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ESL forum >
Message board > how long does it take?
how long does it take?
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colibrita
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how long does it take?
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Hi All
A question that I �m sure many of you will have been asked is..
How long does it take to learn English (or French, etc.)?
I �m interested to hear the variety of answers that you have given. No doubt many will begin with "It depends.." ; )
Thanks
Colibrita
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16 Oct 2012
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chud
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Tho only thing I know, that I learned Hebrew from zero in 6 months in 1990. Immediately after that I began learning Comparative and Hebrew Literature at the Uni. and was alright (actually I �ve got the highest average grade in my department during all the period of studies - 3 years). But I �ve been spending at least 5-6 hours a day learning. I was 18 then and since then I �ve become really bilingual.
Therefore, I believe, it depends on 2 things: 1. How much time are you prepared to spend on learning and 2. Your personal skills.
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16 Oct 2012
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douglas
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I�ve seen people thrown into situations where there was maybe one person that spoke English and they weren �t around all the time, so they were fully immersed into the language as a survival need. Within 1 week(actually a couple of days) they could get the necessities and within a month they were communicating fairly well.
If this is "learning " a language or not you have to define for yourself. They were able to function and communicate with others using the local language (though very "badly") so you could say they learned the language, but if you tested it they would probably be evaluated as false beginners.
Douglas |
16 Oct 2012
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millmo
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My children went from not speaking a single word to fluent in three months (french) as they went straight into school and therefore had no option but to speak the language. I, on the hand am still struggling on after 10 years!!!!!!! Full immersion is the answer! |
16 Oct 2012
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portugueseteacher
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It depends on the person. Personally I thik it takes a lifetime too because language is constantly changing. However, to learn the main structures of a given language I would say some years...But it depends on several factors, time spent learning it, good teaching methods, students �motivation,personal learning styles,.... |
16 Oct 2012
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yanogator
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It also depends very much on the native language of the student. If it uses a different alphabet and has many differences in grammar and vocabulary, it will take longer than if there are many similarities.
Bruce |
16 Oct 2012
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cunliffe
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�How long does it take to learn a language? � It all depends. If you mean, to get by, then for some, it will be a matter of months. If you mean to cope in a classroom, a busy office, or a university, then it may take some time.
When I was a student, doing a diploma in TESOL, (after my BA in French and Italian), I made a remark about how long it took to �master � English. My tutor took real offence. �No-one ever masters English! � she said with a certain amount of indignation. She was right. Can you read Shakespeare and understand it all? Can you read a business manual...etc...?
Thanks for the question, but I haven �t got a pat answer. |
16 Oct 2012
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MoodyMoody
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It also depends a lot on the age of the student and on previous educational background. Obviously preadolescent children learn faster because their brains are still "wired" for learning language easily. But the average 20 year old student will still learn faster than the average 70 year old student, in my experience. The brain doesn �t stop developing at legal adulthood.
It has also been my experience that students with a lot of education in their home countries learn English more quickly than students with little education. They have learned to learn, and they usually understand grammatical concepts more easily. Chud is right here.
Immersion does help also, as millmo mentions. My students who work with English speakers usually learn more than students who come to class and never speak English outside of it. Even in class, my language isolates (Karen, Denga, Krio, Ogoni, etc.) often pick up English better than Spanish speakers, despite the language differences.
But Bruce is not wrong. It is a lot easier, in general, for my French and Spanish speaking students to learn English than Arabic, Chinese, or Korean speaking students. I never studied Portuguese, but I can guess at least one word in ten reading it. I can �t read Vietnamese at all, even with the same alphabet.
I disagree with cunliffe �s tutor, however. In my opinion, mastery of a language means that you can read and understand most non-technical works with minimal use of the dictionary and without mental translation. It also means that one can fluently speak with little misunderstanding from a native listener, even if the accent isn �t 100% perfect, and that one can follow a native conversation at native speed. It �s not an academic definition, but it �s what I would try for with more advanced students than the ones I currently teach. |
16 Oct 2012
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