Fast language fluency

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Welcome to the 5-Week Linguist Show. I wanted to share with you an old recording I made of my 200 hour challenge. As I’ve talked about in other episodes, and people ask often why five weeks? It seems like a bizarre random time period and it’s 100% not.

Fast language fluency: time

When I first started teaching languages, I was a pretty typical non-native speaker of Spanish. So I was that B2 level, intermediate high. I definitely wanted to work on my skills. I wanted to speak like a native speaker, not so much necessarily out of having a passion for Spanish, which I do, but more for some really practical work reasons. I knew it would be so much easier. I’d be able to answer anything. I’d be able to really take whatever I was saying to my students and make it comprehensible, which is the key to learning any language is for things to be understandable, comprehensible. That’s research based, Dr. Krashen.

And I knew that the more proficient I was, the better and more easily I could do that, the better that would be for my students and I would have the freedom of never really having to think too much about what I was going to say, and it definitely turned out to be true. I also wanted a qualification of being able to teach… Have a native level proficiency, or near native, in speaking Spanish so I could teach language immersion. So something I’ve done in English as well where people learn content and in my case, in this particular case, it would have been primary school content. I’m a qualified primary school, elementary school teacher as well. So whatever you would learn, math, science, social studies, students would be learning the same language. They’d also be learning language through that which I think and know is extremely exciting and there’s lots of takeaways which we’ll talk about in another episode. For anybody with a connection to the internet can do something similar tailored to their own interests and needs on their own.

So the five weeks. I always had nine weeks during the summer where I wasn’t teaching and even if I was working, which I had done summer school and immersion school a few times, I always had about five weeks to find of my own. And I started really intensely and intensively studying Spanish to really get to that native level. And that was definitely a struggle. Once you go through the level, so if you go through the A-level, through the B-level, through the C-level, or in the United States, we use ACTFL, the American Council for the Teaching of Foreign Languages, and we have novice, intermediate, advanced, et cetera. Your investment of time is going to have less of a return.

Fast language fluency: progress and time

So what that means is as you’re at the novice level of language where you’re starting with nothing and you’re moving up to being able to create your own words, phrases, sentences in a language that if you invest about 200 hours, which I very specifically picked that time because I knew it was realistic for me to get into five weeks. I could listen to lots of audio books, I could study, I could watch TV, I could go abroad, which I did lots of five weeks, I could go to a private language school. There were so many ways for me to invest that time and get a tangible return on that time. And as you go up that 200 hours, you’re going to make less progress. It’s important. You have to go through that stage. It just gets harder and harder and then as you hit the advanced level, which is what I wanted to go through to hit that near native level of Spanish, that 200 hours, there’s less of a measurable return on that in...