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:

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."

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: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).

I'm gonna take a stab and guess that these numbers are based on rough classroom plus homework hours for preparatory schools. So say 2 years at 6 hours a day plus a lot of homework and then rounding the figure up 500 hours or more for good measure. If it's based on classroom hours, that there should ring alarm bells as there's huge margin for difference in efficiency in a classroom as well as with individual study. If you can find ways to be more efficient than these kinds of courses then you could easily cut that time way way down.

zigmonty Wrote:3 hours a week

You are kidding, right? I can assure that I was doing more then 3 hours a week when I was in high school and learning English (admittedly, one of the easiest languages to learn) and after 4 years of schooling I couldn't hold reasonable conversation. It was barely functional level. There was no SRS back then but even with SRS, it's not going to get you far if you do only 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.

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.

(I'm also in a bad mood because I've had an awful month, so I'm not as nice as I usually am in criticizing posts, haha)

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.

Yep, ok, fair point. And i guess the plural of anecdote isn't data, right? Even if a few of us throw a number in, it isn't statistically significant.

Sigh, i'm not sure where i was going with it anyway. I vaguely remember arguing at the start of this thread that slow pace == it'll take you forever. LOL. Threads should auto lock after a day so i don't get caught changing my mind mid thread.

Umm... summary of my opinion: Just study. Stuff will happen. Enjoy.

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.

Word. I've studied an average of 2 hours a day for going on 10 years--conversation, grammar, kanji, vocabulary, expressions, everything. Plus I live in Japan and am immersed in Japanese 24x7. I hardly even know anybody who speaks English, except for some family members on Skype. And I still don't think I could do N1. Granted I didn't focus on the test specifically, but rather on conversational Japanese. Still, I'm not exactly a slacker. Did the whole RTK, SRS thing, read a ton of books, took classes, got a Master's degree, etc. Saying that someone could go from zero to N1 in 2, 3, or even 4 years is, well, not impossible. Just more the exception than the rule.

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

Tell me I'm just being obtuse and you mean this tongue-in-cheek because I'm pretty sure English is one of the hardest languages to reach very natural levels. The entire language is basically a giant exception on rules (exaggeration, but there are tons) and has one of the largest vocabularies on the planet. And to make matters worse its not very phonetic. This is all before you get to the part about "written grammar."

[Zgarbas]

All languages are filled with exceptions, and phonetics aren't that hard to grasp. Given the large amount of native material available and the fact that everyone is getting immersed in it starting an early age, as well as the fact that it is pushed on kids at the prime of their learning phase, it is considered extremely accessible. Roman alphabet, no special characters, very basic grammar barring the exceptions. Similarity with many European languages.

Also, thanks to the whole world speaking it to an extent simplification is in the making with all but the most elitist embracing it. Grammar mistakes, spelling mistakes, pronunciation mistakes, etc are slowly making their way into the language and changing it. This happens with all languages, don't get me wrong, but when you have half the world working on it it's a much quicker process.

(well, that and American spelling helps with things...)

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.

Extremely basic mistakes such as inability to tell logicalyl written words apart just because they are homophones are ridiculous, and compared to other languages you have it easy (Japanese, anyone? ). And yet even those are slowly becoming acceptable, thus making the language even easier.

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.

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.

Well, I'll say this. Not to front, but I've been a teacher in Japan and in the U.S. for about 14 years now. So I've seen a lot of students. Probably a few thousand. You wouldn't necessarily notice a decline in function in a single individual, but as an aggregate, younger people always learn faster. I know you that's not a popular sentiment in the forum of Anything-is-Possible, but I gotta be honest.

That isn't to say that younger people don't have their own challenges. A 4 year-old has about the attention span of a pigeon. A 12 year old just wants to go outside and play soccer, and a 17 year-old hates everything about school, parents, and probably everything else. But those kids have an ability I don't have as an (yeah, okay, older) adult. They just can't focus it. Welcome to the frustrations of teaching.

Once you get into adults though, things change. 20 year-olds are quicker on the uptake than 30 year-olds. Not a lot; just a little. But put them next to a group of 40 year-olds and you'd see the difference.

Look at it this way: you ever seen a 50 year-old try to ride a skateboard? How about a 40 year-old? Even someone who's 30 has a hell of a time with it. Yet it's not a physically hard thing to learn. Now take a 12 year-old. Give them a board and in half an hour they're like Tony Hawk. Me too. I was a championship skateboarder when I was a kid, and a couple of years ago I got on a board again, and it was like, whoa, this shit's impossible.

Look, I don't like it. I don't willingly accept it, and I don't use it as an excuse. But when I'm in a class with people 30 years younger than myself, I gotta own it. Just sayin.

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?

Yo, I'm just one guy with an opinion, and everybody has one of those. Don't take my word for it. Please google "bilingual third language acquision."

I was taking university classes in Japan with native speakers and reading easy novels with enjoyment when I was still at the JLPT 2kyuu level. (This was back in 2001, and the only time I've actually taken the JLPT was the 1kyuu in 2007, so I can only go by the old test system.)

For those of us who didn't do something like RTK that was focused on learning to write all of the kanji, the 1kyuu test questions that made you differentiate between two similar-looking kanji are kind of "What the heck, you really expect me to know that?"

I won't say that the JLPT shouldn't test your kanji-writing abilities. It probably should. But a standardized test can't possibly account for all the different factors in how you use the language in your own life, and -- well, you might be surprised how much you can do with 2kyuu.

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.

I think within the European 'linguasphere,' anyone that picks up English as a second or third language is going to have an easier time due to the Latin roots. It goes without saying that picking up a language as a kid is many times easier than as an adult (JapaneseRule touched on this).

The language is defiantly morphing and I've read some papers that say that some "ESL mistakes" in some communities are becoming the "standard" usage. But I think a lot of these changes occurring in the language are born out of the fact that the base "rules" of the language are incredibly illogical or muddled in numerous exceptions.

The tonal nature of Chinese is not analogous to what I was talking about when I said "not very phonetic." When you combine a set of characters in Chinese so long as you memorize what the reading/tone is for that character; it doesn't matter what combination of characters it appears in, it will still be the same. Japanese is probably a closer counter-argument though since the reading for a character can change quite a number of times and requires more memorization to remember how to read the character. When I said "not very phonetic" I meant "there are a lot of words in English that can't be read the way they are written." This causes endless grief to many people trying to learn English, especially if they are never even taught what the common graphemes are in English (see Japanese school system).

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.

If I grabbed a dictionary for each language on the planet that covered words that occur pretty often in the language, and counted each definition entry, which would probably have the most entries total? I'm betting its English, but only because English is such a bastard of a language.

I don't know. Maybe I am mistaken. English was my first language and I have never done any searching to see if any articles have been done to somehow "quantify language difficulty." Its just been my observation that reaching a high level of fluency both in spoken and reading&writing takes considerable more work than most other languages. Even native speakers of the language struggle with it pretty often.

Which actually has me curious, do native speakers of French, Spanish, and Slavic languages struggle with proper spelling of words as much as English speakers? Are they as rife with misspellings as in English because of similar sounding graphemes?

[Zgarbas]

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...)

native English speakers can be awful with their spelling...but I think English practice it until like 5th grade? crazy. We're done learning to write and read by 2nd grade.

Here's some good ones

"I could care less"

"I should of done it" (<- UGH)

"you/r/'re"

"maintainence"

...

Betelgeuzah Wrote:"maintainence"

If it weren't for my spellchecker I would always get that wrong but that's because I spell it like I hear it "maitenence." Which probably has more to do with my northern-ish American accent, the 'n' in 'main' isn't pronounced.

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.

I had a friend who once compared studying German and English (she was a professional German teacher). She said that in terms of difficulty German is hard at the beginning but there is some point that once reached makes studying/using German quite easy - one could say the language has been mastered. With English, still quoting her, although you can have an easy start it seems as if you always go up the hill and there seems no end of your learning.

What makes English easy is its grammar (no declination, no gender, no complex conjugation).

Hard bits? Spelling, use of tens of grammatical tenses (mostly for academic purposes though), phonetics (listening and speaking), idiomatic expressions. I would put vocabulary as the last item in that list because basic vocabulary (according to urban myth 2000 is enough to go by) can be quickly acquired.

I agree that if your aim is to be as proficient in English as highly educated native English speakers are then it's a big ask but otherwise, no, I don't think so.

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.

I'd still say that everyone should know how to handle "you". Conjugation is not that difficult. Point taken though.

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...)

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.

^^ yeah, it only becomes apparent how bad our grammar is when it's time to write academic essays. Bane of my life..

As I've said plenty of times in jest, I'm English, I'm correct by default. ^_^

I'm getting really stressed out after reading the new replies on this topic ^^

[Zgarbas]

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.

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.

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.

Both "I had had a headache since an hour ago" and "I have had a headache since an hour ago" make sense although the former doesn't stand on it's own as a sentence. What was the context?

That sentence is wrong no matter how I look at it. My crude definition of "ago" is something like "before right now". Thus:

If persistence is specified (the "since" part):
- If the headache is persisting to the present: "I have had a headache since an hour ago [and still do]".
- If the headache was an event in the past: "I had had a headache since an hour before [that time, and still did at this point in the story]".

If there is no mention of persistence
- Talking about the present: "I had a headache an hour ago [and may or may not still have it]".
- Talking about the past: "I had had a headache an hour before [that time, and may or may not have continued to have it at this point in the storyline]"

I can't explain with grammar why it's wrong. That sentence sounds odd and would likely raise red flags for most native speakers (I presume, since it does for me).