Episode two, it's about time.
Welcome back to the Learn English podcast, the podcast teaching English in context so you can learn naturally.
My name is Dr. C and on today's episode, we will be releasing our inner Lizzo because this episode is about time.
Specifically, it's answering a question that I get asked a lot by my students, and that question is, how much time will it take me to improve my English?
Now, if you did not listen to our first episode, please go back and check it out.
But for those of you who don't know, I am a certified English teacher.
I'm from the United States and I help students improve their English levels.
Well, one of the questions that I get asked most often is this question.
How do I improve my English level and how much time will it take for me to improve my English level?
I work with mostly, mostly with students who are intermediate, upper immediate or advanced levels of English.
So it's a very common question because my students tend to be students who have been studying English for years, but are still a little bit frustrated with their abilities.
They've been studying for a long time, but they don't feel like they're as fluent as they would like to be.
They have difficulty maybe understanding native speakers or formulating sentences and answering and having a conversation with a native speaker.
So this is very understandable.
If you've been studying a language for a long time and you feel like you're not making any progress, that can be very frustrating.
And you can see how that question of how can I improve and how much time will it take for me to improve will come up and be on your mind.
If you're in this situation, these struggles are very common.
Actually everyone goes through it at some point when they're learning a language and there's actually a term for it.
You might've heard this term.
If you've been studying how to learn a language or dealing with your own language journey and that term is called the intermediate plateau.
So during the intermediate plateau, when you have that intermediate level of English or higher, it takes more time to improve in your abilities.
When you were first starting with a language, you're making progress really rapidly.
You can go from a beginner to a pre intermediate to intermediate relatively quickly.
But when you reach a certain point on your language journey, that progress slows down and it feels like you're really not making progress anymore.
You are, you actually are still making progress, but the rate of change is slowing down.
And that's usually what causes people to get frustrated and maybe even lose motivation when they're trying to learn that language.
If you've been watching YouTube videos about language learning or how to learn a language, strategies for learning a language, you might have run across the YouTube channel by the polyglot, Ollie Richards.
If you haven't a little bit about Ollie, he is a British polyglot.
He speaks a number of languages.
He runs the Story Learning website and he has a lot of really great videos on YouTube about language learning.
I'll leave a link in the description for this episode so you can check it out for yourself.
I highly recommend his videos.
And he's one of the language learning experts that I take some advice from because he obviously speaks a lot of languages and his advice is really practical and useful.
Now, Ollie has discussed this intermediate plateau in his videos and he has an idea, a theory, that when you're learning a language, each step along the way takes double the amount of time when you're trying to increase your abilities.
So let's say you're a complete beginner, you know nothing about the language.
When you are starting to learn, you're going from a complete novice to a beginner stage.
That maybe, let's say takes a hundred hours, just for an example.
Now you keep learning and you're going from that beginner to a pre -intermediate, that time for the next set of stages, the next growth, the next progression on your language journey doubles.
So if the first stage took one hundred hours, the next stage will take two hundred hours.
And then to go from pre -intermediate to intermediate, you would double again.
So it takes four hundred hours and so on and so on.
So each step along your journey is doubling the amount of time to get to.
So all these big point here is that when you're getting to those higher levels of any language, the time it takes really stretches out your progression, really slows, and it takes more time.
Now, this is not meant to be scary or overwhelming.
It's just to show you that the intermediate plateau is a real thing, that people all around the world experience this when they're trying to learn a language and that you are making progress even when you feel like you're not.
So let's get back to how many hours, how much time it actually takes to improve your English level.
So all these concepts of doubling time is good to understand how this effect works, but let's get into some actual hard numbers.
So let's get into some actual estimates of how long it would take to learn English.
Now, on the last episode, I mentioned that my whole language learning journey started when I decided to learn Spanish, finally learned Spanish, which had been a lifelong goal for me.
When I was going through that process and trying to figure out how to learn a language, I came across a website and a YouTube channel called Dreaming Spanish.
On the website of Dreaming Spanish, they have a chart, a roadmap, and it correlates how much time you spend with a language and what level you would be at the language.
So for each level, it says what skills you would be able to do in that language and how much time it would take to get there.
I will leave a link again for this in the description of this episode so you can check it out and you can check out this guide.
Now on this guide, what it says is that the more hours of input you get, so input being reading and listening, the more you're going to progress in the language.
So if the language that you speak, your native language is similar to English, maybe it's a romance language or Germanic language, then it'll take you about 600 to 1000 hours to get to that advanced level of English.
If you are trying to get to a native level, that would go up to about 1500 hours.
Again, this is if your language is similar.
If your native language is dissimilar from English, then you need to change those numbers and probably multiply them, probably double them.
So instead of 1500 hours to get to a native -like level, you're looking more around 3000 hours.
Another guide that I have found and one that is most often cited is the US State Department's Foreign Service Institute.
So this is the area of government that actually teaches languages.
They teach languages to diplomats who are going overseas and going to be posted in foreign countries and having to work in foreign countries.
So these people need to be able to speak the language of the country that they're going to.
And this branch of the government is the one that tries to help them learn those languages quickly and efficiently.
The Foreign Service Institute again breaks down how much time it takes to learn English based on what the speaker's native language is.
So again, if the native language is similar to English or dissimilar to English.
Now their guide if the native language is similar to English is about 600 to 750 hours of classroom study.
Now important here to note that this is classroom study, but the Foreign Service Institute is assuming that the student will study on their own outside of class time.
So even though it may only take 750 hours of class time, you have to add in additional independent study time on top of that to actually figure out the total amount of hours.
When you do that, you again, you should probably double these numbers to include classroom time and independent time.
And you're looking at about a thousand hours to 1500 hours.
If the native language is dissimilar, again, these numbers would be different.
It would be more time.
It would take more time for someone speaking a dissimilar language to learn English.
Now you can see in both of these guys, the Dreaming Spanish and the Foreign Service Institute, how the total amount of hours it takes to learn a language.
The total amount of time both of these guys are saying it takes to learn a language to a high level are roughly the same.
The numbers are pretty similar to each other.
You can also see the impact of a learner's native language when they're trying to learn English.
So if you are a Germanic language speaker or a Romance language speaker, you're kind of at an advantage.
There's a lot of cognates between the languages.
So if you haven't heard that term before, cognates are words that are similar to each other.
Maybe you're pronounced the same or just a few letters difference when you're looking at the spelling.
So you're able to determine the word, even if you haven't seen it before, you can kind of get an idea of its meaning.
There's also a lot of grammar that is similar between these languages and pronunciation can also be fairly similar.
If you speak a dissimilar language from English, so let's say you speak an East Asian language, Arabic or Slavic language, it will take more time.
And that's because you have grammar differences, lack of cognates and pronunciation issues, because there might be sounds in English that are not in your native language.
These issues can be overcome.
It just is going to take more time to get you to that higher level.
Now that we've discussed a couple estimates of how long it takes to learn English, let's get into the details of how I answer a student.
When they asked me how much time it'll take for them to learn English and how you can determine how much time it'll take you to improve your English level.
So how I respond to students when they ask this question is I always ask a follow -up question.
I ask them, how much time are you currently spending with English every day?
Ask yourself that ask yourself how much time are you currently spending with English every day?
As we've seen from the estimates today, the amount of time you spend with a language is critical.
It is the thing that determines how fast you progress when you're trying to get to higher levels of a language.
Come up with a plan for yourself.
Determine how much time can you realistically spend learning a language every day?
Can you spend 20 minutes, a half hour, an hour?
What is the amount of time that you can set aside to study English?
Once you have a plan for how much time you can spend with a language every day, look at the guides and determine for yourself how many hours it will take you to progress towards your goal.
Figure out what your goal is, what your current level is and see what the time difference is between those.
Once you have that, you can do some quick math and determine for yourself how many months it'll take for you to get to that goal.
So let's do an example.
Let's say that you determine it'll take you about 400 hours to get to the level of English that you want.
Now let's say you can spend one hour a day studying English.
From that you can determine it'll take you about a year to get to your goal level of English, maybe a little bit more, maybe a little bit less, but roughly about a year.
Now, if you can double the amount of time you can study every day, let's say you can say for two hours a day, then you can cut that amount of time in half and you can say, well, in six months I'll be where I want to be.
Or if you can only give a half hour a day, you can do the math and say, well, it'll take me about two years.
Again, these numbers are rough guides.
We call those ballpark figures, right?
They're not exact. It might be a little bit more, might be a little bit less, but it gives you a rough estimate for how much time, how many months or years it'll take you to get towards your goal.
So no matter where you are in your language learning journey, just know that it does take a significant amount of time to get where you want to be.
This isn't supposed to be discouraging, but it's just to let you know that it does take time and it does take commitment.
The most important things are that you are proud of the work that you've done and the level that you currently have, and that you enjoy the journey, that you engage with interesting material that you want to actually read or listen to, and you enjoy learning the language.
Like I said on the last episode, I really hope that this podcast becomes a resource that you can use on your English learning journey.
I'm going to try to keep the topics interesting and engaging so you want to listen to them.
And I hope that you can improve your English by doing so.
If you liked this episode, please leave a rating on whatever app you're using to listen to this podcast, or if you're watching on YouTube, please leave a comment in the section below.
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And until then, keep on learning English.
