Langauge and Time

Welcome to the 5-Week Linguist Show. If you want to learn a language or you teach a language, you’ve come to the right place. Join Janina each week for tips, resources, and advice for making engaging language learning happen anytime, anywhere.

Welcome to the 5-week Linguist Show. We’re continuing our series of 50 lessons learned about languages, and this week I want to talk about time. When I was a student of languages in high school, as a teenager, I often heard people say, “Oh, it takes a long time to learn languages.”

When I first expressed an interest in languages, a real interest, it was after a trip to the UN in New York. When I returned, my mom told me the people who learn languages to that level grow up in places like Switzerland, where they speak three and four languages, not just some languages that you’ll get through studying at school. While I didn’t have reason to doubt her, I certainly didn’t know the research, I knew that at eight years old that that door wasn’t necessarily going to be closed to me, that there would be a way to learn more than one language.

As I spent my life in school, trying to figure this out, trying to learn languages at the same time, and of course when I say school I mean not just myself as a student, but as a teacher of languages, I really wanted to know about time. Do I have to grow up in Switzerland where I’m speaking perhaps two or three different languages comfortably and easily in school, at home, in my social life, or is there more to learn about time and languages?

Some of the most concrete information I got as a student of languages was about the Foreign Service Institute’s research. In case you’re not familiar with the Foreign Service Institute, they prepare Americans who work for the State Department for their assignments abroad. They have a language training institute and so they’re constantly publishing research on how long people need to go through these language courses to be prepared for their assignment abroad. They get really specific, they’ve broken up languages by categories.

Category I languages are easy for English speakers, or easier, rather, so think languages like Spanish or Dutch, to become slightly more difficult, perhaps a language like German in Category II. Then we get into languages from Eastern Europe that use perhaps a different alphabet, that’s Category III, and then into those really difficult languages that have nothing in common culturally or linguistically with English, or very little, different writing systems, so Arabic, Mandarin, Japanese, et cetera, being Category IV.

While I don’t feel stuck on this research, I do think they’re really good guidelines. I mean, these learner profiles are people will go and they will learn language X, whatever corresponds to their assignment, whatever category that is, and they’ll probably spend, depending on their starting point when they enter, if they’re a native speaker or not, if they studied before or not, they’re going to enter a certain level and they’re going to go through this program. The FSI is constantly taking this data to ensure that people are prepared in the amount of time they have to prepare them.

I think they’re really good guidelines, right? I think basically it’s going to take a lot longer to learn Japanese to the same level of fluency than it would to learn Italian or French. While that may seem obvious, I just think the numbers are good to see because they allow you to be very realistic with your goals.

When I started teaching languages,