Question:
I'm a fifteen, nearing sixteen, year old language learner. Naturally,
I have many questions. In order to be concise, I'll put them in the
form of a list, I hope it doesn't bother anyone.
-Have I reached an age where the persuit of studying, and being able
to express myself with decent fluency, of twenty or more languages is
unrealistic or unattainable?
-How does one maintain their linguistic abilities, in the language
they've studied, once their number of languages studied becomes fairly
large (10 or more languages, perhaps this is an incorrect usage of
large)?
-If one wants to study language, what resources are available for
guiding their study so they can reach such goals of fluency?
-How does one balance their time to allow the study and "maintenance"
of their linguistic abilities?
I appreciate any help, and would love to here from other linguists. I
feel being able to communicate with who share this interest would be
of great help to me, as there aren't many that I can find who I can
relate to. Please, don't hesitate to e-mail me. I realize not all of
my questions can be answered (especially with the vagueness and lakc
of detail in which I presented the fourth question). If more
clarification is needed, just ask.
Answer:
One of my theories is that once you have acquired a certain degree of
proficiency, like a vocabulary of about 10,000 words, the language looks
after itself.
If you want to learn 10,000 words in 20 languages that's 20,000 words at an
average repetition to learn of 3,5 per word, and the average sweep time of
30 seconds per repeated attempt at learning, comes to 350,000 minutes, say
360,000, for safety. This boils down to 6,000 hours. I don't advise you
spend more than four hours a day on it or you will tire your memory without
even realising it, and the long-term efficacy will drop: you shoul do up to
12 20 minute blocks in a day with breaks in between in which you do a
different type of activity, and use handwriting to write the words out
instead of a keyboard and screen, and at the end of the twenty minute
session read the words and phrases out aloud again to yourself that you did
in the session. This means it will take you 1,500 days to learn these twenty
languages.
If you do not learn in a logical and optimal way either it will take longer
and the result will be worse. In particular you need to manage your learning
of vocabulary so that the iterations do not happen too frequently (less than
two weeks in between) as this will activate the short term, not the
long-term memory, and not too far apart (two months or more) as you will
lose the pace. On each iteration you should cut out 25-30% of the words in
the previous sheet, so that your average iterations per word will be 3.5,
which is well within the findings of Ebbinghaus.
Alternatively, you might decide that having just four or five fluent
languages or ten or so less fully learned languages and a social life on top
is a more desirable option.
A good course book can bring you to a stage where the study of literature in
the original can take you forward, or, for a more interactive journey,
exactly what you are doing now.
That's a question of knowing yourself, and one person's secret may not help
the other at all.
Submit Your
Own Answer!
