How quickly can you learn a langauge?

This is a subject I have been thinking about a lot in my narrow slithers of free time. How fast can you learn a language?

I have been thinking about it a lot, because there are a certain amount of languages that I would like to learn by a certain age. And I have to be smart in how I go about learning them.

Just as a fair warning, I am not talking about the time it takes to achieve native-level fluency. I am talking about the relative fluency of the high B1 or B2 area.

So essentially a language is two things.

1 - A vast quantity of vocabulary.

2 - A set of grammar rules that organize that vocabulary into sentences.

So your job as a language learner is to simultaneously memorize enough vocabulary to cover most conversations, and memorize the relevant grammar rules that apply to the vocabulary you have learnt.

As you have probably worked out by now, the speed you can learn a language depends entirely on the speed you can add new words to a vocabulary and memorize grammar rules.

Since you need roughly about 2,000 words to hold a semi-decent conversation in a language, then it stands to reason that if you can remember 100 new words a day then you can learn a language to a reasonable degree in only 20 days.

Most people cannot do this, or don't have the time to do this. If they are serious, most people can stretch to 10 or 20 words a day, which makes the same distance take 100 or 200 days. That is still not a bad rate at all. In fact, it's only between 3 ad 6 months. A very impressive speed.

Of course this is all conjecture. Most people do not do this. They fit in the time when they can. Between work, and their kids, and TV, and add maybe 30 words a week.

There are also a lot of variables, that you may have already noticed.

If you are taking a class, then you may move slower than this. The teacher wants to make sure you know what you have learnt, and will move at the pace of the slowest student. They will intentionally give you less vocab and grammar rules than you can learn, because they want it to be more enjoyable than it is stressful.

But the difference in pros and cons between classes and self-teaching is another subject for another day.

Another issue is how hard the language is. If you speak English, then it will take you longer to learn Cantonese or Hebrew than it would to learn Italian or Afrikaans.

So in summary, how quickly can you learn a language? Well, probably as quickly as you can memorize a decent amount of vocabulary and the relevant grammar rules.

Can you learn a language in 100 days? Yes, you can.

50 days? Very difficult, but yes.

20 days? Good luck, but possible.

7 days? You would need an incredible memory, but still yes.

"You mean to tell me that there are people who can learn a language in a week?"

I mean to tell you that there are people who can learn a language in less than a week. And, you can be one of them if you want to (I guess I should explain that in a different post).

For example, here is a video of the brilliant savant Daniel Tammet learning Icelandic in just a week. Icelandic is a very difficult language, and not the first he has learnt in such a short amount of time. Off camera he has also learnt German in a week, and Spanish in a weekend.

There are only a few people with the innate memory power that Daniel has, but it is possible to teach yourself what his brain does automatically. I think that deserves its own post in the future.

Anyway, this strange rant has gone a bit off course.

You have the ability to learn a language very quickly. To some language learners, speed matters, because they want to get onto the next language. Speed matters to me, although I haven't paid it much attention yet so far. But, I intend to.