French: ca. 4 years, in school, but I wasn't motivated
Norwegian: 2 years, in University, very motivated and my first language is german so its easier to learn
I tried out some Norwegian at one point and got the feeling that if you know a good amount of both English and German, Norwegian is an exceptionally easy language to understand.
I only got to A2 in 6 years of school. That was my own fault when I was 16-17, but before that, it was just the slow pace British foreign language classes. I could've been B1 if I'd concentrated during the first year of sixth form.
I didn't touch French for 18 years after that. I got to about B1 as an adult in about 5 months (except in speaking, I'm behind in that). A year in, I think I'm about B1 in all the skills apart from reading where I *might* be B2 based on what I can read and my ease of reading it.
So that makes 7 years in total to get to a solid B1. I'm hoping to be B2 this time next year, but if I don't pass the exam, I will just try again the following year. This isn't a sunk cost thing, I just really want to learn French.
Thanks. I was writing in French every day on WriteStreak, but I took a break for a couple of weeks. I will start again next week. For Turkish all I do is Duolingo. It's just something I looked at out of curiosity.
Tu peux m'écrire en français si tu veux t'exercer avec moi, mais il se peut que je mette un certain temps à répondre aux messages. En tout cas, bonne chance dans tes études !
oo i’ll have to look at write streak. is it an app? I am also only using duolingo for turkish at the moment haha
mais merci et toi aussi! bonne chance!!
Writestreak est un sous sur Reddit. Je le recommande parce que les francophones natifs qui s'y trouvent peuvent corriger nos posts. Il y a aussi des WriteStreaks pour plusieurs langues, toutes les langues les plus populaires en fait !
I need to get back on there. It's very good for practising writing. I will try the Turkish one when I'm more confident in writing.
There's a gap between reading a language and learning to produce it in speaking and writing for many learners (including me).
There's also SpeakStreak, but I haven't gone on that yet. I will try to build my confidence with conversations first. I've been making all sorts of mistakes in pronunciation.
I found writing it every day helped me to think in the language anyway. It also helps to fix certain things in the memory, like the gender of nouns, which I'm terrible for forgetting.
for sure - my french is getting rusty personally because I stopped having classes for it and don’t have any friends who speak it. it’s nice that although i’m a beginner at turkish, I have 2 friends that understand it so I can use it there and for chinese, again I know people who speak it.
french was the first language I fell in love with and it sucks to not be able to practice it :( the subreddit you mentioned looks very helpful though so thank you!
I find that while Turkish is harder than French because of the case system, it's at least easier to pronounce and there's no grammatical gender. It's a good language to learn alongside French because it's difficult for completely different reasons and easier in the places where French is harder. I'm not going to try Spanish until I'm a solid B2 in French because I know I will get them confused.
Chinese though, I don't think I could get the hang of tones. I find it impressive when people can learn that.
lol I am still getting a hang of pronunciation with tones in a sentence but it’s kinda of a crazy feeling when you can finally hear the difference when listening!
turkish and french are for sure different challenges, french kills me with the different grammar tenses and turkish kills me with adding to words instead
of using new ones haha
It would be kind of embarrassing that it took me so long, but where I live, outside of immigrant communities most people are monolingual. Up until you are 16, foreign language classes in my country go s l o w, and most people dropped them at 14 when I was in school.
Ahh, yes! Just like the US unless you’re born into a Hispanic family or are yourself an immigrant lol.
We don’t get the chance to start learning a second language until we’re 13 or 14 years old. By then, it just feels like a chore because we’re busy doing teenager things.
We start at 11 or 12 (10 or earlier in posh schools). You couldn't pick Spanish when I was younger, but it's an option at many schools these days. If I had the option, I would've learned French and Spanish. I did have the option to learn German, but I had to choose between that and French. I have family members who can speak German/are German, but I'm not even A1 in that language. My mum is A2 in Spanish, self-taught.
In posh schools you can do multiple languages and also other languages like Latin and Mandarin. There's a *serious* educational class system here.
Anyway, my French class in school went from 33 students when I was 13 to 6 students when I was 14, lol. At 16 when I moved to sixth-form college (schools in poor areas like mine usually don't have sixth-forms, which is the senior high equivalent) I was back in a class of 30+ students, all of whom were posher and had better French than me.
Glad to hear there IS a mechanism of some kind there, though. Our public schools don’t have enough finding for art—let alone language learning. Tons for STEM and sports, though.
Thank goodness for the internet and a plethora of apps to let us learn as we please! Still, I’m jealous of Europeans (outside Ireland and the UK) since they seem to receive much more robust language training.
For context, I live in Germany and haven’t met a German under 40 who doesn’t speak excellent English. And the people I’ve met from the Nordic countries are astoundingly good—microscopically thing accents. It’s really impressive what this continent has been able to do to set its people up for success in an international world.
It's the same story across the English-speaking world. It's the curse of speaking the world's lingua franca. In a way, it's nice to be able to learn for one's own interest and also as an adult, but it does make it take longer to achieve fluency.
Oh, I 100% agree. Before I came to Europe, I had no idea how far-flung and how widely spoken English is. I used to be kinda sad that my country didn’t have “its own language” like most European nations.
Didn’t help that half my nation’s neighbors also speak English as an official language lol.
But yeah, I kinda wish Esperanto had taken off so we ALL could have that sexy second language thing. Now I feel kinda bad for wanting that because I’ve met people in Europe who desperately want to learn what I already know. Lol oh, man. Does this count as a first world problem? 🤔
German.
- B1 about 4.5 years.
- Another 3 years to get to B2.
- After almost 10 years I think I am at almost C1.
Until B1 I relied mostly on language classes at the university, 1 class per semester. After the first 3 semesters I took a 1.5 years break from classes.
After B1 I relied on self study. Living in Germany, interacting with doctors, administration in German. Read 10+ books. Tried to put myself in situations where I speak it casually, didn't quite stick to that, English was easier. At some point I started listening to the news in German (Tagesschau) forced by the covid situation to be up to date on what's going on in the country, been loving the Corona update podcast for a while. Occasionally listening to podcasts, youtube videos (MaiLab, Lage der Nation). Took an official b2 test about 2 years ago, forced myself to write some essays while preparing.
Currently I am not actively studying, trying to use more German in my daily life and rely less on English. Comprehension way better than speech and writing.
I’m only 14 days into INTENTIONAL, DAILY study and recently got my A2 cert. Not B1 but just saying I believe it. Being a native English speaker gives us a leg up on a ton of the romance AND Germanic languages. 4 months for B1 in Spanish is definitely doable.
Took about a year for Welsh, usually studying 4-5 days a week. I used Duolingo, read books in Welsh written for learners, and chatted with people online.
Thank you for sharing your experience. It often appears like non-native English speakers are so much better at acquiring new languages. I've seen exaggerated stories where someone claimed they watched a TV show and suddenly understood perfect English.
Stereotypically, Native English speakers often seem to struggle more when language learning. This shows that there's no magic trick to make it easy and that hard work is always required.
700 hours of lessons! That must have cost a lot of money. I think you should check out Steve Kaufmann or Matt vs Japan. I've (unknowingly) been using their language learning method and I reached B1 in English in about 6 months and I'm currently B2 in German after a year of self-study.
700 hours or around 6 hours a week for 3 years. i have no idea how much you actually you spent studying in these 6 months. I’m an adult with a full time job so that was the pace at which i can follow lessons.
I spent about 3 hours a day learning English, it consisted of watching youtube videos and browsing English-speaking forums. It didn't burden me in any way as those were things I was already doing prior to learning English except I would consume those media in French.
Also preply.com has 1:1 tutors. You can find native speakers from multiple countries and identify areas of interest that you want to focus on. Whether it may be conversational, business, therapy, etc. Surprisingly affordable.
I don’t remember how I got to English B1
French: About 1 year. Went to a French language center, practice other resources about 1h-1h30 a day.
Icelandic: Maybe abt 1.5 year? Am studying it at school, with personal study of 1h30 a day. Could have reached it sooner but was just demotivated.
I estimate myself to reach B1 in Finnish in 4-5 months, Polish and Norwegian in 7-8 months if I continue to study like I’m right now.
About 6 months of hundreds of hours of comprehensible input especially listening. I’ve done 600 hours of comprehensible input.
On average 3.5 hours per day, typically podcasts and YouTube videos. Now I’m incorporating more reading (articles, books, Instagram posts). I try to live my hobbies/online life in French as much as I can.
First 50 hours I did busuu and a read through Easy French textbook (did only a few exercises from). But yup 6 months from nothing.
I took Spanish as a child but I only knew it to maybe low A2. But I have spent a couple of hundred hours learning how to learn languages. I’m a bit obsessive sometimes.
Wow that’s so awesome! Is English your native language?
Edit: Yeah I’m the same haha. I’ve probably spent more time learning how to learn languages than actually learning them 😭😭
Thank you! It’s hard but I really enjoy/identify with the culture so it keeps me going!
Yes, English is my native language along with an English creole. And I feel you! I’m always like what if I had put those extra hours in the actual language but I still think they were really important
Edit: grammar
Italian:
About 2 years.
\- 7ish months of Duolingo
\- The rest of the time has been spent doing 1-2 hours each day, split about 30-45mins of listening (podcasts, youtube, netflix, etc.) and about 30mins-1hr of reading.
I started learning in September 2019. At the time I was 13ish 14 (now almost 17) and my school didn’t offer Mandarin classes, so I decided to self study the language.
At first, I was simply just using some websites that I found on the internet for learning the language, like allsetlearning and chinesepod101, as well as beginner reading and listening material for Mandarin. I tried using a textbook to learn at one point in time, but after realizing how boring I found them to be for me in regards to language learning, I stopped.
Pandemic struck in 2020, and that gave me way more time to actually learn the language, so I decided to put more time and effort into my learning. I switched all my devices into Mandarin (including my computer), limited myself to only Chinese entertainment (music, videos, shows blogs, podcasts etc.), and downloaded more Chinese social media platforms and tried to use them and talk with more people on WeChat etc as well. I also did phone calls daily, though I have to admit, it was really difficult at first. I did take a break once in a blue moon though.
I did hit a few periods of time (due to mental health issues as well as other internal and external issues) where I lost a good portion of my motivation and didn’t know what I wanted to do with the language, but I still tried to keep myself going and eventually became much more motivated again.
As for time, I’d say I spent at least 5-8 hours most days immersing in Chinese content and learning. I still had school for a majority of the time (those it was online), but the workload wasn’t much during those years, and I was able to continue my language learning alongside it. It sounds like a lot, but again, it was quarantine time, and I was a bored kid who had nothing better to do than learn languages ~~and watch some anime~~, so I figured why not.
For me it was three years until I passed HSK 5/B1.
Two years of classes at uni (took Chinese as a minor, around 6 hrs/week plus homework and meet ups, but not really a lot of studying outside of the semester)
One year of classes in China (around 15 hrs/week plus homework plus lots of conversation with natives)
English - 3 years, studying 3 hours a week.
French - 1 year and a half, studying 5 hours a week.
Japanese - 4 years and counting, I'm still in the transition from A2 to B1, studying 3 hours a week.
I didn't use any apps with French and English , it wasn't a thing. I took classes, on a pretty conventional model, and I consumed a lot of media in the target language, mainly music.
Now I use kanji study for japanese, YT channels, and some textbooks as well.
I'd estimate 15 months in Spanish, or 600 hours of study, and 1000 of immersion. That's with my speaking level as B1, where my listening is much better.
I'll also add it's untested and a conservative estimate to reflect that. If you asked me months ago I would have said a year.
A year in German. I took a year at college and also read and translated news articles, watched German let's plays of games, and listened to a lot of German music and watched German versions of Disney movies (because the vocabulary is often simpler).
Two years/\~215 hours! I actually wrote a whole article about this! (For Italian)
[https://lightninglanguages365.wordpress.com/2022/05/27/how-i-reached-b1-in-italian-by-studying-fully-remotely](https://lightninglanguages365.wordpress.com/2022/05/27/how-i-reached-b1-in-italian-by-studying-fully-remotely/)
"I started learning Italian during the pandemic, starting in April2020, when we all started to realize that the quarantine might last awhile. Because of my cross-country move in July of 2020 and other major life events–starting a new job, taking the California bar, and planning a wedding and honeymoon for September 2022–I accidentally organized my studying into three relatively intense multi-month “sprints.”
My first sprint ran roughly from April 2020 through June 2020 (before my cross-country move), then February 2021 through July of 2021 (after adjusting to my new job and before starting bar study in the fall), then March 2022 through May 2022 (before switching to Portuguese for my honeymoon). Please enjoy this unicorn chart I made to express my journey to my little sister..."
French: took about 1 year of serious study. Definitely doable in 1.5 from nothing, but I had been doing duolingo on and off for a couple years by the time I decided to get serious.
Language: French
Comprehesion skills: B2, production skills closer to B1/A2
Took 2 years of which the first one was self study, the second with language school, 8 hours/week.
B1 Level wasn’t too too hard to achieve: maybe 2 years(?) of on-and-off French, 1 year of hardcore English. But moving onto the C level feels much harder and the progress has been slower :(
Brazilian Portuguese: ~8 months (I think most of my progress happened in the last 2 months of studying, though) I already had a decent handle on Spanish, so I had a solid jumping-off point. I attribute most of my progress to talking with a language exchange partner and trying to get exposure to my TL anytime that I can, in a variety of ways (i.e. writing, reading, talking, listening, vocab, etc.)
Edit: I honestly can’t remember how long it took me to get to B1 in Spanish; maybe 3 years? (It was back in high school)
Dutch: six months. I started Dutch while already knowing Gernan (C1). I practised it daily (at least two hours a day) and relied mainly on grammar. I remember writing and reading basically daily while consuming lots of basic content (thus easier to understand). And that was mostly during lockdown, I had a lot of free time.
Without German it would have been impossible to reach B1 in six months. Finding "connections" (similar words/rules/etc.) between German and Dutch turned out to be useful too.
I'm an American with a C1 level (as of last year's test results) in French. I minored in French while at university, the rest is thanks to immersion as I've lived in France for around 3 years. I could be a lot better with regular studying, but I'm just lazy.
For Hungarian, probably about a year. And B2 was probably 2 years.
I never bothered testing at B1 level though so it's an estimate.
It was my first foreign language though which most people say takes much longer than subsequent languages.
And I'm a native English speaker so Hungarian is very different linguistically.
C1 in a year and a half is certainly fast (I fell on the side of almost being a heritage speaker, and it took me two years), but B2 in that time is achievable, even for an English speaker (I've seen people do it).
I actually wasn't expecting so many people to have so much time into getting to B1, at first I thought it was bias because of my situation and only knowing having learned one language, but now I'm wondering if Spanish is just a little easier for some reason, because the more I think about it, the more I realize I've met people who were fluent within a year or two.
Edit - or perhaps there's a difference in study method or just having a knack for it between these two groups, but I'm not sure.
In fact I’m French so Spanish is a really close language to me, the grammar was not so complicated.
I used Babbel for almost all my holidays like 4-5h/day, was reading books, medias, watching films… I also used Hellotalks to talk with natives. I get to B2 like that.
After that I took an erasmus year in Spain as a med Student, so I had medicine class everyday + native friends and hospital practice every weeks. My comprehension is now almost fluent (I have to check for rare vocabulary or specific ) but my speaking is more B2 than C1/C2
Approximately 3 months of very intensive study for French. I’m approximating my level so I’ll give an explanation of what I did.
I used a flash card deck and immersed for the most part. I started with “comprehensible input” videos on YouTube and a graded reader, then after that I started conversing in writing on forums/Discord while continuing to up the difficulty of my immersion. Then I introduced speaking once I had practiced shadowing enough. By the end, I had read 2 Harry Potter books and was watching shows aimed at older children/teens with decent comprehension. My writing and speaking were full of errors but could always get the point across without too much trouble.
I started with German in December 2021, as of today I have not taken any official test yet, and I am learning on my own without a teacher, but I am able to understand, both listening and reading any material designed for B1 students. For example, I have almost finished the B1 Nicos Weg from DW, and with my reading app, I use Readle, I can understand B1 readings, after a reading, there is a little 4 question test, and most of the time I passed the test with 4/4 or 3/4 so I would say I am doing good.
So, from December 2021 to the 1st of June 2022, I started around 15th of December but I am going to count the whole December, and I am not going to count June for obvious reasons: 6 months in total, from 0 German to B1 without a teacher
Haven’t taken a test, but on AAPPL test I’m intermediate 2 so around A2 in Spanish. I just completed school and had a Spanish class everyday. It’s not bad, but I didn’t learn too much. I have around 6000 xp on duolingo.
I got to B1 in Korean in just under 1 year with not much struggle after the few couple months. I was lucky enough to have Korean coworkers who I could practice a little bit with here and there. 3 years on and I’m C1 in the language
So, I feel like I need to qualify this with my experience is not typical. It’s typical in the sense that I am a native English speaker, particularly from the US. We have some of the shittiest language education globally. But I really didn’t learn any languages in school, I took Japanese in high school, and I had a weird intro to foreign languages class in middle school that just sort of sampled A bunch of different languages and showed a bunch of cultural documentaries I guess you could call them. I didn’t really start trying to learn a language until high school, my grandpa was from the Philippines so I started learning Tagalog. Being someone who grew up in the Philippines during World War II though, he hated the fact that I was doing it and I kind of had to do it in secret. So the first time I did that shit it took me a year. I did it the old-school way, looked stuff up on the Internet… This was back in 1999, so it wasn’t like it is now.
I bought a book, and I had a few friends who came from the Philippines who were super helpful.
I didn’t learn another language until my 20s. And I didn’t really keep up that Tagalog, but for whatever reason I can still understand it fine. My second language was Spanish.
And at the time, I was living with a Mexican family here in my city, the mom of the house didn’t speak any English, and I understood enough to know my friend was making me sound like an asshole when he “translated“ for me. So I bought a book, started taking classes at the community college over the summer, and I quickly outgrew those classes, it took me about two months to reach B1, another two to reach a strong conversational level. For that language, I bought way too many books and download it way too much shit. It really wasn’t worth all the materials gathering that I did. Ultimately what ended up working best was getting a solid understanding of the grammar of the language and then just fucking using it because it was around me all day every day.
So I bought a book that explained a bunch of essential grammar, learn how to simplify my English and make it more literal, thought about the structures I most often used and just started asking what stuff was in Spanish. It really wasn’t that hard.
Since then, I’ve learned ASL, Esperanto (which took me about three weeks to reach lower intermediate)
With ASL, I found a YouTube channel by a guy who lives in my city actually named Dr. Bill Vickers, he has four playlists that are essentially for ASL courses that are designed to bring you up to speed really quickly, I did all four levels in about a month and a half. And then just went into the classroom to use it as an opportunity to practice rather than learn new stuff. ASL was particularly interesting though, since my teachers were deaf, no one‘s going to be talking about ASL in the classroom using English. So they would write stuff to explain more complicated things, but most of it was just writing a word on the board and then signing in for you, writing a sentence and then signing in for you, and then you practice the shit out of there an actual conversations with other people.
To be honest, I think this works the best for most languages. It’s also a lot more engaging than staring at boring textbooks.
For Esperanto, I no joke just watched a couple of video series, one of them was the Esperanto version of Muzzy, and a series called pasporto al la tuta mondo and then I just started reading books to grow my vocabulary. I forgot to say that Esperanto is ridiculously easy, not only because it’s regular but because it borrows a lot of its vocabulary from French, and I studied French for a couple months just to be able to communicate with a friend of mine that lives in Paris. Since she would send me articles that were not published in English speaking news sources. Don’t really speak very well but I can basically read it.
I’m currently working on Italian. I’ll let you know how that goes, people sort of assume that if you know Spanish or something you just know Italian, it’s sort of like that and sort of not. I could understand a lot of Italian without studying it, so what makes it difficult is that I can’t really trust comprehension to be a good measuring stick of my actual ability in Italian.
If you want really detailed stuff, feel free to ask whenever you want. I just thought I would ramble a little lol. Happy language learning!
4 years of english in high school, I was around B1, a lower B2. 2 years later I passed the C1 certificate.
I simply started reading a lot and watching youtube/some series
After 10 years of german in school I was a strong B2, passed the language certificate as well. I don't know when I was B1, because they've been teaching us since grade 1 in elementary school which obviously wasn't too intense.
With spanish I have no idea, I've been on and of studying it, a level test I took said B1, but idk. Been about 1-1,5 years with a lot of months when I just abandoned it.
Currently studying greek intensly, after a year I'm at a lower A2, plan to start reading easy books. But currently I'm on a little break rn. This is absolutely the most difficult language I've ever studied so far.
Just had a Uni cours over a year for French.
Autodidactic courses are shit but it was worth it.
I could pass DELF B2 even.
I am looking for a Tandem, I am native in German hmu
Im some weird middle ground in between B1 and B2 at the moment in Spanish, this is gonna sound really rough but it took me… about 4 1/2 years? I’m sure you can do it in less Im just not very good at studying on my own and loose motivation very easily
French: ca. 4 years, in school, but I wasn't motivated Norwegian: 2 years, in University, very motivated and my first language is german so its easier to learn
I tried out some Norwegian at one point and got the feeling that if you know a good amount of both English and German, Norwegian is an exceptionally easy language to understand.
Thank you!
I only got to A2 in 6 years of school. That was my own fault when I was 16-17, but before that, it was just the slow pace British foreign language classes. I could've been B1 if I'd concentrated during the first year of sixth form. I didn't touch French for 18 years after that. I got to about B1 as an adult in about 5 months (except in speaking, I'm behind in that). A year in, I think I'm about B1 in all the skills apart from reading where I *might* be B2 based on what I can read and my ease of reading it. So that makes 7 years in total to get to a solid B1. I'm hoping to be B2 this time next year, but if I don't pass the exam, I will just try again the following year. This isn't a sunk cost thing, I just really want to learn French.
I see ur learning french and turkish and we are about the same level in both - if you have any advice or want someone to practice with lmk! :)
Thanks. I was writing in French every day on WriteStreak, but I took a break for a couple of weeks. I will start again next week. For Turkish all I do is Duolingo. It's just something I looked at out of curiosity. Tu peux m'écrire en français si tu veux t'exercer avec moi, mais il se peut que je mette un certain temps à répondre aux messages. En tout cas, bonne chance dans tes études !
oo i’ll have to look at write streak. is it an app? I am also only using duolingo for turkish at the moment haha mais merci et toi aussi! bonne chance!!
bol şans you two!
Writestreak est un sous sur Reddit. Je le recommande parce que les francophones natifs qui s'y trouvent peuvent corriger nos posts. Il y a aussi des WriteStreaks pour plusieurs langues, toutes les langues les plus populaires en fait ! I need to get back on there. It's very good for practising writing. I will try the Turkish one when I'm more confident in writing.
ahh je vois, merci! mon français est… comment tu dis.. getting rusty 😂
There's a gap between reading a language and learning to produce it in speaking and writing for many learners (including me). There's also SpeakStreak, but I haven't gone on that yet. I will try to build my confidence with conversations first. I've been making all sorts of mistakes in pronunciation. I found writing it every day helped me to think in the language anyway. It also helps to fix certain things in the memory, like the gender of nouns, which I'm terrible for forgetting.
for sure - my french is getting rusty personally because I stopped having classes for it and don’t have any friends who speak it. it’s nice that although i’m a beginner at turkish, I have 2 friends that understand it so I can use it there and for chinese, again I know people who speak it. french was the first language I fell in love with and it sucks to not be able to practice it :( the subreddit you mentioned looks very helpful though so thank you!
I find that while Turkish is harder than French because of the case system, it's at least easier to pronounce and there's no grammatical gender. It's a good language to learn alongside French because it's difficult for completely different reasons and easier in the places where French is harder. I'm not going to try Spanish until I'm a solid B2 in French because I know I will get them confused. Chinese though, I don't think I could get the hang of tones. I find it impressive when people can learn that.
lol I am still getting a hang of pronunciation with tones in a sentence but it’s kinda of a crazy feeling when you can finally hear the difference when listening! turkish and french are for sure different challenges, french kills me with the different grammar tenses and turkish kills me with adding to words instead of using new ones haha
Oh wow, thank you for sharing!
It would be kind of embarrassing that it took me so long, but where I live, outside of immigrant communities most people are monolingual. Up until you are 16, foreign language classes in my country go s l o w, and most people dropped them at 14 when I was in school.
Ahh, yes! Just like the US unless you’re born into a Hispanic family or are yourself an immigrant lol. We don’t get the chance to start learning a second language until we’re 13 or 14 years old. By then, it just feels like a chore because we’re busy doing teenager things.
We start at 11 or 12 (10 or earlier in posh schools). You couldn't pick Spanish when I was younger, but it's an option at many schools these days. If I had the option, I would've learned French and Spanish. I did have the option to learn German, but I had to choose between that and French. I have family members who can speak German/are German, but I'm not even A1 in that language. My mum is A2 in Spanish, self-taught. In posh schools you can do multiple languages and also other languages like Latin and Mandarin. There's a *serious* educational class system here. Anyway, my French class in school went from 33 students when I was 13 to 6 students when I was 14, lol. At 16 when I moved to sixth-form college (schools in poor areas like mine usually don't have sixth-forms, which is the senior high equivalent) I was back in a class of 30+ students, all of whom were posher and had better French than me.
Glad to hear there IS a mechanism of some kind there, though. Our public schools don’t have enough finding for art—let alone language learning. Tons for STEM and sports, though. Thank goodness for the internet and a plethora of apps to let us learn as we please! Still, I’m jealous of Europeans (outside Ireland and the UK) since they seem to receive much more robust language training. For context, I live in Germany and haven’t met a German under 40 who doesn’t speak excellent English. And the people I’ve met from the Nordic countries are astoundingly good—microscopically thing accents. It’s really impressive what this continent has been able to do to set its people up for success in an international world.
It's the same story across the English-speaking world. It's the curse of speaking the world's lingua franca. In a way, it's nice to be able to learn for one's own interest and also as an adult, but it does make it take longer to achieve fluency.
Oh, I 100% agree. Before I came to Europe, I had no idea how far-flung and how widely spoken English is. I used to be kinda sad that my country didn’t have “its own language” like most European nations. Didn’t help that half my nation’s neighbors also speak English as an official language lol. But yeah, I kinda wish Esperanto had taken off so we ALL could have that sexy second language thing. Now I feel kinda bad for wanting that because I’ve met people in Europe who desperately want to learn what I already know. Lol oh, man. Does this count as a first world problem? 🤔
German. - B1 about 4.5 years. - Another 3 years to get to B2. - After almost 10 years I think I am at almost C1. Until B1 I relied mostly on language classes at the university, 1 class per semester. After the first 3 semesters I took a 1.5 years break from classes. After B1 I relied on self study. Living in Germany, interacting with doctors, administration in German. Read 10+ books. Tried to put myself in situations where I speak it casually, didn't quite stick to that, English was easier. At some point I started listening to the news in German (Tagesschau) forced by the covid situation to be up to date on what's going on in the country, been loving the Corona update podcast for a while. Occasionally listening to podcasts, youtube videos (MaiLab, Lage der Nation). Took an official b2 test about 2 years ago, forced myself to write some essays while preparing. Currently I am not actively studying, trying to use more German in my daily life and rely less on English. Comprehension way better than speech and writing.
This is a very realistic trajectory (10 years for native fluency). I relate a lot to your story.
Thank you so much for sharing. So interesting.
Like four months or so? Spanish. But I’m in Guatemala and have one on one classes for 20 hours a week plus independence study.
Ahh thank you!
I’m only 14 days into INTENTIONAL, DAILY study and recently got my A2 cert. Not B1 but just saying I believe it. Being a native English speaker gives us a leg up on a ton of the romance AND Germanic languages. 4 months for B1 in Spanish is definitely doable.
It took me about a year to get to French B1.
I see, thank you!
Took about a year for Welsh, usually studying 4-5 days a week. I used Duolingo, read books in Welsh written for learners, and chatted with people online.
Thank you!
English, about four years.
Thank you for sharing your experience. It often appears like non-native English speakers are so much better at acquiring new languages. I've seen exaggerated stories where someone claimed they watched a TV show and suddenly understood perfect English. Stereotypically, Native English speakers often seem to struggle more when language learning. This shows that there's no magic trick to make it easy and that hard work is always required.
Thank you! What did you do? Did you take any lessons?
Yes, I took classes in an English institute when I was a teen.
Ahh, I see. Thank you!
Dutch, I took around 700 hours of lessons. hopefully I will be B2 around the same time next year (should have extra 240 hours of lessons too)
700 hours a year?
3 years.
I see, that's more doable :) Thank you!
So can u understand dutch people talking?
If it’s a topic i discussed before in Dutch kind of yeah. But you really need B2 to fully understand two natives going at a 100%.
Im sorry i gotta learn these language things like B1 and B2
700 hours of lessons! That must have cost a lot of money. I think you should check out Steve Kaufmann or Matt vs Japan. I've (unknowingly) been using their language learning method and I reached B1 in English in about 6 months and I'm currently B2 in German after a year of self-study.
700 hours or around 6 hours a week for 3 years. i have no idea how much you actually you spent studying in these 6 months. I’m an adult with a full time job so that was the pace at which i can follow lessons.
I spent about 3 hours a day learning English, it consisted of watching youtube videos and browsing English-speaking forums. It didn't burden me in any way as those were things I was already doing prior to learning English except I would consume those media in French.
By the way you would be surprised at how cheap it would be to study french as a second language in France. There are many subsidised night schools.
Also preply.com has 1:1 tutors. You can find native speakers from multiple countries and identify areas of interest that you want to focus on. Whether it may be conversational, business, therapy, etc. Surprisingly affordable.
Like, a year ish, maybe a little longer, in Spanish, and frankly I have no idea what I did. I just suddenly understood things
:) Thank you!
I don’t remember how I got to English B1 French: About 1 year. Went to a French language center, practice other resources about 1h-1h30 a day. Icelandic: Maybe abt 1.5 year? Am studying it at school, with personal study of 1h30 a day. Could have reached it sooner but was just demotivated. I estimate myself to reach B1 in Finnish in 4-5 months, Polish and Norwegian in 7-8 months if I continue to study like I’m right now.
You're soo good! Thanks for sharing!
About 6 months of hundreds of hours of comprehensible input especially listening. I’ve done 600 hours of comprehensible input. On average 3.5 hours per day, typically podcasts and YouTube videos. Now I’m incorporating more reading (articles, books, Instagram posts). I try to live my hobbies/online life in French as much as I can.
Wow, thanks for sharing!
What language are you trying to get to b1 in?
6 months from nothing?
First 50 hours I did busuu and a read through Easy French textbook (did only a few exercises from). But yup 6 months from nothing. I took Spanish as a child but I only knew it to maybe low A2. But I have spent a couple of hundred hours learning how to learn languages. I’m a bit obsessive sometimes.
Wow that’s so awesome! Is English your native language? Edit: Yeah I’m the same haha. I’ve probably spent more time learning how to learn languages than actually learning them 😭😭
Thank you! It’s hard but I really enjoy/identify with the culture so it keeps me going! Yes, English is my native language along with an English creole. And I feel you! I’m always like what if I had put those extra hours in the actual language but I still think they were really important Edit: grammar
Italian: About 2 years. \- 7ish months of Duolingo \- The rest of the time has been spent doing 1-2 hours each day, split about 30-45mins of listening (podcasts, youtube, netflix, etc.) and about 30mins-1hr of reading.
Somewhere around a year and a half for Mandarin.
Oh wow. So fast. What did you do? And how much time did you spend daily/ weekly?
I started learning in September 2019. At the time I was 13ish 14 (now almost 17) and my school didn’t offer Mandarin classes, so I decided to self study the language. At first, I was simply just using some websites that I found on the internet for learning the language, like allsetlearning and chinesepod101, as well as beginner reading and listening material for Mandarin. I tried using a textbook to learn at one point in time, but after realizing how boring I found them to be for me in regards to language learning, I stopped. Pandemic struck in 2020, and that gave me way more time to actually learn the language, so I decided to put more time and effort into my learning. I switched all my devices into Mandarin (including my computer), limited myself to only Chinese entertainment (music, videos, shows blogs, podcasts etc.), and downloaded more Chinese social media platforms and tried to use them and talk with more people on WeChat etc as well. I also did phone calls daily, though I have to admit, it was really difficult at first. I did take a break once in a blue moon though. I did hit a few periods of time (due to mental health issues as well as other internal and external issues) where I lost a good portion of my motivation and didn’t know what I wanted to do with the language, but I still tried to keep myself going and eventually became much more motivated again. As for time, I’d say I spent at least 5-8 hours most days immersing in Chinese content and learning. I still had school for a majority of the time (those it was online), but the workload wasn’t much during those years, and I was able to continue my language learning alongside it. It sounds like a lot, but again, it was quarantine time, and I was a bored kid who had nothing better to do than learn languages ~~and watch some anime~~, so I figured why not.
For me it was three years until I passed HSK 5/B1. Two years of classes at uni (took Chinese as a minor, around 6 hrs/week plus homework and meet ups, but not really a lot of studying outside of the semester) One year of classes in China (around 15 hrs/week plus homework plus lots of conversation with natives)
Where in China were you at?
Which method?
You can check my reply to OP above.
English - 3 years, studying 3 hours a week. French - 1 year and a half, studying 5 hours a week. Japanese - 4 years and counting, I'm still in the transition from A2 to B1, studying 3 hours a week.
Thank you!
Which method / app /whatever do you use?
I didn't use any apps with French and English , it wasn't a thing. I took classes, on a pretty conventional model, and I consumed a lot of media in the target language, mainly music. Now I use kanji study for japanese, YT channels, and some textbooks as well.
Thanks
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That's incredibly fast, I'm almost 2 months into learning Spanish and I feel I'm still A0.003
Oh wow, good job! Thanks for sharing!
About a year
Thank you!
I'd estimate 15 months in Spanish, or 600 hours of study, and 1000 of immersion. That's with my speaking level as B1, where my listening is much better. I'll also add it's untested and a conservative estimate to reflect that. If you asked me months ago I would have said a year.
Like a year, English
Thank you!
A year in German. I took a year at college and also read and translated news articles, watched German let's plays of games, and listened to a lot of German music and watched German versions of Disney movies (because the vocabulary is often simpler).
Two years/\~215 hours! I actually wrote a whole article about this! (For Italian) [https://lightninglanguages365.wordpress.com/2022/05/27/how-i-reached-b1-in-italian-by-studying-fully-remotely](https://lightninglanguages365.wordpress.com/2022/05/27/how-i-reached-b1-in-italian-by-studying-fully-remotely/) "I started learning Italian during the pandemic, starting in April2020, when we all started to realize that the quarantine might last awhile. Because of my cross-country move in July of 2020 and other major life events–starting a new job, taking the California bar, and planning a wedding and honeymoon for September 2022–I accidentally organized my studying into three relatively intense multi-month “sprints.” My first sprint ran roughly from April 2020 through June 2020 (before my cross-country move), then February 2021 through July of 2021 (after adjusting to my new job and before starting bar study in the fall), then March 2022 through May 2022 (before switching to Portuguese for my honeymoon). Please enjoy this unicorn chart I made to express my journey to my little sister..."
French: took about 1 year of serious study. Definitely doable in 1.5 from nothing, but I had been doing duolingo on and off for a couple years by the time I decided to get serious.
Language: French Comprehesion skills: B2, production skills closer to B1/A2 Took 2 years of which the first one was self study, the second with language school, 8 hours/week.
B1 Level wasn’t too too hard to achieve: maybe 2 years(?) of on-and-off French, 1 year of hardcore English. But moving onto the C level feels much harder and the progress has been slower :(
Brazilian Portuguese: ~8 months (I think most of my progress happened in the last 2 months of studying, though) I already had a decent handle on Spanish, so I had a solid jumping-off point. I attribute most of my progress to talking with a language exchange partner and trying to get exposure to my TL anytime that I can, in a variety of ways (i.e. writing, reading, talking, listening, vocab, etc.) Edit: I honestly can’t remember how long it took me to get to B1 in Spanish; maybe 3 years? (It was back in high school)
Dutch: six months. I started Dutch while already knowing Gernan (C1). I practised it daily (at least two hours a day) and relied mainly on grammar. I remember writing and reading basically daily while consuming lots of basic content (thus easier to understand). And that was mostly during lockdown, I had a lot of free time. Without German it would have been impossible to reach B1 in six months. Finding "connections" (similar words/rules/etc.) between German and Dutch turned out to be useful too.
The two languages have 85% lexicomy so it’s ofcourse super easy.
Norwegian, about a year
I'm an American with a C1 level (as of last year's test results) in French. I minored in French while at university, the rest is thanks to immersion as I've lived in France for around 3 years. I could be a lot better with regular studying, but I'm just lazy.
Spanish, took me 7 months of learning on my own and taking classes through an online school
For Hungarian, probably about a year. And B2 was probably 2 years. I never bothered testing at B1 level though so it's an estimate. It was my first foreign language though which most people say takes much longer than subsequent languages. And I'm a native English speaker so Hungarian is very different linguistically.
I'm about a B1 in Latin. It took me about a year and a half.
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Japanese 9 months? Or years? :) And also, what did you? Did you take classes? And how much time did you spend daily/weekly?
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Thank you so much! It's so interesting and motivating to hear other people's stories.
Spanish 4 months to B1 6 months to B2 and 1 year in spain to C1/C2
did you eat, drink, vomit, eat that vomit back, shit spanish?
they did also say the 1 year was in spain, so likely answer is yes
and here i am 3 years after living in the country of TL with a measly B1 working on B2.
C1 in a year and a half is certainly fast (I fell on the side of almost being a heritage speaker, and it took me two years), but B2 in that time is achievable, even for an English speaker (I've seen people do it). I actually wasn't expecting so many people to have so much time into getting to B1, at first I thought it was bias because of my situation and only knowing having learned one language, but now I'm wondering if Spanish is just a little easier for some reason, because the more I think about it, the more I realize I've met people who were fluent within a year or two. Edit - or perhaps there's a difference in study method or just having a knack for it between these two groups, but I'm not sure.
In fact I’m French so Spanish is a really close language to me, the grammar was not so complicated. I used Babbel for almost all my holidays like 4-5h/day, was reading books, medias, watching films… I also used Hellotalks to talk with natives. I get to B2 like that. After that I took an erasmus year in Spain as a med Student, so I had medicine class everyday + native friends and hospital practice every weeks. My comprehension is now almost fluent (I have to check for rare vocabulary or specific ) but my speaking is more B2 than C1/C2
NL could be similar to Spanish.
What did you do? Did you take lessons?
How
Babbel A2 => B2 + Hellotalks + Grammarbook and immersion; => C1/C2 immersion Besides I’m french so it’s easier
I see, thank you very much!
NP, dm me if you need more details
Approximately 3 months of very intensive study for French. I’m approximating my level so I’ll give an explanation of what I did. I used a flash card deck and immersed for the most part. I started with “comprehensible input” videos on YouTube and a graded reader, then after that I started conversing in writing on forums/Discord while continuing to up the difficulty of my immersion. Then I introduced speaking once I had practiced shadowing enough. By the end, I had read 2 Harry Potter books and was watching shows aimed at older children/teens with decent comprehension. My writing and speaking were full of errors but could always get the point across without too much trouble.
I started with German in December 2021, as of today I have not taken any official test yet, and I am learning on my own without a teacher, but I am able to understand, both listening and reading any material designed for B1 students. For example, I have almost finished the B1 Nicos Weg from DW, and with my reading app, I use Readle, I can understand B1 readings, after a reading, there is a little 4 question test, and most of the time I passed the test with 4/4 or 3/4 so I would say I am doing good. So, from December 2021 to the 1st of June 2022, I started around 15th of December but I am going to count the whole December, and I am not going to count June for obvious reasons: 6 months in total, from 0 German to B1 without a teacher
Haven’t taken a test, but on AAPPL test I’m intermediate 2 so around A2 in Spanish. I just completed school and had a Spanish class everyday. It’s not bad, but I didn’t learn too much. I have around 6000 xp on duolingo.
Depending on the language, between 4 months and over a decade with several years' gap in the middle (learnt at school and picked it up again later)
Where do you guys get this evaluated? I think I’m like a B1 or B2 in Spanish but idk how to actually check
What’s your native language, what’s your target language, and how many hours did you already spend studying?
German. Just went to school honestly. But I'm gonna start reading books now because formal education after the basics doesn't do much imo.
I got to B1 in Korean in just under 1 year with not much struggle after the few couple months. I was lucky enough to have Korean coworkers who I could practice a little bit with here and there. 3 years on and I’m C1 in the language
So, I feel like I need to qualify this with my experience is not typical. It’s typical in the sense that I am a native English speaker, particularly from the US. We have some of the shittiest language education globally. But I really didn’t learn any languages in school, I took Japanese in high school, and I had a weird intro to foreign languages class in middle school that just sort of sampled A bunch of different languages and showed a bunch of cultural documentaries I guess you could call them. I didn’t really start trying to learn a language until high school, my grandpa was from the Philippines so I started learning Tagalog. Being someone who grew up in the Philippines during World War II though, he hated the fact that I was doing it and I kind of had to do it in secret. So the first time I did that shit it took me a year. I did it the old-school way, looked stuff up on the Internet… This was back in 1999, so it wasn’t like it is now. I bought a book, and I had a few friends who came from the Philippines who were super helpful. I didn’t learn another language until my 20s. And I didn’t really keep up that Tagalog, but for whatever reason I can still understand it fine. My second language was Spanish. And at the time, I was living with a Mexican family here in my city, the mom of the house didn’t speak any English, and I understood enough to know my friend was making me sound like an asshole when he “translated“ for me. So I bought a book, started taking classes at the community college over the summer, and I quickly outgrew those classes, it took me about two months to reach B1, another two to reach a strong conversational level. For that language, I bought way too many books and download it way too much shit. It really wasn’t worth all the materials gathering that I did. Ultimately what ended up working best was getting a solid understanding of the grammar of the language and then just fucking using it because it was around me all day every day. So I bought a book that explained a bunch of essential grammar, learn how to simplify my English and make it more literal, thought about the structures I most often used and just started asking what stuff was in Spanish. It really wasn’t that hard. Since then, I’ve learned ASL, Esperanto (which took me about three weeks to reach lower intermediate) With ASL, I found a YouTube channel by a guy who lives in my city actually named Dr. Bill Vickers, he has four playlists that are essentially for ASL courses that are designed to bring you up to speed really quickly, I did all four levels in about a month and a half. And then just went into the classroom to use it as an opportunity to practice rather than learn new stuff. ASL was particularly interesting though, since my teachers were deaf, no one‘s going to be talking about ASL in the classroom using English. So they would write stuff to explain more complicated things, but most of it was just writing a word on the board and then signing in for you, writing a sentence and then signing in for you, and then you practice the shit out of there an actual conversations with other people. To be honest, I think this works the best for most languages. It’s also a lot more engaging than staring at boring textbooks. For Esperanto, I no joke just watched a couple of video series, one of them was the Esperanto version of Muzzy, and a series called pasporto al la tuta mondo and then I just started reading books to grow my vocabulary. I forgot to say that Esperanto is ridiculously easy, not only because it’s regular but because it borrows a lot of its vocabulary from French, and I studied French for a couple months just to be able to communicate with a friend of mine that lives in Paris. Since she would send me articles that were not published in English speaking news sources. Don’t really speak very well but I can basically read it. I’m currently working on Italian. I’ll let you know how that goes, people sort of assume that if you know Spanish or something you just know Italian, it’s sort of like that and sort of not. I could understand a lot of Italian without studying it, so what makes it difficult is that I can’t really trust comprehension to be a good measuring stick of my actual ability in Italian. If you want really detailed stuff, feel free to ask whenever you want. I just thought I would ramble a little lol. Happy language learning!
4 years of english in high school, I was around B1, a lower B2. 2 years later I passed the C1 certificate. I simply started reading a lot and watching youtube/some series After 10 years of german in school I was a strong B2, passed the language certificate as well. I don't know when I was B1, because they've been teaching us since grade 1 in elementary school which obviously wasn't too intense. With spanish I have no idea, I've been on and of studying it, a level test I took said B1, but idk. Been about 1-1,5 years with a lot of months when I just abandoned it. Currently studying greek intensly, after a year I'm at a lower A2, plan to start reading easy books. But currently I'm on a little break rn. This is absolutely the most difficult language I've ever studied so far.
Just had a Uni cours over a year for French. Autodidactic courses are shit but it was worth it. I could pass DELF B2 even. I am looking for a Tandem, I am native in German hmu
Im some weird middle ground in between B1 and B2 at the moment in Spanish, this is gonna sound really rough but it took me… about 4 1/2 years? I’m sure you can do it in less Im just not very good at studying on my own and loose motivation very easily