brian91

Senior Member

Ireland

Joined 3929 days ago

335 posts - 437 votes

Speaks: English*

Studies: French



Message 1 of 67 09 May 2010 at 11:35am | IP Logged

Hi, take a look through this article and tell me what you think. I plan on doing this with Spanish or another

language this summer for three months and see where it takes me:



''If you are thinking about studying Italian, you are probably wondering how long it is going to take you to

achieve fluency. In this article, I will explain how you can achieve basic fluency in Italian in 3 months or less by

following this plan.

The truth is that many students end up taking Italian language classes for many years and still cannot

understand real Italian conversation. I also know many students who have achieved fluency in Italian or in other

foreign languages in less than 3 months.

Before I get more into the plan, I should note that those of you who already know another romance language like

Spanish or French will find this much easier to do. Also, if you have studied a foreign language that wasn’t

necessarily a romance one, you will still have a slight advantage. For those of you who have never studied a

foreign language before, you may find that the process takes you a bit more time because you are not used to

learning foreign languages yet.

However, you should know that it is definitely possible to achieve basic fluency in Italian in 3 months as long as

you stay committed to studying Italian each and every day for a serious amount of time.

Let’s go over some basic numbers so that you can see for yourself what is required to get to the basic fluency

level in Italian.

In European languages, the 1000 most commonly used words make up 85% of common speech. The 3000 most

commonly used words make up 95% of common speech. In order to achieve basic fluency in Italian, we need to

hit the 95% mark which means a total of 3000 words.

Additionally, many experts in languages say that in order to become fluent in languages like Italian, Spanish or

French, 200 hours of active study time is required.

So, because you are going to study for 3 months, you will have 90 days of study. This means learning about 33

new Italian words per day. If you devote 2 hours to this study process, you will get 180 hours of study in by the

end of 3 months which is basically the 200 hours recommended by language experts.

You might think that learning 33 new Italian words per day is too hard. But consider the fact that you are going

to be studying 2 hours everyday. This means you learn 16 words per hour or about 1 word every 4 minutes.

Take into consideration the fact that many coganates exist between Italian and English like the English word

“international” being “internazionale” in Italian and you will see that you will be able to pick up many Italian

words in less than 5 seconds.

However, we should remember that you won’t have all 2 hours to devote entirely to the study of new words.

Remember that you will want to review words that you have learned in the past and also make sure you are

picking up important things like correct grammar. After all this, however, you should still have enough time to

reach your goal of basic Italian fluency.

If you are able to study Italian actively for 2 hours per day and reach the goal of learning 3000 Italian words by

the end of 3 months’ time, you will have achieved basic Italian fluency. The important thing to remember here is

that you need to stay committed each and every day to your Italian studies and take each step seriously. If you

are able to stick with it each day and progress, then you will attain fluency in Italian.''



So what do you think? This definitely seems possible, but is it feasible? Has anybody here done this? Do you

think I could have a great conversation (or even a reasonable one) with three-thousand words? If true, this could

change my language learning forever. If not, I guess it's still a great way to get started. I used to think that

something like 20,000 words or more were needed for fluency. I like to look through multi-lingual dictionaries

and observe the words. But I've seen that words like ''adhesive'' don't make the lists of a language's three-

thousand most common words.



All the best,

Brian

4 persons have voted this message useful





http://www.babylonia-ti.ch/BABY207/PDF/mondria.pdf &nbs p; - see 'myth nr.1' for one answer to your question.



Simple English proves that if you choose your words wisely you can circumlocute effectively with relatively few words.



Now you only need to find a native speaker who will get it, and use only words that are hard to simplify, without any attempt at being precise :) Otherwise it will be a one way conversation.



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draoicht

Groupie

Ireland

Joined 4798 days ago

89 posts - 146 votes

Speaks: English*

Studies: Spanish



Message 3 of 67 09 May 2010 at 1:58pm | IP Logged

Rather than using a frequency list, I think you would be better off using a version of Listening-Reading i.e. reading a book in your target language and listening to the audiobook that goes with it.



I think this is better than using a frequency list as you will come across the most frequent words as a matter of course, you'll see the words in context rather than as standalone words and by using the audiobook you'll hear how they sound and can shadow the audio if you want.



Input unknown words in their sentences into an SRS and review at your leisure.



At two hours a day you would get through a good few books in 3 months



The author of the article says that it takes 200 hours to reach basic fluency in a romance language while FSI says 600 hours, a difference of opinion maybe?





Edited by draoicht on 09 May 2010 at 2:05pm

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brian91

Senior Member

Ireland

Joined 3929 days ago

335 posts - 437 votes

Speaks: English*

Studies: French



Message 4 of 67 09 May 2010 at 2:10pm | IP Logged

Kubelek wrote:

http://www.babylonia-ti.ch/BABY207/PDF/mondria.pdf &nbs p; - see 'myth nr.1' for one

answer to your question.



Simple English proves that if you choose your words wisely you can circumlocute effectively with relatively few

words.



Now you only need to find a native speaker who will get it, and use only words that are hard to simplify, without

any attempt at being precise :) Otherwise it will be a one way conversation.





That's an interesting article. Here's a direct link in case anyone here is too lazy to copy and paste like me :D

http://www.babylonia-

ti.ch/BABY207/PDF/mondria.pdf

2 persons have voted this message useful









Students learn Spanish at FSI in four months. It's possible with Spanish, Italian, etc, if you have a good ability and are, most importantly; very motivated. For very hard languages, not so much. I became basically fluent in about 5 months with about 2 hour study everyday, given I was in an immersed environment (I used FSI and Pimsluer).



3000 words is enough for any basic conversation about day to day topics. You will need all common grammar structures internalized. You will also need to circumlocute frequently, which is a skill that partly depends on your verbal ability, but can be practiced.



I can't see doing this without an SRS, a good routine, and very frequent conversation to be continuously activating words and grammar structures, as well as provide context.

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brian91

Senior Member

Ireland

Joined 3929 days ago

335 posts - 437 votes

Speaks: English*

Studies: French



Message 6 of 67 09 May 2010 at 5:26pm | IP Logged

I (re)discovered this on the website today (it's by Francois, the founder):



''One of the most common questions I get asked is 'How many words do I need to learn?'. The answer is of

course to learn any many as you can, but I can be more precise.



Some words are very common while others are rarely ever seen. This means that you can understand a large part

of mosts texts with only a limited number of words. How many exactly is a question that you can answer with a

lexemic frequency dictionary. These dictionaries are made by taking an extremely large corpus of texts (books,

newspapers, etc...), grouping each words by lexemes and listing how many times they came up in the corpus. A

lexeme is a 'unique' word that does not depend on conjugation or plurals or declensions. For instance the

lexeme 'to be' would cover 'am, is, are, were' etc...



These lexemic frequency dictionaries were made during the Cold War for the purpose of computerized

automatic surveillance of other countries - especially Russia.



I have one such dictionary in digital format for Russian. With the files I was able to create a graph of frequency

versus rank:







The result is that:

the 75 most common words make up 40% of occurences

the 200 most common words make up 50% of occurences

the 524 most common words make up 60% of occurences

the 1257 most common words make up 70% of occurences

the 2925 most common words make up 80% of occurences

the 7444 most common words make up 90% of occurences

the 13374 most common words make up 95% of occurences

the 25508 most common words make up 99% of occurences



This shows clearly that vocabulary frequency follows both the law of Pareto (80% of occurences by only 20% of

words) and the law of diminishing returns.



So yes you can probably read any text with only 3000 or 5000 words, but you will always miss some key words.

You can't really say that all you need is 3000 words although this certainly gets you to a more or less

autonomous stage in your learning, from which you can learn many words by their context.



Lexemic dictionaries also exist for other languages but are hard to find. Non-lexemic frequency dictionaries are

useless as they would list you every single variation of words. They are not usable by a language learner.



You can use such a dictionary (with the words and the frequency) to discover new, frequent words which you can

learn, or to estimate the size of your vocabulary.''



4 persons have voted this message useful





I have a frenquency dictionary for 8 languages (German, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Italian etc) all the ones that I plan to study. Each one constitutes around 20 thousand words for each language. They are a great little tool.



They way I look at it:



Will I miss a few words in novels/advanced reading/newspapers that aren't common? Yeah.



Can I understand 90%+ of it? Yes. :D

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brian91

Senior Member

Ireland

Joined 3929 days ago

335 posts - 437 votes

Speaks: English*

Studies: French



Message 8 of 67 09 May 2010 at 5:52pm | IP Logged