Free Training: The 5-Week Linguist

Welcome to the 5-Week Linguistic Free Audio Training. My name’s Nina Klimas, and I’ve been teaching languages in several different countries, in Asia and the United States, and in Europe, since the ’90s. I have a BA in theater arts, and a BA in foreign languages and I also have an MA in the teaching of languages. I speak six different languages to various levels of fluency and skill. And I’ve also trained in language proficiency rating with the Center for Applied Linguistics. By the end of this training, you’re going to understand how long it takes to learn a language, how languages are learned, how to create time for language learning and how to select materials and activities, over five week periods of time, to learn any language you want to any level of fluency that you want.

So let’s get started with how long it takes. So before we get into the actual time of how long it takes, let’s talk about a specific level of fluency that we can all agree on as a common goal. So your goal might be higher than the level that I talk about or lower than that, but either way, we want to just have one specific goal in mind. So the US Government’s done loads of research on this and for very practical reasons. So they train a lot of military members in the Defense Language Institute, and they also train a lot of people who work in embassies and do work at consular offices, people who issue visas, et cetera, abroad. So they have very specific reasons for training people in languages.

And that fluency that we’re going to talk about here is essentially on the ACTFL, the American Council for the Teaching of Foreign Languages, scale. It’s intermediate high, advanced low, that’s essentially the same level. So some very similar levels, or if you are European, the common European framework of reference. So a lot of the research has been done by the inter-agency language round-table, and they’ve published a lot of findings that you can easily find online, and they publish six different levels of fluency. So the levels are from zero, which means you can’t speak the language at all, no functional ability, all the way up to five, which means that it’s difficult to distinguish you from a native speaker. So that same level that we talked about that B2, intermediate high, advanced low is sort of a three on that level if that gives you any idea, it’s actually pretty high level of proficiency. It’s certainly not the type of skill that you’re perhaps used to in your own language, but it’s good, you can definitely communicate.

We have that level of fluency, so think of being able to speak without a whole lot of refinement, making plenty of errors, but definitely being able to get your point across on a lot of topics. All of your every day needs can be met. You can make appointment, you can order food, you can socialize, but it’s, again, we don’t have that refinement that you have that you’re really used to in your own language. You speak mostly in sentences to paragraphs. So we have that level. Now let’s talk about different languages. So we have category one languages, which are pretty similar to English, so think French, think Spanish, think Italian, right? Those languages that are really similar to English. To hit that level of fluency might take between 750 and 1000 hours of really focused practice and input. And you’ll find different hours attached to these categories and you’ll even find some languages categorized it differently depending on what you read, but I think it’s a really good basic guideline.

The lower end, 750 hours, that might be somebody who’s really skilled at learning languages,