There are many ways to think about the process of language learning. For the purpose of planning personal study time, it can be helpful to think about language learning in terms of three interconnected components.
To design an effective personal study plan, you will want to give explicit attention to each of these three components. There are a variety of techniques you can use to build skills within each component. Try out the techniques and see which work best for you now and try out new ones as your language skills progress.
As you experiment with these techniques, you will see that many effective language study techniques emphasize one component (memory, comprehension and understanding, or communication), but incorporate activities that also contribute to developing skills in the other components at the same time.
In very simplistic terms, all that linguistic and cultural information is stored in many different locations in your brain. As you encounter, store and retrieve that information in multiple ways, you create and strengthen the links in your brain among all those various bits of information. This process is literally making physical changes in your brain. The more information you store and the more robust the pathways that allow you to retrieve and use that information in linguistically and culturally appropriate ways, the higher your level of proficiency in the language.
It is not uncommon for language learners to learn a lot about a language or to comprehend the language, but not be able to communicate in the language. This happens when students store many bits of information, but do not practice using the language for communication:
In this way, learning a language is more like learning to play a musical instrument, dedicated athletic training, or training in theater or dance. It is not about just doing some grammar exercises and memorizing individual vocabulary words, rather you need to engage in the activity of communicating over and over again, honing your skills, in order to develop the ability to use the language at a high level of proficiency.
Students learning languages through the Five College Center for the Study of World Languages (FCCSWL) often ask how long it will take to become fluent in the language.
The answer to this question hinges on:
“Fluent” doesn’t always mean the same thing:
Since the term “fluency” can have so many meanings, at FCCSWL we have adopted the concept of “language proficiency” as defined by the American Council of Teachers of Foreign Languages (ACTFL):
In the scenarios above, the first student’s fluency goal corresponds to the ACTFL INTERMEDIATE levels of proficiency (there are sub-levels you can learn about later), the second student’s fluency goal corresponds to ACTFL ADVANCED levels of proficiency, and the third student’s fluency goals correspond to the ACTFL SUPERIOR proficiency rating.*
You can find all of the guidelines for speaking, writing, listening, and reading proficiency on ACTFL’s website. Also see What are the ACTFL Guidelines?
ACTFL also publishes Can-Do Statements that students can use for self-assessment. For more information, see Self-Assessment with Can-Do Statements or access the Can-Do Statements online:
How long it takes to learn a language also depends in part on whether you already know another language that has similarities to the one you are learning. If your first language is English, it will be less difficult to learn languages such as French or Spanish that have significant vocabulary and grammatical similarities to English, than it will be to learn Vietnamese, Wolof, Arabic, or any other languages that share very little similarity with English.
In the United States, the government agencies charged with training diplomatic, military, and intelligence personnel have categorized languages based on their level of difficulty for native English speakers to learn. The difficulty categories are based on actual experience with how many hours of intensive study (in the classroom and outside of class) it typically takes for these government employees to reach various levels of proficiency.
The various government agencies have not always categorized languages in the same way, but you can get a good sense of these categories and estimates of how long it takes by studying this version of a category chart posted on the website of Language Testing International (the official testing service run by ACTFL).
For reference, students taking courses through FCCSWL are most commonly enrolled in a “half course” each semester.
The “How Long Does It Take?” chart also categorizes the length of time it takes to learn a language based on individual aptitude for language learning: Minimal, Average, and Superior. While there is no doubt that some people seem to be able to learn languages more easily than others, what we have learned through many years at FCCSWL is that there are other factors that play a larger role in whether students will reach their proficiency goal.:
*Other rating scales that are based on proficiency include the ILR (Interagency Language Roundtable) Scale used by the U.S. government and the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). Depending on your career goals, you may find it helpful to become familiar with one of these scales.
When you are learning a language that you can speak but not read or write, or which you only speak at home or in certain contexts, your approach to the learning process will necessarily be different from that of someone who is coming to a language with no prior knowledge.
The following pointers will help you navigate these differences so you can both make use of your prior experience with a language and also be ready to advance your proficiency to a higher level:
The language you learn to read and write in your course may be somewhat different from your spoken variety. There may be variations in vocabulary, grammar, or pronunciation.
It is important to practice speaking slowly and thinking through the individual words you speak. Since you have been learning and speaking this language for a long time, you may have many habits of speaking (and sometimes errors) that you have internalized by repetition and don’t even notice.
Try to read as much as you can (Also see: Getting Input).