Hours needed to "maintain" a language

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smallwhite
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Re: Hours needed to "maintain" a language

Postby smallwhite » Tue May 16, 2017 12:49 pm

I tried to roughly calculate how much reading you have to do in order to encounter every word in your vocabulary at least once.

Project Gutenberg frequency list (follow link to see what constitutes a word)

Rank ...... Word ..... Occurence per billion
13001 dating 2041.91
13002 nearby 2041.91
13003 poplar 2041.91
13004 spoonful 2041.91
13005 Trevor 2041.91

Words around rank 14000 looked too difficult for B2 while the words above look just right, so assume vocabulary size = 13,000.

2041.91 occurences per 1,000,000,000 words
= 1 occurence per 489,738 words

If it takes B2 you 5 minutes to read a page of 250 words,
1 encounter per 9,795 minutes.

If you spread that reading over 365 days, ie. you're happy with 1 encounter per year,
9,795 minutes / 365 days = 27 minutes per day

:shock: I don't know what went wrong but that's more than what I do when I'm actively studying.
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Iversen
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Re: Hours needed to "maintain" a language

Postby Iversen » Thu May 18, 2017 5:54 pm

IronMike wrote:Can doing only active skills preserve passive skills simultaneously?


I would tend to disagree. If you are a mediocre speaker you may be treated as such and the whole discussion will take place in some kind of 'basic' language with a low percentage of rare words and idioms. Or you will just hear a lot of words and wxpressions words which you never catch and never learn. You need a wider vocabulary to read literature written for native readers, but you will also have to time to absorb it, and you may not be called to reproduce those words so in the first time it is enough to know them passively.

outcast wrote:Whenever I have the choice, I choose speaking. It is the hardest skill in each of my languages, but it combines with listening, which is the harder of the two receptive skills (for me at least). I sometime run into Russian co-workers on the metro, and when I do, I turn the Esperanto radio off and strike up a conversation with the Russian.


I totally agree. The problem is that I don't meet people to speak to in most of my languages in person, and I don't feel comfortable things like Skype.
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IronMike
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BCS, 1+L/1+R (DLPT5, 2022)
Russian, 3/3 (DLPT5, 2022) 2+ (OPI, 2022)
German, 2L/1+R (DLPT5, 2021)
Italian, 1L/2R (DLPT IV, 2019)
Esperanto, C1 (KER skriba ekzameno, 2017)
Slovene, 2+L/3R (DLPT II in, yes, 1999)
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Re: Hours needed to "maintain" a language

Postby IronMike » Thu May 18, 2017 6:09 pm

Iversen wrote:
outcast wrote:Can doing only active skills preserve passive skills simultaneously?


I would tend to disagree. If you are a mediocre speaker you may be treated as such and the whole discussion will take place in some kind of 'basic' language with a low percentage of rare words and idioms. Or you will just hear a lot of words and wxpressions words which you never catch and never learn. You need a wider vocabulary to read literature written for native readers, but you will also have to time to absorb it, and you may not be called to reproduce those words so in the first time it is enough to know them passively.


In all fairness Iversen, I didn't say that. You quoted @outcast, not me. So I corrected it above.
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You're not a C1 (or B1 or whatever) if you haven't tested.
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IronMike
Black Belt - 2nd Dan
Posts: 2554
Joined: Thu May 12, 2016 6:13 am
Location: Northern Virginia
Languages: Studying: Esperanto
Maintaining: nada
Tested:
BCS, 1+L/1+R (DLPT5, 2022)
Russian, 3/3 (DLPT5, 2022) 2+ (OPI, 2022)
German, 2L/1+R (DLPT5, 2021)
Italian, 1L/2R (DLPT IV, 2019)
Esperanto, C1 (KER skriba ekzameno, 2017)
Slovene, 2+L/3R (DLPT II in, yes, 1999)
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=5189
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Contact:

Re: Hours needed to "maintain" a language

Postby IronMike » Thu May 18, 2017 6:11 pm

Iversen wrote:
IronMike wrote:Whenever I have the choice, I choose speaking. It is the hardest skill in each of my languages, but it combines with listening, which is the harder of the two receptive skills (for me at least). I sometime run into Russian co-workers on the metro, and when I do, I turn the Esperanto radio off and strike up a conversation with the Russian.


I totally agree. The problem is that I don't meet people to speak to in most of my languages in person, and I don't feel comfortable things like Skype.

This time you quoted me, but attributed to @outcast. So I corrected it above.
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You're not a C1 (or B1 or whatever) if you haven't tested.
CEFR --> ILR/DLPT equivalencies
My swimming life.
My reading life.


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