Can you learn a language in 1 year?
Hello, and for the folks that are coming back, welcome back. If you don't know (yet), I have been learning languages for as long as I know myself. I started learning languages at the age of 7 with English, and now I can speak English and Turkish fluently, and have a certain level of comfort in Chinese and French.
If you are coming from the clickbait(y) title, the short answer is no. Umm, well, yeah, it depends, actually.
I know a bunch of guys from discord (very reputable, I know.) that managed to immerse 10 hr/day for 100 days and got around 1000 hours of immersion just about 3 months. I also know a guy (myself) who loses motivation and comes back once in a while to do his Anki because why the fuck not (ADHD).
All of those aside, I want to discuss one major thing: Language learning is not immersion. Yes, the first guy who spends 10 hours a day will possibly be better if they can do it in the long run, I am not arguing over real facts. But when you are trying to learn a certain language in a specific timeframe, there is a big problem.
Words. Language learning, at least the ALG/REFOLD/MIA/IBL type of immersion, growth, or acquisition/input based language learning methods are based off of two really solid things. Immersion and known words. Humans, so you, if you are not a superhuman that is, have a limited amount of new words that they can learn each day.
Let's take 10hr/day guy (who we will call Mikinson from now on). Let's say he's learning French. The current FSI recommendation for it is ~690 hours, so we are well above the recommended hours. So the question is: With that amount of immersion, can he be somewhat fluent at the end of three months?
The answer is no. Over and over again. Because you need at least 5000 words to be able to understand something from actual native contents. With his amount of days, he needs to learn 50 new words per day to accommodate this trend. He can immerse, he can have some sense of the words, but still, he won't be fluent. But what about one year? It depends. Even with 7w/day, you are well above the 5k point and if not that year, the next year you can go crazy.
But while writing this, I had a new thought. How does FSI guys do it? how they can learn a language so fluently in 30 weeks? My guess is that they are just forced to do itTM and they have nothing better to doTM and it's literally their jobTM. Besides that, Their domain is pretty defined so here's that.
This also really depend on the language that you are learning. Chinese, Japanese? Forget about it. French, Spanish? Maybe. Arabic? Fuck off. Hotel? Trivago.
Anyway. Love ya'. Thanks for wa- listening me barf.