3 Stages of Language Acquisition - How Long Does it Really Take

hi there Steve Kaufman today I want to talk about something that I think is very important a question that I get all the time and that is how long does it take to learn a language and I want to talk about that in terms of what I consider to be the three stages of language acquisition and so let's start with that stages of language acquisition if you google four stages of language acquisition most of what you find will talk about the stages of language production you know initially it can answer yes or no can say a few short sentences whatever to me language acquisition is not about language production its initially about how we acquire the language how we get the language in to us so based particularly on my experience this last three four months with Arabic and Persian and as I contemplate getting into let's say Turkish next year how long do I think it will take for Turkish what will be my stages along the way of a you know towards acquiring that language all right so I looked up an article that I rolled quite a long time actually ago quite a long time ago and recently put up again on my blog where I talk about three stages of language acquisition in the first stage which I say takes 60 to 90 hours call it three months at an hour a day and of course this is gonna vary depending on the language but I described in that article many years ago any of these seven or eight years ago exactly what I experienced with my Persian and Arabic and that is that I need to listen often and repeatedly to simple stories what I didn't know when I first wrote this article at least I wasn't aware of the many stories the point of view stories I became aware of them when I was studying polish and pure polish dot PL uses these very effectively I then discovered that AJ Hoge does this in English and I discovered that these have been around that some of the people involved in the you know what is it called TP RS teaching proficiency through reading and storytelling they have also used this technique we have our sixty many stories at link that's only one example of this point of view storytelling technique but by listening to these many many many times and reviewing them on link and reviewing the words I got a sense of the language so I call the first stage this ninety to a hundred hours I call it connecting with the language that's all you have to achieve so that I have a sense of Persian now depending on the language it can be more than three months in in the case of Persian three months even combined with Arabic I was able to connect with the language I actually can say some things now I know more or less how the language works although there are fine points of grammar that I'm not aware of Arabic is much more difficult Arabic is more difficult because the grammar is more complicated or at least more different from what I'm used to as a speaker of indo-european languages the writing system is more difficult and I began sort of connecting with the Arabic script with Arabic so that by the time I got to Persian I had an easier time reading so depending on the language it can be longer but the first stage is connecting with the language and it is done through a lot of listening and reading and ideally content like are many stories that link where the most common verbs of the language are used over and over again and a lot of the very common conjunctions and connecting words and phrases are used over and over again so you naturally absorb the language when I personally enjoyed having a tutor once a week in each of Arabic and version but it's not a condition I think it's useful to do but it's not a condition because you're mostly trying to get the language into you so based on an hour a day that's three months it could be longer it could be shorter depending on how similar the language is and the writing system is to what you are familiar with the second stage then which I call getting comfortable with the language now here again it's largely input based because in my experience if you are comfortable if you can understand if you have a high level of comprehension if you have sufficient vocabulary the output will come will come as you have more opportunity or you create more opportunity to speak you will improve your ability to speak but you will then activate this passive knowledge this comprehension this vocabulary that you have acquired so in the second stage now I may still continue as if Persian and Arabic I could continue listening to my many stories in fact I'm even doing that that now with my Russian and Ukrainian in order to get a better sense of the structure and the case endings and the verbs of motion and this kind of thing but I need to expand my vocabulary I need to expand you know what I am comfortable with what I understand if for example in Arabic and Persian if I get an article for example in Arabic from al-jazeera and there's 40 50 % unknown words there that's not comfortable in fact it's difficult for me to read and listen to so ideally in the second stage which is twice as long as the first stage if the first stage was 3 months the second stage could very well be six months and here ideally I would look for conversations so to some extent the podcasts are conversations but a lot of the podcasts that I've been listening to they have a lot of sort of special vocabulary and why if I continue doing it I would eventually acquire that vocabulary let's say it's politics or economics and so the these texts would become more comfortable to me however I felt with Arabic if I could find an intermediate level of content maybe many stories about economics and politics where the vocabulary repeats although the nouns will not repeat as often as the verbs which repeat more often and in a sense are more important to our ability to our express to express ourselves so ideally maybe we should start our link podcasts up again where we had two people talking to it to each other in Italian or French or Japanese so that you get sort of a a natural conversation but then spoken first and then transcribe not something that's written and then read so this becomes very lively it's interesting you're sort of eavesdropping on a conversation and yet if you're a link you have them the ability to read the transcript save the words and after a while if it's the same two people talking to each other about everyday life or things that are of interest to them a lot of the vocabulary will repeat another thing that I very much enjoyed with Chinese and to some extent I found some of this in Russian is you know books on subjects of interest to me nonfiction which is usually easier than literature nonfiction history geography but with a simplified vocabulary so that again as I am increasing my comfort level with the language I'm not facing you know 50% unknown words so if it's possible to find this sort of intermediate level of material and then gradually migrate towards genuine authentic material which and you know I pushed myself to do in Korean and I pushed myself to do in Romanian and I pushed myself to do in Greek and in Arabic but he was just a little too difficult for me so I wasn't getting to that comfort level but ideally that you would have six months to work at material that is no longer simple many stories but it's not quite the full-blown authentic material or you simply plow into the authentic material and you know suck it up you want to get there you're interested in it there's a lot of unknown words you save these words you listen to the audio and gradually you'll become more comfortable but so there is this period then of becoming comfortable with the language so that in my opinion is another six months so now we're at nine months three months predominately with the many stories then the fourth to the ninth month ploughing now into either intermediate material or interesting authentic material so that you can increase your comfort level with the language at this stage I would normally increase my interaction with the tutor I might even go to twice a week because now I'm starting to acquire enough vocabulary that I can actually talk about things that are interesting and of course at link I get a report from the tutor with the words and phrases that I struggled with and then I study these as content if I'm lucky the tutor gives me an audio file to listen to as well so where we are at nine months now the next stage I simply call constant improvement because there is no perfection but you are now sufficiently comfortable in the language that you can listen to almost anything of interest or read anything of interest and continue to acquire vocabulary to pay attention to aspects of the language and therefore to continue to improve and this can go on for as long as you have time to spend with that language and I think once you achieve that level in other words of comfortable comfort with the language you are now launched so you can go as far as you want in the language now what about grammar in all this all right about fine points of pronunciation such as the conversation we had the day the other day about teach in Japanese you know when I started Arabic there was all kinds of complicated explanations about different types of Arabic verbs and in any language you're going to find this if I started in the Turkish there's going to be a lot of explanation about Turkish grammar Turkish pronunciation most of these excellent Asians are very difficult to they're more intimidating than anything else because they describe something that the learner has as yet no experience with and therefore I think it's far better to let the learner experience the language notice certain things or not notice certain things and then when the learner is curious about some aspect of Arabic grammar or curious about pitch if they're curious about pitch then they can go in and read up on it and it'll be you know dealing with something that they already have some familiarity with but it is not the main path to sort of fluency in a language the main path to fluency is letting the language come into you and I think that is done in these three stages nowhere in my three stages do I try to guess what the learner is able to say you know in stage one they can answer simple questions in stage two they can talk about their family in stage three they talk about the weather I think that's meaningless if the learner has gone through these three stages of language acquisition they will acquire more and more vocabulary a better and better sense of the structure of the language and they will gradually be able to use this but the focus is on in my opinion on what we can acquire rather than what we can do because we will be able eventually to use this that which we have acquired we need only increase our opportunity to use it and so as I progress in the language I would perhaps talk three times a week with the tutor maybe and then at some point go to the country but I would go to the country once I have already achieved the level of comfort in the language so that I can take full advantage of being there so there you have it you know nine months to a year gets you to that comfort level it could be longer for Arabic or Chinese it could be shorter if you're a Portuguese speaker learning Spanish but that's roughly what it is in my opinion and I look forward to hearing from you and I Apollo for the long video bye for now you

Channel: Steve Kaufmann - lingosteve

Views: 148,311

Keywords: language learning, learning languages, language

Id: NIX5k7acSe4

Length: 13min 29sec (809 seconds)

Published: Mon May 13 2019