zigmonty Wrote:I'd be surprised if my overall average was higher than an hour a day. I'm assuming the N1 figure is similarly bogus.

Tzadeck Wrote:

zigmonty Wrote:I'd be surprised if my overall average was higher than an hour a day. I'm assuming the N1 figure is similarly bogus.

*Wankery hand gesture*

"I'm higher/lower than an average, therefore the average is bogus."

Tzadeck Wrote:Another fun way of thinking of 4,000 hours of study is that it's 167 entire 24-hour days of study. Or about 24 weeks of 24 hour-a-day studying. Basically, if you spend an entire half a year of your life studying Japanese, you can pass N1 (which shows how inconceivable it is to pass N1 in a year--you'd have to study 11 or 12 hours a day).

zigmonty Wrote:3 hours a week

zigmonty Wrote:Err... ok. Where, pray tell, do they get their numbers? What reason do we have to in any way think they're accurate, even as an average? I honestly don't give a damn, this is the first time i've even looked up how many hours it's supposed to take. I just don't want people seeing some number that seems absurdly high to me (we're talking like a factor of 2 here... to the *bottom* end of their range) and getting discouraged. 3 hours a week == 25 years to pass the N1? WTF sort of nonsense is that?

For future reference, if i had simply called bullshit on it without attaching an anecdote, would that have been more acceptable? Geez.

Tzadeck Wrote:Asking where the numbers come from and how we know they're accurate are legitimate questions.

Saying how long it took YOU, however, is not a legitimate criticism of an average, because averages are still accurate averages even if certain data is very high above or very below the average. How many hours it took a single person to get to N2 level neither confirms nor denies the average, so you calling the estimation of the number of hours 'bogus' because of just one person seemed ridiculous to me.

Tzadeck Wrote:

Eikyu Wrote:Two years is the time it would take to reach N1 at a language school, studying full time. It really depends on how much time you can commit. I think that reaching N1 in two years would at least require something like one to two hours of study per day.

I think people vastly underestimate N1. If you studied every day of the year for two hours a day for two years you will have studied just 1460 hours. The Japanese Language Education Center average number of study hours needed to have passed N1 if you had no kanji knowledge prior to studying Japanese is 3,100-4,500 hours. It's waaaaay more than 2 hours a day for two years.

If you wanted to study, say, 4,000 hours in two years, you would have to study five and a half hours a day, without missing a day for all 730 days.

I think I've studied Japanese way more than 4,000 hours, over the course of six years, and I still think I am more likely than not to have failed N1 in December. Results pending. Also, I did RTK and used SRS.

Inny Jan Wrote:learning English (admittedly, one of the easiest languages to learn)

dizmox Wrote:

Betelgeuzah Wrote:

vix86 Wrote:"Best way to see if you actually know whats being said in anything is to ask yourself, 'Can I say in English what they are talking about? Even the most rudimentary thing.....Oh they are talking about attacking that, etc. ?'

Sounds a bit odd to me. Languages are their own entities. Sometimes even if you know a word in one language doesn't mean you can recall it in another language easily. That's because at some point you don't need the help of your native language to comprehend another language. Situations arise where you know what a word means, but can't seem to be able to translate it even to your native language. Of course some people are better at this than others. But I don't think it's some sort of benchmark of comprehension at all.

Especially considering that translating is not always so straightforward, as same concepts are said differently.

Quote:If young people are so smart why is the pace of school so slow?

That's not what he said.

By "if young people are so smart" I meant "if young people pick things up so quickly". Adults just have less free time than children, and obviously someone who just left HS will be better at studying than someone whose mind has been turned to mush from doing nothing but a menial job for decades, but otherwise it's not like one's mind starts decaying after childhood passes.

People just say these things to give themselves an excuse not to do something at an older age.

AlexandreC Wrote:

JapaneseRuleOf7 Wrote:2. Bilingualism. Without exception, the people I've met who were the best at Japanese grew up speaking two or more languages. Bilingualism is a huge advantage. Dag.

I strongly disagree with you. People who've learned a second language will fare better at learning other languages, but this is absolutely NOT true of people who grew up speaking more than one language. I've often been in language classes with such people and they never did better than average.

It's the process of figuring out a language, and how to learn it, that will help you with other languages. If speaking 2 languages alone were enough to make you better, then why isn't speaking a language already making everyone good at learning foreign languages?

Zgarbas Wrote:Srsly though, English isn't a hard language. It doesn't have the phonetic nightmare that are the ma ma ma ma ma ma mas, the unusual alphabets, the gazillion verb tenses, no accents, conjugation is generally easy, irregularities are slowly becoming flattened.

Quote:P.S. It's not that it has one of the largest vocabularies on the planet, it's just that it is so easy people actually get to learn all them fancy words because they have so much free time with it.

Betelgeuzah Wrote:"maintainence"

nadiatims Wrote:Yeah it's hard to maintain perfect spelling with English, when most of the words come from all sorts of different languages and follow a bunch of different spelling conventions. Not only that, but we're bombarded with a diverse range of accents and grammar conventions and so on when we watch TV or use the internet.

There's a pretty big difference between that and speaking the language of a small homogenous nation in Europe.

Zgarbas Wrote:TBH, ignoring obvious typos and rush mistakes (starting a sentence and changing it mid-way without changing the first part properly, something I do often) I see natives make more mistakes than some people I know. I sometimes have quarrels with natives on lang8 because they see nothing wrong with a sentence which is obviously incorrect. If you just try a bit then it all makes sense =/.

Then again, we had the irregular verb list shoved down our throats when we're 7 =/.

I think it is almost impossible to misspell anything in my mother tongue without being nigh illiterate. We're straightforward that way.

(and I still fail to see how English and Latin have enough in common to matter...)

zigmonty Wrote:Be careful questioning native speakers on grammar... We know grammar that isn't in books and, at least for english, the books are supposed to be a reflection of our usage, not the other way around (as opposed to say, french, which is more prescriptive). Stuff like "me and my dad went to the park" is up there with "ain't" these days. It may not fit the official rules of grammar (not that there is an authoritative source for that in english), and it's too colloquial for some settings, but only pedants nitpick it these days. It's pretty much just an irregular grammar pattern. English is pretty flexible when it comes to grammar, and if the natives aren't correcting something, but you think it's wrong... well... maybe you need to relax a bit.

That said, anyone learning a foreign language to a high level will know the official rules better than your average native speaker who's never thought about it (it's fairly common for english natives to not be taught grammar in school). We've all said stuff and realised after we've said it that we'd mangled it, sometimes without knowing how to fix it.

Zgarbas Wrote:We're talking stuff like "I had had a headache since an hour ago". The native even insisted on how "have had" is correct because "people get it"...and despite me pointing it out 3 times he never noticed it was in the past. So incorrect by all standards, but "gettable". Not elitist stuff like "me and X". Even on these here forums, which are filled with language enthusiasts, you get some pretty jarring mistakes.