Hello again all. I recently watched a video that was an interview of Stephen Krashen, and he stated that to go from absolute beginner at reading to the highest level in a language, it takes approximately 1200 hours of reading content just barely above your level. This equates to approximately 11 million words read in a language (if you read an average of 150 words per minute).
I wanted to ask a question to all of you who believe you have become proficient or fluent in a language. How many hours/words of reading did it take for you to understand virtually everything you read? How about to a fluent level (fluency in my mind is high B2)? How many hours of listening to understand everything you hear? How about to a fluent level? Thanks for your responses.
Iâd clarify a couple of things here: On the offset, 1200 hours is 1hr/day for 3.3 years and yes, dedicating that time to a language could easily lead to fluency. But the average reading speed of 150 words per minute is probably only applicable to native speakers. A beginner reading a foreign language will be way, way under that, and you are highly unlikely to reach 150 wpm speed by the end of the 1200 hours of reading mentioned above.
11 million words in any language would probably equal over 100 average length books, give or take. Thereâs pretty much no way the average person would do that in 3.3 years in a foreign language when theyâre starting from scratch.
However, the basics of Krashenâs argument are sound. Dedicating 1200 hours could get you to fluency. At an hour a day, you could reach B2 in 6-9 months (I wouldnât call this fluency though), and you could start getting into C1 after a year or so. By the end of the 1200 hours you could possibly be C2 fluency, depending on the language.
I canât comment on the number Krashen was discussing since I didnât see it. And I suppose it was primarily English, since 11 million words in English covers a lot more ground than 11 million in Russian. However, I would imagine that anyone who reads 11 million words over 1200 hours, gradually increasing the difficulty as they improve will be a pretty amazing reader.
For me in Spanish, there are still words I read or hear on TV that I donât understand, but really nothing to impair meaning. So, Iâm not exactly sure how to respond to that. I estimate Iâm at about 1,000 hours of total Spanish learning (2-400 hours of high school Spanish, and about 600-700 hours of taking a college course years ago and the lionâs share of that time since spent in self study). During the self study time, Iâve read 1.6 million words, listened to 460 hours, made 45,000 lingqs, and have about 32,000 words (even though known words says 31K). Iâm going for 33-35,000 known words, 2 million words of reading, 600 hours of listening, and 12-1400 hours total learning to move on.
I think âpotential fluencyâ is somewhere between 20-30,000 words in Spanish, but you need to activate it with speaking practice.
Once I got around the 13-15,000 mark after some major 90 Day Challenge work (the original one in 2014), things really jumped off.
Itâs a bit of âpolyglot jargonâ, it means that, as you read and listen to material in your target language, you gradually learn to recognize or understand more and more vocabulary. However, most of it is âpassiveâ vocabulary, you can understand it if you hear it but you canât produce it yourself in your own speech. Most of your vocabulary will always be passive, thatâs true even for native speakers. However, as you progress, youâll want to âactivateâ parts of your passive vocabulary, so as to increase your fluence. You mostly do that through active conversation with native speakers.
I just hit the 13,000 word mark and I can definitely agree that I kind of had an epiphany moment with my Spanish. I now listen to podcasts and watch youtube videos and understand upwards of 85% of what I hear. I can read native high-level novels (currently reading La Isla de las Tormentas by Ken Follett, I very much so recommend it) and understand the story without a dictionary (although I need the dictionary to understand certain important parts), and I had an hour long conversation with an Italki community tutor on a lot of topics and understood virtually everything he said. It feels amazing. I obviously still have a long way to go for my goal of C1-C2 mastery, but I definitely feel as though I (finally!) hit the B2 and âfunctionally fluentâ level Iâve been shooting for for two years. Thanks for your comment.
11 million words read is a great goal I think, and one Iâm going to shoot for after reading this. Iâm at 1.3 million in French and Iâm still slow at certain points and there are words I donât know here and there. Thatâs not to say I canât read a lot of course, but there is definite room for improvement. However, the words I donât know tend to be pretty obscure nouns or different âflavoredâ verbs, or verbs that I already know but are conjugated in a different, weird literary tense (French is full of these :D). Doesnât matter though, Iâd like to know them all.
I agree with the others, 13-15k words is at the point (at least in a romance language I think) where most native material, be it books, the news, or podcasts, fit the bill for Krashenâs i+1, read-just-above-your-level theory. It really becomes a lot of fun then, but it was a struggle at first!
I have just started reading intensively in Portuguese. My passive vocabulary is quite high because I have a higher level of Spanish, so I read one book in Portuguese thatâs probably at about a Harry Potter level (A Ăltima Feiticeira, by Sandra Carvalho) and added nearly ~5000 known words (there were ~14,000 unknown words when I started it). I really enjoyed it and I feel that at ~15,000 known words (where I am now), I would be able to get by with this level of book without LingQ, but Iâd have to stop and look things up pretty regularly and having LingQ makes it much easier. There are seven more books in the series and I intend to read them consecutively if I can, so itâll be interesting to see where I end up.
Meanwhile with Spanish, Iâm at ~30,000 known words and I recently read six books on kindle (three âadultâ books and three adolescent ones), so I feel I donât âneedâ LingQ for Spanish reading, even though itâs always helpful to use it, of course.
I should also add that at ~17,000 words in Italian I have struggled a bit to read physical books, even at non-adult levels. So one day Iâd like to start reading Italian books on LingQ and see how that goes.
If you donât mind me asking, do you ever have any difficulties learning 3 romance languages at once and mix them up? I would like to really spend time working on another (rather then just dabbling as I have been in them) but I worry that it may confuse me with my French.
Yes, I definitely have difficulties! Itâs actually four Romance languages, including French (which I havenât studied much on LingQ but in which I am about B2 on a good day). Obviously the similarities between them help on the one hand when starting a new language, but can cause confusion on the other. French is the one thatâs least like the others, but that said, French and Italian have a lot of structural similarities (e.g. the past tense forms) and share vocabulary. This actually might be the best pairing to learn if youâre going to do two Romance languages, because the sounds seem so different but the structure is very similar. Whereas with Spanish/Italian/Portuguese Iâm often thinking, âIn this language is it propio or proprio / lingua or lengua?â etc.
My problem is that I switch back and forth between them all too often. Sometimes I think it would have been better to have picked one and reached a very high level in that than to be some variation of intermediate in four different ones. Now that Iâm living in Portugal, I am focussing on Portuguese, obviously. But I just spent six weeks in Spain, and earlier in the year I was in Italy for three weeks, so I naturally wanted to get into those languages then. Iâve been doing a lot of Portuguese these last few weeks, and today an Italian friend came to visit and I can barely say anything to her in Italian because it just isnât on the tip of my tongue at the moment and itâs just coming out as half-Portuguese.
Very interesting, thanks for sharing! I may pair Italian with my French like you suggested. For what itâs worth, I think having 4 languages at your level is really cool, because the hard part of learning a language (in my opinion the first 15k words) is done, and any one of those you could easily springboard into being advanced really quickly. Not to mention learning many different countries and cultures!
Thanks Yes, there are definitely a lot of positives! I just walked the Camino de Santiago and it was fun to meet people from different countries and be able to speak their language. Also, here in Lisbon, a French bakery/gelaterie just opened up downstairs from our apartment, so I get to speak French with them when I buy a baguette.
