours of homework a day.

So 1,500 words in a month would be pretty punishing for most learners. But (1) you may be able to pick some up via cognates if you know a related language, and (2) some of them can safely remain passive at A2.

1500-2500 words active vocabulary I think is the A2. I was watching some CEFR (standard) exam interviews on YT for A2 for reference yesterday. I would be massively impressed if someone could achieve those in standards in 3-6 months of intensive study.

[bombobuffoon]

Would it be possible even in theory to reach A2 in 12 languages in 12 months? I highly doubt it.

That would mean a crushing 1500 words in each. Or gaining a working vocabulary of 18000 words over the span of a year. That's 50 words a day. While I am sure there are some memory freaks out there who could do that, they would be unlikely be well rounded enough to handle the other aspects like pronunciation, listening. Nah.

If you pick a bunch of languages from the same family you could fudge pretty well on the number of words. Imagine a native French speaker taking on Spanish, Italian, Catalan, Portuguese, Galician, Sardinian, Sicilian, Neapolitan...

Oof yeah maybe. But can you actually find 12 closely related languages to English?

[emk]

1500-2500 words active vocabulary I think is the A2. I was watching some CEFR (standard) exam interviews on YT for A2 for reference yesterday. I would be massively impressed if someone could achieve those in standards in 3-6 months of intensive study.

As far as I am aware, there have never been any official vocabulary size numbers for the CEFR. I have just flipped through the latest revised guidelines (PDF), and I still couldn't find a table with actual numbers for vocabulary. (I searched for "vocabulary" and skimmed the relevant sections looking for tables.) The CEFR has always been task oriented, and previous attempts to estimate actual vocabulary sizes corresponding those tasks have been all over the map. There may be some other publications that I've missed; I haven't looked seriously for 5-8 years or so.

The FSI Finnish course supposedly takes 44 weeks and 1,100 class hours to reach Speaking-3/Listening-3. If I remember correctly, S3/L3 is often considered to fall somewhere between B2/C1, and the FSI considers it "General Professional Proficiency" (you should be able to do office work). Note that FSI class hours can be very deceptive, because I've heard the typical number of hours is something like 5 hours of class to 4 hours of homework. So they expect people to reach S3/L3 in around 2,000 hours of work.

The FSI screens students with language proficiency exams first. But for students who meet their thresholds, they expect to hit their learning goals a significant fraction of the time.

In general, first-time self-study learners may need more hours than FSI students. I certainly did not hit S3/L3 in French in 750 "classroom" hours. With homework, that would be 1,350 hours. Which, OK, maybe I was in the rough ballpark. I did go from a professionally assessed A2 to a solid score on a B2 exam in 4 months of full-time study. But I may have been a strong A2 in some ways, and B2 is definitely below "General Professional Proficiency" by any reasonable definition.

[Iversen]

Long ago I wsanted to know how efficient my wordlist layout was, and I made a test based on Serbian - which back then was a new language for me. I just knew a little bit of Russian, including the Cyrillic alphabet. I counted known words - lala-words against not known words before and after the ever-moving boundary between pages that had been through the wordlists and pages that hadn't. And I foound that I could understand roughly a third of the words before and two thirds after doing those wordlists. With around 15.000 headwords in the dictionary that would mean 5000 words learnt in a month or two (sorry that I can't be more specific, but I'm sitting in a library and my train is leaving in twenty minuts, so I haven't got time to search through my bulky log to find more precise numbers). And I could keep that speed with other lanhguages, but still not learn to speak them.

About paintings: if I felt that I only could do mediocre paintings if I did one painting per month then I would drop that hobby! However I have found out that it's much faster to do 'museums drawings', where I summarize a museum in an hour or so. Therefore I may have resumed my painting hobby, but in all likelyhood I'll actually only produce one new painting per month. The rest will be quick and dirty drawings ...

[s_allard]

I also emphasize passing tests in order to provide some semblance of comparable measurement of language skills. Otherwise we end up with these endless discussions about what is means to say "I'm semi-fluent in language X. My oral comprehension skills are around 50% those of a native. My writing is quite good. I can get by pretty well in speaking. As for reading, it's actually not bad when I can use the dictionary on my phone." Pretty useless gibberish in my opinion. Just say "I passed an official CEFR B1 test."

I don't know about you, but I've met people who actually say: "I'm only semi-fluent in language X" and downplay their ability and they turn out to be better than the average. I see why you would want to use tests, though who is it for? How does anyone really know you or me or anyone else passed any B1 tests even though we might say so? It's a personal measure.

In another thread I offered the reminder that CEFR is merely a set of rather vague and subjective guidelines used by bodies and organisations offering courses and setting exams. That they are very broadly interpreted and sometimes with a lot of leeway. So what is really being resolved in this scenario as compared to the list of self-evaluation statements provided above? I would say the statement: 'I went for a job interview in Portuguese and got the job' carries more weight than 'I passed a B1 test'.
...

To say that the CEFR is "merely a set of rather vague and subjective guidelines used by bodies and organisations offering courses and setting exams." demonstrates a rather crass ignorance of the goals and the accomplishments of a large number of serious academics given the task of creating a unified system, i.e a common framework, for the description and assessment of language proficiency in the European Union where 24 languages are officially recognized currently.

As we know, it is widely used in areas of employment, immigration and citizenship qualifications and university admission requirements inter alia. In Canada where I live we have two different systems, one used by the federal government and one used by the government of Quebec. Neither are comprehensive as the CEFR. The US uses a variety of systems for university admission and language training. So do many countries.

The CEFR was not designed for us language aficionados. We use it as a way of giving some sort of common meaning to the idea of "speaking" a language. If you don't use the CEFR or something similar, you have to resort to either useless descriptors like "fluent" or to avoiding the question completely, e.g. I speak X number of languages. The title of this thread is a perfect example of the pre-CEFR manner of talking about language learning. Useless doggerel.

I should also point out that the various tests based on CEFR are not a requirement. The CEFR provides explicitly for self-evaluation. I personally am a fan of tests in terms of motivation despite not having the slightest need for any language certification.. There's nothing like putting out some hard cash and having a date hanging over your head to get you studying for real. I highly recommend it as a reality check.