1000 hours to learn English? October 28, 2009

Posted by cantueso in ESL, english, inglés, language.
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This is the most frequently asked question and also the  most difficult to answer.
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1.

A lot depends on your inclinations, your age, your ways of doing things. Contrary to what many people believe, intelligence is not necessarily helpful in language learning.
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2.

Even more depends on what you mean by “knowing” a language.

Do you mean passing an exam?
Are you trying for a job where “fluency” is required ?
Would you just like to be able to converse ?

Your own language comprises maybe some 200 000 elements –  even if you are neither a scholar, nor a full time reader.

In your own spontaneous conversational language there are dozens of exclamations, sighs, proverbs, word plays, advertising jingles, intonations, brand names, baby talk, newspeak, abbreviations, local expressions, professional terms, ironies. Most of this will probably never reach your second language and so you won’t feel really at home in it.

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3.

Calculate that to learn a language takes about as long as learning to play an an instrument :

To get the basic skills you might need some 100 hours of active practice.
To reach the fluency required by industry you might need 800 or 1000 hours.

However,

to get “the natives” to smile back at you would take only a few hours sitting down with a phrase list  that you’d find for instance at Wikipedia. . Below is an extract:

Photos courtesy http://davidlevine.wordpress.com/

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