There is no definitive answer to the question posed by the title of this post. It all depends on the following factors, among other things:

How much of the language do you want to learn?
If you want to become proficient in all aspects of the language, then it’s going to take a lot longer than if you just want to learn enough to ‘get by’ when you visit a country or region where the language is spoken

Which languages do you already know?
Learning a language related to your native language and/or another language you know will probably take less time than learning an unrelated language. There will be a lot of vocabulary you recognise and the grammar will be similar.

How will you be studying?
Studying on your own and/or with a private tutor might be quicker than studying in a class because you can go at your own pace. If you study every day, even for only short while, you’ll probably make better and faster progress than spending a few hours a week in a class. You might make even more progress if you combine studying on your own with going to a class or having individual lessons – the class/lessons will give you the opportunity to use your language with others, and to get advice, guidance and feedback from a teacher/tutor, while studying on your own enables you to work on aspects of the language that interest you and practise the bits that you find difficult.

How motivated are you?
To continue studying for as long as it takes to learn a language, you need to be well motivated, and also focused and dedicated. To motivated you are, the quicker your progress is likely to be.

According to ALTA Languages Services, it takes about 300 hours for someone to go from beginner to advanced level. This works out as around a year and eight months of studying for half an hour a day, or ten months studying for an hour a day.

It took me five years of fulltime study to learn Chinese, a year and a half of which I spent in Taiwan. French and German took me seven and six years of regular study (a few hours a week) respectively. After four years studying Japanese fulltime, including four months in Japan, I could speak it fairly well, though not fluently. I’ve been learning Spanish and Welsh sporadically for about eight years and have a fairly good command of the latter, but only a fairly shaky grasp of the former. After two years of studying Irish I have a good knowledge of the language and can speak it quite well.

More or less every area of human activity involves a different range of specialised vocabulary, otherwise known as a linguistic register. Knowing the vocabulary associated with a particular activity isn’t essential, but without it you will probably find yourself using complex, convoluted descriptions, which can be frustrating. Once you learn the relevant words, you can talk about the activity with confidence, and those involved with the activity will be more likely to believe you know what you’re talking about. Of course it helps considerably if you know what the words mean as well.

If your car breaks down, for example, and you have to take it to a garage, knowing the words to describe what you think is wrong and being able to discuss possible solutions will signal to the mechanic that you about cars. As a result, he will be less likely to slip some extra unnecessary work onto your bill. By this I’m not implying that all garage mechanics would stoop to such practices, but these things do sometimes happen, apparently.

Motivation is very important when learning a language, or indeed anything else. Without motivation it’s difficult to continue studying for very long.

An enthusiastic teacher or tutor can really help, as can learning materials at the right level, i.e. one that stretches you, but not much. Setting yourself targets and goals, and rewarding yourself when you achieve them can also help. Another good way to motivate yourself is to spend time studying the language in a country or region where it’s spoken.

Way back in 1988 when I first tried to teach myself languages, I found it very difficult to continue studying for more than a few weeks. My lack of motivation was the main reason. Since about 1998 though, I’ve been studying various languages more or less continuously. Motivation seems to come more easily to me these days.

How do you motivate yourself to study?

According to report in the Times, increasing numbers of primary schools in the UK are teaching, or plan to teach, their pupils foreign languages, usually French. The idea is to use new, inovative teaching methods to get children excited about languages at an early age, with the hope that they will continue studying them at secondary school. So far this scheme appears to have a success.

At the same time, there have been decreases in the numbers studying languages such as French and German at secondary school, but increases in those studying more exotic languages like Chinese and Arabic. Those schools that teach the more exotic languages find it difficult to find teachers – there are only a few colleges in the UK offering teacher training in Chinese, Japanese or Arabic. In fact there’s such a shortage of language teachers that generous finanicial assistance and incentives are on offer to those who train to teach them.

There seem to be fashions in which languages people choose to learn and in which languages are in demand by employers. Some languages, notably French, German and Spanish, are perennial favorites, at least in English-speaking countries. Other languages may enjoy popularity for a while, then are displaced by different ones. In the UK there are increasing numbers of people learning Chinese and Japanese, and Spanish is also gaining more followers, particularly among adult learners. In the USA there is currently a significant demand for people with Arabic language skills.

During the Cold War, many of the inhabitants of Eastern European had to learn Russian at school, a language few of them felt much affection for. Since the collapse of the USSR, other languages have become popular, particuarly English and German. And according to Radio Polonia, Russian has been making a come back in Poland recently.

Which languages are popular in your country?

Sources: www.cilt.org.uk, www.vistawide.com

Continuing yesterday’s theme, sort of (not all posts on blog are completely random), my question for you today is at what stage can you claim that you ‘speak’ a language, are ‘fluent’ or ‘proficient’ in a language or ‘know’ a language? And when you make such claims, what do you mean by them?

My English dictionary defines ‘fluent’ as “able to speak or write a specified foreign language with facility”. By this definition, I’m fluent in Mandarin Chinese, and nearly fluent in French, Welsh and Irish. I can read and understand a number of other languages fairly well, but can’t speak or write them nearly as well.

Unless you grow up speaking two or more languages, it’s very difficult, though not impossible, to be as proficient in a foreign language as you are in your mother tongue. If you immerse yourself completely in a language, you will probably eventually acquire native or near-native proficiency, but at the same time you might loose some of your proficiency in your mother tongue. This certainly happened to me to some extent when I was in Taiwan – my Mandarin became fluent, but I was not keeping up with all the latest developments in English.

When learning a language it’s sometimes helpful and useful to get an idea of how well you’re progressing. There are a number of ways to do this, including taking language proficiency tests, setting yourself a task to complete using only the language you’re learning, or seeing how much you understand when you listen to or read the language.

When I read things in a foreign language, I try to understand as much as possible without using a dictionary. Any words I don’t know I try to guess from the context. At first I can understand very little, but as my knowledge of the language improves I start to understand a lot more. One way I gauge my progress is to count how many words I have to look up per sentence, paragraph or page. When I can read whole pages or even chapters of books without reaching for a dictionary, I know I’m making good progress. There may be a few words I’m not sure about, but I tend to leave them, as long as they’re not key to my understand of the text.

When listening to a foreign language, on the radio for example, I try to get the gist of what they’re talking about from the words I understand. If I know more of the language in question, I can fill in more of the details. Understanding the news in a foreign language is relatively easy as I’ve usually heard or read the news in English beforehand and know what to expect. Understanding other material can be more of a challenge.

As children few of us know any grammatical terminology, yet we’re still able to speak grammatically. In school we might be taught the ‘grammar’ of our own language. Traditionally, in English-speaking countries at least, this has consisted mainly of parsing sentences – an exercise that involves labelling the parts of speech (noun, verb, adjective, etc). Recently though, there’s been a trend to avoid teaching any kind of grammar at all, at least in the UK.

Those taught to parse sentences seem keen to point out that many people ‘don’t know their grammar’ these days, with the implication that this is a bad thing. However, even people who don’t know, or are not sure of, the difference between nouns, adjectives, adverbs, etc. are able to cobble together grammatically correct sentences.

The origin of parsing sentences goes back to ancient Greece: the Greeks developed a description or grammar of their language in order to teach it to non-Greeks. The most famous Greek grammarian, Dionysius Thrax, established the idea of parts of speech, which he based on the ideas of Aristotle. In his Téchnē, written in the 2nd century BC, he stated that Greek had eight parts of speech: noun, verb, participle, article, pronoun, preposition, adverb and conjunction. Adjectives were a sub-class of nouns. To ‘know one’s grammar’ was essentially a matter of being able to parse sentences and name the parts of speech. Syntax was usually ignored.

The Greek model was copied by the Romans and adapted to Latin, a language different to Greek in many ways. The Latin model was later used for many other languages, few of which were much like Latin or Greek.

Were you taught grammar at school? How was it taught, and do you remember much of it?