how fast can you learn an unrelated language?

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drp9341
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how fast can you learn an unrelated language?

Postby drp9341 » Fri Jul 07, 2017 3:50 pm

Hello everyone!

My question quite simply put is the following: How fast can you learn an unrelated language to fluency? (ie: English speaker learning Russian or Polish / Italian speaker learning German / English speaker learning Finnish.)

I managed to learn Spanish to fluency in about 6 months, (when I already spoke Italian,) and Portuguese in about 2 months, (However, I already knew related languages; most of the words were cognates, and the sentence structures were nearly identical. I simply absorbed the language naturally, and used formal studying as a way to smooth out the rough edges.)

Now I am learning Polish, living in Poland, and trying to learn it as quickly as possible. My theory is that there is only so much my brain can truly learn each day. When I study new stuff for 1.5 hours, I learn probably 75% as much as I do when I study new stuff for 4 hours.

Am I fooling myself without even knowing it? A part of me thinks that anything more than 1.5 hours of actual study, (not counting speaking with Poles, hearing TV and radio in the background all day long, and torturing my girlfriend asking her tons of questions about stuff I've studied.) Is kind of a waste of time.

Regardless, it seems that 1.5 hours is the point of diminishing returns, but how much do the returns actually diminish?

What do some of you more experienced learners think?
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Re: how fast can you learn an unrelated language?

Postby sillygoose1 » Fri Jul 07, 2017 4:33 pm

The two most unrelated languages for me have been German and Russian. It took me about two years of German study and native materials to get to where I am now which is to say I can read quite well with the exception of more obscure vocab and I can follow a sitcom while not getting all of the jokes or understanding the more heavy details.

I've studied Russian for the same amount of time and I'm still L/Ring or using graded readers while picking out a few words from TV shows.

I do think you are right in that 1.5 hours of study everyday compared to 4 is optimal. There really is so much your brain can take in and you need to let it rest. Think of it like a muscle. Heavy study for a month, then maybe take a break for a week.
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Re: how fast can you learn an unrelated language?

Postby blaurebell » Fri Jul 07, 2017 6:44 pm

I'm currently studying Russian and it's not related to any other language I know. It's definitely a tough nut to crack in comparison to all those related languages. I already have some numbers for Russian compared to French. I learned French after learning a bit of Italian and a lot of Spanish, so it was exceptionally easy. To get to a point where I could start reading a regular novel with a dictionary I needed 46h in French, just a bit of pronunciation training, Duolingo and Assimil vs 153h in Russian, of grammar heavy courses, pronunciation training + Duolingo and Assimil. With Russian the alphabet was already a problem and the amount of grammar needed to decipher the average Russian sentence was considerable and it took a lot longer until real sentences in native contexts started to make sense to me. When I started to read French, I never referred to translations either, it was pretty transparent after I looked up all the words. In Russian I often had the experience that even after looking up all the words I couldn't make sense of the sentence, so I often referred to a French translation of the same book or Google translate. The word order of Russian is simply mad. So, reading also takes longer because I have to go over some sentences a few times before I understand them. The first 305 pages of intensive reading in French took me 62h, whereas the first 273 pages in Russian took me 127h, more than double the time for less pages. This is in part due to being a highly inflected language with a lot more word-forms, but also because the alphabet and word-order slows me down. So, expecting at least double the time for breaking through the comprehension barrier seems a reasonable for my own method. I would suspect that production would take much more than double the time though, because a language with cases has just so much more potential for making mistakes. Speaking "fluently" might be double the time too, because there simply is more grammar to learn, but speaking "well" will probably require a lot more drilling still. Getting understood isn't so hard usually, but doing it in a way that doesn't resemble Tarzan seems like a really difficult thing with a language like Russian.

As for study time in general: I also can't do more than 2h of intensive studying and that includes, grammar, flashcards and intensive reading up to the first 250 pages. After I'm past that initial barrier I can keep going with intensive reading for a lot longer though. I can only stand a very limited amount of time spent on flashcards. 20 minutes already feel like an eternity and they don't work for me at all. Once I'm down to ~15% unknown word forms per page I can keep going for 4-5h with intensive reading though, which is pretty much 4-5h of solid vocabulary study with context. The first 2h it still feels like a strain, but then my brain seems to give up all resistance and deals with all the new vocabulary just fine. I also find that I have more resistance to grammar when I understand what's going on, so 1h of grammar for production when I understand the language already is a lot easier than doing 1h of grammar at the beginning when I lack vocabulary and I'm not familiar with the structures of the language yet. That's why I try to break through the comprehension barrier first and only tackle production much later.

My current time estimates for Russian look like this: So far I have done 180h of intensive reading and I will probably need at least another 420h to get to a sufficient amount of vocabulary to start reading extensively with acceptable precision. At this point I will also start on listening comprehension and start with 30h of listening reading, followed by 20h dubbed series with subtitles, followed by 150h of dubbed series without subtitles. After that 150h of listening only to audiobooks, radio and podcasts. At that point I'll probably be in a good position to start on native series. My estimate is about 1200-1400h for solid B2-C1 comprehension, maybe a little longer if I need to read more than 5000 pages intensively to reach my vocabulary goals. With French the same strategy - intensive listening -> dubbed series -> native audio took me about 750h.
Last edited by blaurebell on Fri Jul 07, 2017 10:13 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: how fast can you learn an unrelated language?

Postby lichtrausch » Fri Jul 07, 2017 6:55 pm

drp9341 wrote:How fast can you learn an unrelated language to fluency? (ie: English speaker learning Russian or Polish / Italian speaker learning German / English speaker learning Finnish.)

blaurebell wrote:I'm currently studying Russian and it's not related to any other language I know.

Has news of the discovery of the Indo-European language family not made it to these parts yet?
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Re: how fast can you learn an unrelated language?

Postby Serpent » Fri Jul 07, 2017 6:59 pm

I learned Finnish in about a year and a half. I did spend one summer learning 4-8 hours every day (not in Finland), and also studied a lot after that.

I should note that a lot of languages listed here are not completely unrelated. The Indo-European languages have similarities that you take for granted until you start a language from an entirely different family.

Even in Finnish I could take advantage of some loan words, both from Russian and from the Germanic languages (Swedish, English...).

edit: please be respectful though, I totally understand how a distantly related language can feel unrelated.
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Re: how fast can you learn an unrelated language?

Postby leosmith » Fri Jul 07, 2017 7:02 pm

drp9341 wrote:How fast can you learn an unrelated language to fluency?

It depends on what you mean by "fluency", and a lot of other factors. Maybe in your case, if you think you're going to put about the same amount of effort in as you did with Portuguese, you can just multiply by 2. Where did I get the 2? It comes from (1100/600 = ~2). The 1100 and 600 are FSI numbers for Category IV and Category I.

My theory is that there is only so much my brain can truly learn each day.

I agree, but 1.5 hours is really low imo. Maybe that's a good number for a single uninterrupted sitting, rather than an entire day. This is also going to depend on many factors.
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Re: how fast can you learn an unrelated language?

Postby Ezy Ryder » Fri Jul 07, 2017 7:10 pm

lichtrausch wrote:
drp9341 wrote:How fast can you learn an unrelated language to fluency? (ie: English speaker learning Russian or Polish / Italian speaker learning German / English speaker learning Finnish.)

blaurebell wrote:I'm currently studying Russian and it's not related to any other language I know.

Has news of the discovery of the Indo-European language family not made it to these parts yet?

Maybe it's better to speak in terms of "similarity", rather than "relation"? There is of course a correlation. But, for example, even though Mandarin, Japanese, and English are related equally closely to one another (which is to say, not at all), you'll probably find Japanese to be lexically easier than Mandarin, for a monolingual speaker of English (because of all the loanwords and 和製英語/waseieigo; as well as easier than English for a monolingual speaker of Mandarin (because of all the 漢語/kango and 和製漢語/waseikango). French, despite not being a Germanic language, appears lexically more similar to English; than the, actually fellow Germanic, German.
Although of course, grammatical, syntactical and phonological similarities are more likely to come with relation.
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Re: how fast can you learn an unrelated language?

Postby blaurebell » Fri Jul 07, 2017 7:17 pm

lichtrausch wrote:Has news of the discovery of the Indo-European language family not made it to these parts yet?


It all depends on how you define "related". I think we're talking about "closely related" languages here, like Spanish-French-Italian or Russian-Polish-Ukrainian. I would also like to point out that classification, relation, similarity is mainly a matter of definition in general. What's related and unrelated is actually a matter of degree. We're talking about human languages so technically all languages are related because they are all supposed to be produced by human mouths. Extraterrestrials would probably talk about "human dialects" rather than "human languages". And that actually assumes that they figure out that we have any intelligence at all. To a being with pincers it's probably all just animal growling.
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Re: how fast can you learn an unrelated language?

Postby aaleks » Fri Jul 07, 2017 7:32 pm

I have been learning English about 5 years now. When I started 5 years ago it wasn't from a scratch (the usual story :) ). Plus it wasn't my first attempt to learn the language, and also I had some experience with learning German (although I'd already forgotten that language). So maybe 5 years is much too long. But at the other hand, I've never attended any English language classes or worked with a tutor. All that time I've been learning by myself and in a very unsystematic way. Mostly, I've just read books and watched TV. I wasn't working on my writing until a half year ago. And even now almost all my "work on writing" is my posts here. With speaking things are even worse.
I guess I have to admit that my experience with learning an unrelated language is not an encouraging one :) . But I believe that if I would've worked on every language skills from the beginning the result would be better, and it would've taken twice less time.
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Re: how fast can you learn an unrelated language?

Postby drp9341 » Sat Jul 08, 2017 8:26 am

blaurebell wrote:I'm currently studying Russian and it's not related to any other language I know. It's definitely a tough nut to crack in comparison to all those related languages. I already have some numbers for Russian compared to French. I learned French after learning a bit of Italian and a lot of Spanish, so it was exceptionally easy. To get to a point where I could start reading a regular novel with a dictionary I needed 46h in French, just a bit of pronunciation training, Duolingo and Assimil vs 153h in Russian, of grammar heavy courses, pronunciation training + Duolingo and Assimil. With Russian the alphabet was already a problem and the amount of grammar needed to decipher the average Russian sentence was considerable and it took a lot longer until real sentences in native contexts started to make sense to me. When I started to read French, I never referred to translations either, it was pretty transparent after I looked up all the words. In Russian I often had the experience that even after looking up all the words I couldn't make sense of the sentence, so I often referred to a French translation of the same book or Google translate. The word order of Russian is simply mad. So, reading also takes longer because I have to go over some sentences a few times before I understand them. The first 305 pages of intensive reading in French took me 62h, whereas the first 273 pages in Russian took me 127h, more than double the time for less pages. This is in part due to being a highly inflected language with a lot more word-forms, but also because the alphabet and word-order slows me down. So, expecting at least double the time for breaking through the comprehension barrier seems a reasonable for my own method. I would suspect that production would take much more than double the time though, because a language with cases has just so much more potential for making mistakes. Speaking "fluently" might be double the time too, because there simply is more grammar to learn, but speaking "well" will probably require a lot more drilling still. Getting understood isn't so hard usually, but doing it in a way that doesn't resemble Tarzan seems like a really difficult thing with a language like Russian.

As for study time in general: I also can't do more than 2h of intensive studying and that includes, grammar, flashcards and intensive reading up to the first 250 pages. After I'm past that initial barrier I can keep going with intensive reading for a lot longer though. I can only stand a very limited amount of time spent on flashcards. 20 minutes already feel like an eternity and they don't work for me at all. Once I'm down to ~15% unknown word forms per page I can keep going for 4-5h with intensive reading though, which is pretty much 4-5h of solid vocabulary study with context. The first 2h it still feels like a strain, but then my brain seems to give up all resistance and deals with all the new vocabulary just fine. I also find that I have more resistance to grammar when I understand what's going on, so 1h of grammar for production when I understand the language already is a lot easier than doing 1h of grammar at the beginning when I lack vocabulary and I'm not familiar with the structures of the language yet. That's why I try to break through the comprehension barrier first and only tackle production much later.

My current time estimates for Russian look like this: So far I have done 180h of intensive reading and I will probably need at least another 420h to get to a sufficient amount of vocabulary to start reading extensively with acceptable precision. At this point I will also start on listening comprehension and start with 30h of listening reading, followed by 20h dubbed series with subtitles, followed by 150h of dubbed series without subtitles. After that 150h of listening only to audiobooks, radio and podcasts. At that point I'll probably be in a good position to start on native series. My estimate is about 1200-1400h for solid B2-C1 comprehension, maybe a little longer if I need to read more than 5000 pages intensively to reach my vocabulary goals. With French the same strategy - intensive listening -> dubbed series -> native audio took me about 750h.



Thanks for this post, it's definitely eye-opening. Out of curiosity, do you actually keep track of all of the hours, or is it an estimate?

This is something I've always been curious about when I see people on this board talk about hours. I have never kept track of hours, and I even have a hard time keeping track of how many months. If I study for 2 months, stop for 2 months except occasional review of notes I took, and then start again for 2 months is that 4 months or 6 months?

Also, what kind of strategies would you recommend if your goal is communication first, "refinement" second.
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