Postby emk » Sat Mar 16, 2024 12:15 pm
I'm trying to figure out how much someone could get done in a month, if they were willing to push themselves to the point of burnout. Let's say 25 days/month, 9 hours/day. That gives you at least one day off per week, and you're putting in the same number of hours per day as an FSI student. That's 175 hours/language.
Also, let's assume you're learning closely related languages, what the the FSI would call Category I or II.
A bunch of online tables claim 180-200 instructional hours is enough to reach A2. Assume you're slightly more efficient than the average student. It's just barely plausible that you could reach A2 in a month of 9 hour days. I assume some people here could do it faster.
But A2 is a lot less useful than B1. At B1, you can survive independently, even if you need to fall back on pantomime and muddling through. Retention is normally quite tough at A2. And interference would be a beast with thay many low-level languages, especially because—in order to get those sweet Category I and II discounts—you'd wind up with tons of Romance and Germanic languages.
On top of all this, I've long suspected that even cleverly overlearned knowledge takes 30 days to "mature." I've seen it with Anki cards of all kinds. Once I get them to 30-45 days old, they're a lot easier, and I don't forget them as easily. So switching every 30 days might leave you with a lot of badly consolidated knowledge?
So even if you're willing to study 175 hours/month, I would imagine that you'd find yourself burned out, swamped by interference, unable to much of anything useful, and just generally an unhappy mess.
I remember when a well-known polyglot tried to learn enough Mandarin for monolingual travel in 3 months of intense, full-time study. I actually think he made it far enough to muddle through basic travel? But I interacted with him towards the end of those 3 months. And he was very obviously stressed and burnt out, because he'd been working a ridiculous number of hours.
So 12 languages in 12 months sounds like an incredibly frustrating experience, even if you do nothing but study extremely intensively during long days. I wouldn't bet against some extremely experienced polyglots being able to pull something out of it, but why suffer like that for such a dubious reward?
9 x