Language Difficulty Ranking (FSI)

[annelions]

But I've always wondered - are those, say, 600 hours academic hours or not? Are they class hours only, or include homework and/or independent practice?

That's a good question! I found a page mentioning "Their [FSI's] schedule calls for 25 hours of class per week with three or four hours per day of directed self-study." The hour-week equivalences account for the 25 class hours - so my interpretation is the 600 hours doesn't include extra homework/review time.

At 3-4 hours per day extra study, that approximately doubles the actual work needed to become fluent in a language. Yikes! That's gotta deter some people. I can see a lot of less-experienced language learners reading those stats without the knowledge of the suggested extra study and then getting frustrated/disappointed when they study for 600 hours and aren't anywhere close to fluent.

People who use only the 600 hours figure without also accounting for the self-study aspect are being misleading, whether they intend to be or not.

[jeff_lindqvist]

Even if the self-study hours were included, we must remember that the assumed 600 hours are spent as part of an FSI schedule, with that specific intensity and time period in mind - neither faster nor slower. It's not something that can be easily replicated on your own. Fast enough to not lose momentum, but slow enough to let the skills grow.

I wrote something about this a few years ago, in The outstanding tourist multi-track approach.

[gsbod]

I know it doesn't count for much, but my intuition tells me that there is probably an optimum level of intensity for learning a language, and it is probably a lot less than 40 hours a week. It may well be that if your optimum intensity is, say, 12 hours a week, and you study at this intensity, you will need less hours overall, but probably quite a few more weeks.

Obviously in the case of the FSI it is the weeks that matter, since they're paying for their staff training and need to get them competent and ready for placement in as few weeks as possible.

But in the case of us hobby language learners who are trying to fit language learning in around all kinds of other life commitments, I think it's a useful consideration.