It’s New Year’s resolution time, which inspires many people to refresh or improve their foreign-language skills. But really, what does it take to pick up a new language? Before you download Duolingo, let’s examine how to best maximize your efforts to succeed in your quest to become a polyglot.
The Language Itself
Different languages take different amounts of time to learn. The Foreign Service Institute (FSI) — a school within the U.S. Department of State — grades languages based on a number of factors that determine the complexity of learning them, including alphabet, grammar, pronunciation, and rhythm. Most of the Romance languages — French, Spanish, and Italian, for example — are category I, and take approximately 600 class hours (24 weeks) to achieve professional proficiency. German is category II, which equals 900 hours, or 36 weeks. Category III is assigned to the “hard” languages, which have “significant linguistic and/or cultural differences from English.” It can take around 1,100 hours, or 44 weeks, to learn Czech, Thai, or Polish, for example.
The “super-hard” languages fall into category IV, and, according to the FSI, it can take 2,200 hours to learn Arabic, Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, or Korean. That means it can take a State Department diplomat, who has demonstrated skill at learning languages, 88 weeks to learn one of these languages.
Desired Proficiency
If you don’t have the ability to dedicate more than a year of full-time classes to learning a new language, don’t give up hope. If you have a goal of learning any new language, pick one of the category I languages. They share many characteristics with English, including the alphabet and grammar, so they’re much easier to pick up. If you’re a fan of French cinema, start there. Maybe next year you can move on to Spanish.
Perhaps your goal is to be a better traveler, and you have some Eastern European or Asian destinations planned for 2023. There’s significantly less time and effort needed to pick up the basics — “thank you,” “hello,” “how much does this cost?” — than is needed to be a State Department ambassador. Make a list of the important phrases for traveling, and learn the correct pronunciation and phrasing for those. It might help to join a conversation group for that language (either in person or online) to practice before the big trip.
Motivation
That brings us to perhaps the most important factor in achieving any goal, and particularly in learning a language: motivation. How quickly you learn a language depends greatly on how motivated you are to do so. You’ll learn much faster by sticking with those Babbel lessons and finding folks to practice conversation with, than you would if you opened up a phrasebook sporadically. Like most skills, fluency takes repetition and regularity to achieve.
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