Yes. After one semester of German, the whole class was at emerging B2 level (reading, writing, and speaking). Our instructor utilized cartoons (not Calvin & Hobbs, but one with a frog), and we didn’t do audio labs but sat in a different room informally and had to speak organically for an hour 2x a week. I listened to German singers like Nena (I also quite like Faun & Sylbermond) outside of class, as well as 2-ish hours of reading out loud, counting pennies out loud, and reciting the most common verbs in their basic conjugations. I also didn’t just fill in the worksheets but wrote the whole thing out 5x each, just like my vocabulary words. We also had a once a month German Club where we had to talk entirely in English, and watched German films. So I had 3 hours per day plus one hour of singing, 5 days per week. And whenever I ran into any classmates on campus, we usually spoke German to each other, too. My oldest son did something similar on his own when Thailand went into lockdown, and taught himself Lao in 4 weeks, primarily from the State Department language materials (he bought off an eBay like website), and then speaking it when he went grocery shopping (since it’s similar to Thai).

In my experience (of course depending on the language), going from nothing to B1 is pretty easy. Going from there to B2 might take 3 or more times of what it takes you to go from nothing to B1.

Going from nothing to B1 doesn't take more than a year, but that depends on your methods. I'm just on the edge of b1 in German, and it's taken me around 7 months to get here. And that's even with the fact that I had no idea what I was doing the first 5-6 lol

@@boffy2648I did it in 6 weeks, but I was singing along to German artists (Nena, mostly; Rammstein uses archaic grammar and isn’t suitable), plus practicing on my own for about 2 hours outside the classroom. Keep in mind that our teacher utilized cartoons, and didn’t have us do audio labs-we actually had to sit in a room and organically talk to each other for an hour 2x a week. Then we had monthly German club meetings, where we watched German language films and also had to speak entirely in English. We were all verging into B2 by the end of the semester (reading, writing, and speaking).

... And this is a program which already selected people who are likely to persevere in a challenging learning environment. Unless I misunderstand the State Department's hiring practices... Also, I imagine the knowledge that very soon you'll need to use the language in your work and life outside work (usually) is quite motivating. Personally, I've only ever been successful with immersion. And curiously, the culture you are immersing yourself into also matters. I don't mean to rehearse old stereotypes, but I found immersion in Paris France very different from immersion in Berlin Germany. ... Do I really need to complete that thought? ... Germans were way more tolerant of mistakes and willing to allow you to fumble through a conversation without switching to English.

@@schoolingdiana9086 I wish I had that. I'm just stuck at home using the internet to learn. Which has gotten me far, but still.

In truth, the Germanic languages are by far the easiest languages ever to learn and memorize, as the prettier the words are, the easier they are to memorize, and some of those stats don’t take into account things such as the methods of learning that the ppl that participated in the tests used and the focus and the number of resources and videos teaching them etc, otherwise Icelandic and Hungarian and Finnish would all be listed as three of the easiest languages ever, since they are very easy, and Norse and Icelandic are in the top five easiest to learn and memorize after English and Dutch and Norwegian which are the top 3 easiest languages ever, with English being the absolute easiest language in every way, and these five are also the most fun to learn as they are the prettiest ever, and Gothic / Faroese / Danish too, and Hungarian is easy, being a mid category 2 language, and Estonian / Latvian / Finnish are just a bit less easy to memorize than Hungarian and are also category 2 with normal letters and very easy category 1 pronunciation! Esperanto is very easy, but it’s not one of the top 10 easiest as it’s way harder to memorize the words in Esperanto (especially if one doesn’t know any Latin language like Spanish or Portuguese fluently, one will need to repeat the Esperanto words a lot more than one needs to repeat Germanic words) and it doesn’t use a proper grammar that would sound right! For example, the 8th language that was listed as a ‘category 1’ around 1:07 is not even close to being a category 1 language and it’s more like category 4 as most words are extremely non-pretty and not fun to learn and take way more repetitions and it has a very heavy spelling with many diacritics that remind of Czech and Polish, and it’s not a Latin language, so it hasn’t even been classified correctly, as the most accurate classification would be Thracian-Aslavic or something like that because it’s not truly Slavic either, even though it does have many Slavic word endings and a Slavic intonation, and, it is certainly not easier to learn than Icelandic and German or any other Germanic languages lol, so some of the official classifications and official rankings are not correct at all, like, some of them are, but not all, and what they refer to as fluent isn’t native speaker level fluency, just a C1 or C2 level which is just advanced, but not native speaker level and not even close to writer level which is what I would refer to as true fluency, and one must know over thirty-five thousand base words automatically to be writer level in a language, and getting to a writer level can even take five or ten years or more, depending on whether the learner is actively learning many new words every day and revising previously learnt words a lot on a regular basis, but learning in a more passive-like way will take more years tho, and, to get to a native speaker level with fully developed automatic mode in the new language or languages will take at least three to five years even in the prettiest languages, though learning the actual words and understanding the written language can be achieved in one year or so, especially in the prettiest languages ever!

There are actually many ways to rank languages, as some languages have easy category 1 spelling and less easy category 2 pronunciation, while other languages have light spelling but they aren’t easy to memorize because most words aren’t pretty etc, so the best way to rank languages is by word memorability and prettiness (the prettier the words, the easier they are to learn) and by spelling and pronunciation, for example, if I were to rank all the prettiest languages ever by prettiness of the words and how easy it is to memorize them, they would all be at the top as languages like Norse / Icelandic / Dutch / English / Norwegian / Gothic are equally gorgeous and the prettiest ever, so I can remember most of their words after seeing them two to five times, however, English and Dutch have the lightest spelling ever with almost no diacritics or umlauts, except for a few words like resumé and geïntereseerd etc, so they are the easiest to type on any device, and Norwegian and Danish are almost as easy to type as English and Dutch, and, if I would have to rank them by pronunciation, English and Norse and Icelandic and Dutch have the easiest pronunciation ever with the accents that are the easiest to imitate, so I sounded native in languages like Icelandic and Dutch and Norse even when I was beginner level, but now I am upper intermediate level in Icelandic and Norse and very close to advanced level in Icelandic and upper advanced level in Dutch, and I am also advanced level in Norwegian - I am learning tons of pretty languages and I prioritize the prettiest languages the most, and I focus mostly on vocab, so I learn them very fast, like, I’ve been prioritizing Icelandic a lot over the past few months, and I am already close to advanced level and I know over 6.000 words at the moment, despite the very limited resources, which are also usually not taken into consideration when they create the official rankings and stuff like that, so one should keep that in mind, that the official rankings are not 100% accurate and that they haven’t taken all aspects into consideration, and they also don’t include all languages, so they’re not complete either!

English is by far the easiest language ever created and also the easiest to use and type on any device, so I don’t think one can express very complex ideas and concepts in any other languages the way one can express them in English or speak with the same fluidity even at an intermediate or advanced level, but Dutch and Norwegian and Norse and Icelandic come very close, and also Gothic, and also Faroese and Welsh and Breton and Cornish and Manx and Danish, which are also the most fun to learn, tho Danish has a category 2 pronunciation like German / French / Swedish / Brazilian Portuguese, but the languages themselves are very easy to learn and are category 1, and it may seem at first like Norse languages like Icelandic and Gothic and Norse have a category 2 spelling, but in fact, it’s harder to spell words in French and Spanish and Portuguese because these languages have accents where one wouldn’t expect them to be or don’t have accents where one would expect them to be, so the accents are harder to memorize in Latin languages, whereas in Norse languages the accents are in fact different vowels or sounds, so it’s easier to spell the words if one knows the word and the pronunciation well, and am native speaker level in Spanish, but I noticed that I tend to correct my comments more when I type in Spanish because I never get every accent right, so the spelling in Latin languages is less easy than in Germanic languages for sure, and I haven’t had any difficulty with the spelling of Norse / Germanic words, even though I am only upper intermediate level in Icelandic and Norse! So I have to give the Norse languages a category 1 ranking, as I have been learning them myself, and I noticed that they aren’t category 2 as I used to think, even though they may look very intimidating at first, plus French is definitely less easy than any of the Norse languages and the pronunciation of French words is not easy, and French is still listed as a category 1 language, so I don’t think any of the Germanic languages are truly category 2, tho Proto Germanic might be, and, some of the languages listed as category one or two languages are not category one or two at all, so the official rankings are not one hundred percent accurate, like, any non-pretty language is at least a category four language as it’s not fun to learn and not easy to memorize, while the pretty languages are by far the easiest languages ever as pretty languages are naturally easier to memorize and fun to learn, and the prettiest languages ever are by far the easiest languages to learn! Chinese languages and Japanese are the hardest ever as they are category ten with impossible writing systems and tonal pronunciation and words that sound the same, and the right rankings would be from one to ten at least because there are many languages and there many different levels of difficulty, so one cannot rank them from one to four or five, like, Russian would be a category five language, and Polish and Czech are category four etc, and there is a huge difference even between the difficulty level of Russian and the difficulty level of the hardest languages such as Chinese and Japanese and Korean etc, and any language harder than Irish and Scottish Gaelic (which are category three) is an objectively hard languages, while Germanic languages and modern Celtic languages and the true Latin languages and Slovene and Hungarian and Latvian and Finnish and Estonian are objectively easy, with Irish / Scottish Gaelic / Finnish / Estonian / Latvian being the ‘hardest’ languages that are on the easy side, and Irish and Scottish Gaelic can be quite complicated, but still, they are not impossible and they are very pretty, which makes it very fun to learn them!

Re Danish, a good point was made in the video about the pronunciation of Danish, and, it’s the same with French and Swedish - Danish does have a category 2 pronunciation like German / French / Brazilian Portuguese / Swedish, so the pronunciation itself is not as easy as the pronunciation of Dutch / Norse / Icelandic / Norwegian / Gothic / Welsh / Breton / Cornish / Italian etc, so the pronunciation will take more practice to get the right native accent, and Swedish pronunciation can also be quite complicated because of the actual intonations and pitch accents, though one can just learn one of the other Swedish accents that don’t use the intonations that the standard Swedish accent has, and Danish has lots of glottal stops, by the way, like, it has more glottal stops than any other language I’ve ever heard, so even though the words themselves are category 1, one should know that the pronunciation itself is category 2 and the accent isn’t as easy to imitate as the accents of most other Germanic languages, so one will have to practice pronunciation and hear a lot of the spoken language to get the right accent, and Spanish intonation and accent are also kinda category2ish, as it’s not as easy to imitate the actual accent, so when it comes to pronunciation alone, the languages with the easiest pronunciation and the accent that is the easiest to imitate are English / Norse / Icelandic / Gothic / Dutch / Welsh / Breton / Cornish / Manx / Italian / Esperanto / Galician / Latin! Irish and Scottish Gaelic also have an easy pronunciation overall, but it’s the spelling that’s more complicated in these two, so these two have a category 3 spelling and the numbers are very complicated too, and, for me, the Danish Rs are easy, but the glottal stops not so easy, so my Danish pronunciation isn’t very good yet, but I am beginner level in Danish tho, but in German I am upper intermediate level as I am in Icelandic and Norse, but my German pronunciation needs a lot of practice because it doesn’t sound natural and it doesn’t sound right, so the German accent is not easy to imitate naturally either, and it requires a lot of practice and being at least upper advanced level and knowing the words automatically to get a more natural accent! Re the languages listed as ‘category 3’ they are totally not category 3 at all and are at least category 4, and Icelandic / Norse / Gothic and Hungarian and Latvian / Finnish / Estonian and Slovene etc are not even close to category 4 and are certainly not ‘harder’ than Swalihi or Indonesian etc lol, like, Indonesian is an agglutinative language just like Hungarian, so they both have the exact same grammar with postpositions added at the end of the nouns and written as one word, so I find it funny how they listed Indonesian as a category 3 despite the fact that it has mostly non-pretty words that are way harder to learn than Hungarian which has mostly pretty and unique words that are very easy to memorize, so I wouldn’t believe official stats because they aren’t always accurate, and they didn’t even include any Celtic languages and Norse and Gothic etc, and they haven’t taken into consideration the number of resources available and how well the ones teaching explained the grammar of the less known languages like Icelandic and Hungarian, because I am sure they didn’t mention the fact that the word endings are the same for each group of nouns and verbs and adjectives in languages like Icelandic and Hungarian etc, so they aren’t any more ‘difficult’ than French and Spanish which have like a zillion verb tenses, so how can French be category 1 and Icelandic ‘category 4’ which makes no sense, and how can the hardest languages ever Chinese and Arabic and Japanese be just slightly harder than Icelandic which uses a normal writing system with Latin letters, and how can Russian and Icelandic and Slovene be in the same category when Icelandic and Slovene use the Latin alphabet and Russian uses the Cyrillic alphabet which is indeed way harder to read and get used to, so one can see that official stats aren’t always accurate and don’t always make sense one hundred percent, and should be taken with a grain of salt!

Hey, if you really like Russian language I’d like to recommend you several songs such as: 1. Екатерина Арлашникова - Луна 2. Кино - спокойная ночь 3. Би2 - а мы не ангелы парень 4. Fun Mode - рыцарь и королева That’s enough for today. If you want more - write something back 👋

I believe Dr Steven Krashen said that what you comprehendingly listen to today takes 6 months for the brain to absorb before you naturally can speak it.

Ideally you're going to be using the language for the rest of your life. Don't worry about rushing to get fluent, consistent, sustained effort will get you much farther.

I learned Spanish passively in childhood and I haven’t used it in over a decade before I started learning languages on my own about one+ year ago, and I am native speaker level in Spanish, but I didn’t even realize that in the past because I never really used Spanish, and it didn’t feel like it was that good in childhood, so it’s true that languages get better with time, like, the words become a lot more automatic after many years, and it’s a lot easier to say things fast in languages that one learned a longer time ago, whereas in newer languages it’s not very easy to form sentences or think fast, not even when one knows the words very well, and I think it’s because languages naturally need more years to be processed fully and to become fully automatic inside the hern, and it takes several years for the hern to fully get used to the new language or languages! It’s easy to learn the actual words and to be able to understand the written language, and this can even be achieved in one year in languages that are very easy and pretty with gorgeous words such as Norse / Icelandic / Dutch / English / Norwegian / Gothic / Welsh / Breton etc which are some of the prettiest ever and some of the languages that are the easiest and most fun to learn, but to fully develop an automatic mode in the new language or languages where one can say fast anything without having to think about it takes several years, even in the prettiest and easiest languages, and typing a lot in the new languages can also help a lot because it helps create a muscle memory or reflexive memory or something like that! I think I just got at or around an advanced level in Icelandic after learning it for a few months, almost every day, but lately I’ve been learning it every day, so my level in Icelandic is now around the same level I have in Norwegian, and my Dutch is at an upper advanced level, so it’s a bit higher, like, in Dutch there are usually only two or three new words in almost every new video, and I usually know more than 99% of the Dutch words from almost every new video I watch, and in Icelandic there are ten to twenty new words in each longer video, so maybe about ten new words in shorter videos that are around 10 minutes, so my vocab at least is advanced, though one of my goals qua language learning is to learn all the words that I can find in the prettiest languages ever like Norse and Icelandic and Dutch and English and Norwegian and Gothic and Faroese and Welsh and Breton and Cornish and Forn Svenska and Danish and East Norse and Middle English and the Öld and Middle versions of these languages which are the languages I want to use the most, but I also want to learn all the words in Manx and Irish and Scottish Gaelic and also in Slovene and Latin and Galician and Portuguese and Gallo and Occitan and Hungarian and Old English and Swedish as these languages also have mostly pretty words and very epic idioms and sayings, and in most of my other target languages I want to be at least native speaker level and to know at least ten thousand to fifteen thousand base words and to be able to understand the written language at least, even though Irish and Scottish Gaelic are a bit complicated as these two are the true category 3 languages at least qua spelling, so they are a bit more complicated than Hungarian and Latvian and Estonian and Finnish which are actually category 2 languages, tho most of the Irish and Gaelic words themselves are usually easier to learn than most Finnish and Estonian words, so I can usually remember them after seeing them three to five times, as modern Celtic languages have a word memorability level similar to that of Norse / Germanic words, so it doesn’t take many repetitions to learn the words and to recognize them in sentences when seeing them again, though it does take more repetitions in general to get the words to become extremely automatic, so I would recommend seeing and hearing and revising each word at least thirty times actively over a longer period of time and typing each word several times to learn them extremely automatically!

And definitely pick a language you're definitely interested in. I wasted time learning a language that was "useful" but not something I was genuinely interested in.

@@skeingamepodcast5993 100%. I was learning Chinese for almost 8 months because it would be useful….but I liked nothing of it. I specially disliked the way it sounded…..so instead I dropped it so I can dedicate more time to just enjoy japanese (which I can never have enough of) and italian…havent looked back since tbh

3 students per tutor, 5 hours a day.

He didn’t go into detail about the exercises they do but he explained how much they study in a classroom vs at home

he uses the US state departments categories as a starting point for the video, so yeah its not all that misleading, seems like you just misunderstand or didnt watch the intro

@@lollycopter 15 hrs. of homework a week added to the 25 hrs. a week. of classroom study of about 24 weeks overall for the easiest languages for English speakers (Spanish, Dutch, French, etc...) That is 960 hrs., then it is recommended to spend an entire year in the target language country afterwards. The livelihood depends on the success of these participants. Effectively it is just the start in their proficiency to qualify for their career in as a Foreign Service Officer.

Thai is category 7 or category 8 like Korean, not category 3 lol, these official classifications and rankings are not accurate and are incomplete as they don’t include most languages that exist, only some of the more known languages, and, Icelandic and Slovene are two of the easiest languages ever, they should be listed as category 1, while the Tharcian-Aslavic language that was incorrectly classified as a ‘Latin’ language and listed as the 8th ‘category 1’ languages is at least category 4 same as Czech and Polish with very heavy aspect with many diacritics and mostly non-pretty words that are way harder to memorize, and the languages listed as a ‘category 3 language’ such as Swahili and Indonesian etc are at least a category 4 language as well and aren’t fun to learn, and any language that has mostly non-pretty words that aren’t fun to learn is naturally very hard to learn, while the words of all languages that use different alphabets which are harder than the easiest alphabet ever aka the Latin alphabet are naturally very hard to read and process the written text, while Chinese languages and Japanese (which use characters instead of actual alphabets) and Arabic languages (which have the scripts that are the most complicated and hardest to read) etc are category 10 and category 9 languages, and they are way harder than Russian which is category 5, so the rankings should be from one to ten at least because one to five rankings aren’t accurate and there are many languages with make different difficulty level, so one cannot properly classify them if it’s just a one to five rankings system, plus many of the languages that they included are incorrectly ranked which are either easier or harder than they were ranked, so these types of rankings and lists aren’t one hundred percent accurate and aren’t complete as they don’t even include most languages that exist, so one should always take that info with a grain of salt! A true category 3 language would be Irish and Scottish Gaelic which are the hardest pretty languages and the hardest languages that I am learning, and Hungarian is just a mid category 2 language, and Latvian / Finnish / Estonian are just slightly harder than Hungarian and are also category two, and German is similar to French in difficulty level and it’s still a category one language tho it’s closer to a category two language than it is to the easiest category one languages, and the absolute easiest language ever is English, and Dutch and Norwegian are the easiest after English, and Norse / Icelandic / Gothic and Welsh / Breton / Cornish are also in the top easiest languages that are the easiest and most fun to learn, and I am saying this from personal experience, as I am learning all the Norse / Germanic / Nordic languages and the modern Celtic languages and all other pretty languages at the same time, so I know how easy they really are! However, it seems like those that made the classifications and rankings didn’t truly study or observe most of those languages or the ones teaching some of the less known ones like Icelandic and Hungarian etc didn’t explain the grammar well to the learners, because I cannot understand how can Icelandic and Slovene and Hungarian etc be listed as a ‘category four’ and languages that are way harder and not fun to learn are listed as a ‘category three’ or ‘category one’ and even languages with different alphabets such as Russian and Greek are listed in the same category with Icelandic and Slovene and Hungarian and Latvian and Finnish and Estonian etc which makes no sense and isn’t accurate, because it’s easy to learn the words in all Germanic languages (Germanic languages are naturally the easiest languages to memorize and learn) and it’s easy to use them if one understands how the grammar works and if one knows the word endings associated with each group of words well, because the words follow the exact same patterns, especially in Norse languages, the noun endings and the verb endings and the adjective endings are exactly the same for every group of nouns / verbs / adjectives, with very few exceptions, so it’s easy to memorize the different forms of each word if one knows the base words and the endings associated with each group of words automatically! Like, I can remember the declensions and conjugations for every Icelandic word that I know automatically after only reading them once or twice, and I know the patterns very well, even though I am only upper intermediate level in Icelandic and Norse at the moment, and it’s the same in Hungarian and Finnish etc from what I have seen so far, the endings are the same and tend to follow the exact same patterns, so their grammar isn’t hard as most ppl that make those types of lists and rankings etc try to make it out to be, so I don’t think they tried studying these languages themselves or had them taught properly to learners if they even tried to teach them at all! Besides, languages such as French and Spanish and Italian have more verb tenses with like 100+ different verb forms for each verb which is way more different forms then the verbs in all Germanic languages combined lol, yet they are still listed as a category one, while Icelandic was listed as a category four which makes no sense at all, if anything, it’s way easier to learn Icelandic than French and Italian and Spanish, and it’s way easier to imitate the Icelandic accent than French which has a category two pronunciation and accent and Spanish which has an accent that is not easy to imitate even if one is native speaker level in Spanish, like, I am native speaker level in Spanish since childhood yet it’s not easy to naturally get the standard Spanish accent and intonation, whereas Icelandic is so easy to pronounce and imitate that I could sound native even when I was beginner level and I didn’t even have to practice the actual accent because it’s naturally easy to imitate by just adding a soft H sound before double consonants and speaking in a breathy way because Icelandic is the breathiest language ever!

I am upper intermediate level in Icelandic and Norse and I am real close to reaching an advanced level in Icelandic after actively studying it for a few months, for a few hours a day almost every day, and I know over 6.000 words in Icelandic at the moment, and I focused for like 4 months mostly on Icelandic and maybe 2 months mostly on Norse, and I can perfectly understand how the grammar works and have no difficulty using the right forms, and I feel like typing Norse and Icelandic words is easier than typing Spanish words and getting all the Spanish accents right, even though I am native speaker level in Spanish as I learned it passively in childhood, and typing French words is even harder than typing Spanish or Italian words as French words have even more words with more types of random accents and diacritics, so even after learning the actual words automatically, one still has to see the words in their written form many times to fully memorize every single accent and diacritic that tends to be quite random in French, so yea - these types of official lists are only partially accurate, but they are not 100% accurate, especially when it comes to less know languages, less known languages tend to get incorrect rankings and incorrect classifications etc, probably because they haven’t been studied and observed and analyzed in detail and the ppl teaching them didn’t know how to explain the grammar in a very clear and detailed way, and the learners aren’t usually made aware of the fact that the word endings are the same for every group of words, so most learners get the idea that they are not easy to learn and don’t try to observe and analyze the different patterns on their own either...

I always thought of those "24 months" to learn x language of the FSI as the ACTUAL TIME you learn. Like numbers of hours. So, unless you spend 24 hours in a day learning the language, a DAY WHERE you learned the language does not equal of A DAY LEEARNING. I may be wrong but I'm pretty sure how they measure it. It's like saying it takes 10,000 hours or something. It's 10,000 hours of actual focused learning. When you go take a bath it's not counting. If yo see it THAT way I think those estimates are quite reasonable. A day has 24 hours., If you studied for 2-8 hours IN A DAY that doesn't make for a day studying the language. So, if you study 8 hours a day, that means it will take 3 days to get ONE day of learning.

​​@@JohnnyLynnLeeit is wild that you think that 😅 The number are how long they think they need to train you for an assignment. I think the problem is comparing apples to oranges in terms of their grading, they may consider people ready to do the job after that much time, they're unlikey to be concerned with european measurements of overall fluency. as far as I know they also try to select for people with high aptitude, so not just average folks going through the program but likely people who hear the language reasonably well from the start or have already had an interest prior to the program.

@@CaptainWumbo Buy then the number doesn't mean anything if not specified of how long a day you'll study. Someone studying for one hour a day for for months will get very different results from someone doing it 8 hours a day. And someone studying 8 hours actively will have different results from someone studying 8 hours but with 4 active hours and 5 passive hours. When you are cleaning your house, sleeping, shitting (unless, to some extent, if you are doing passive listening) you are NOT studying So a 'month" in that sense means NOTHING at all. And also, as you5slef have noticed it depends on what you consider "able". After a year could you sit and watch Thai news comfortably? It took me five years in Japanese with 3 to 8 hours a day to do so. I'm entering my 4th year of Vietnamese and I still can't pick, say, Guns Germs and Still and red it in Vietnamese. Not by a long shot. Without specifying the TIME and what we REALLY are able to do in the time better that measurement means nothing.

This was a very interesting read. Thank you!

Steve doesn’t care about you. Most often the time he doesn’t answer internet users. Wake up, dude. Steve is not a friend. He’s a businessman.

I don't really care if Steve "cares" about me or not, I appreciate his content and remarked on it, that's it. Lotta vitriol there dude, what happened to you? @@TheClearSighted

I believe the brain doesn't truly erase anything.

I thonk you are right about self confidence. Even the more introvert ones are confident

I like your comment. I’ve been learning Spanish for a few years, and now use every opportunity on the construction sites I work to use the Spanish I know. Almost 100% of the time I get positive reactions, and the Spanish speakers practice their English on me 😂

Uhhhhhh

Wow! Congratulations! Put some of your tips here! I'm still in my third.

try a different method or something else to what you're doing. respectfully there is no way it should take you that long

I'm a portuguese native speaker and I started russian couple weeks ago, do you think I could get maybe to B1 in less than a year? How does reading help you? In the beginning you read like anything not worrying if you are not understanding? I think I might do that, just to get a sense of the language I like to review things a lot so the few things I know, I know very well, but I'm too slow at picking new things up

I think it´s possible. Although it requires a lot of dedication and time. Have you already mastered the Cyrillic alphabet? If not, I´d focus on it for a while, it´s crucial. And I´d recommend you start by listening to something rather than reading, it´s easier.

I think you could get to a C1 level to pass a test in 3-6 months with intensive study and buttloads of imput. But, you'll have actually reached a B1 level. And the C1 level will come 1 or 2 or 3 years later, depending on how much you use the language.

Can you explain how you use KZfaq? Language learning channels, or just by listening to random videos?

Wisely and sanely put. Progress is no accident.

Can you explain a little more how you are doing this? I am learning German myself but I feel like a lot of language learning channels are boring and not very well structured. If it's just videos you're interested in my intuition would be to build up a big vocabulary prior. I mean I've been watching anime for 10+ years but outside of a few phrases I haven't picked up much Japanese naturally.

Definitely interested in your method

When watching a video on KZfaq I click on the LingQ browser extension on my computer, or use the Share function on my mobile to share it with LingQ. AI will automatically transcribe the video and create a lesson for you in LingQ.

For me (English-speaking native) B2 Finnish was when I could happily discuss or read even a college textbook type of text. Long before that I COULD have read all sorts of things but it was such a huge effort that I needed some significant need or interest to plow through it. B2 was also when I understood background noise immediately (like trains being called out in a station) even when I was not intentionally listening.

@@eanevakivi2479 That's interesting because I'd say I can listen to background stuff as you describe fairly comfortably, not knowing every single word but understanding 95%+. It's the 'meaningful conversation' I struggle with. To make interesting points on interesting topics. But is that B2 stuff or really C1?

@@ManForToday Not hearing if I do not actively listen could just my tendency to mute background noise: hours & hours learning to read on a schoolbus 😊 I guess college-level texts no problem was more like C1, but that was after 10+ yrs.

I would appreciate if you can suggest course suggestion for German A1 to C1 level ? I'm looking for German language exam preparation resource which is efficient and the best.

@@user-en6ek3vc7vmaybe the Goethe institute. Search for "Goethe institute preparing for language proficiency tests"

@@user-en6ek3vc7vI have now left 2 comments in answer to your question, but apparently my advice is being blocked.

@@vrmartin202KZfaq is really cracking down on censorship. It seems like half of my comments get deleted. Maybe because it’s an election year in the US?

Ok but have you seen the language lord videos bc he’s doing 0 to a B1/C1 level in 2 months 😭

Interesting. My weakness in languages is grammar, but I'm weirdly good with writing systems and phonetics. This isn't a brag. It's a terrible mismatch! Imagine a native speaker seeing you able to read words and produce the sounds very accurately but then stumble through sentences like a drunken six year-old. Not good.

The difference between the fusional and agglutinative branches of synthetic languages (=languages that adjust a base word by adding things to it, vs. analytic languages using helper words instead of inflection). In a fusional language, one piece of inflection can adjust the word's meaning in multiple ways, and the cases can end up being pretty irregular as a result. In an agglutinative language, one piece of inflection only adjusts meaning in one way. So you end up building words like lego. Agglutinative languages tend to be very regular. PIE-descended European languages are generally fusional, while eg. Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, Japanese and Korean are agglutinative.

The rankings are written from the POV of a native English speaker only. Chinese to Korean or Japanese would be much easier than Spanish for example.

I have never attempted to learn ASL so I have no idea.

There are just too many resources. I have dabbled in Japanese time and time again. The next I try I'll do the following: Duolingo, Lingodeer, Learn Japanese in 90 days by Kevin Marx and a resource that uses romanized characters.

No immediate plans.

When it comes to pronunciation, Dutch pronunciation is one of the easiest ever and the Dutch accent is naturally easy to imitate, whereas German has an accent that is very hard to imitate, so one has to practice German pronunciation a lot to get the right native accent, but the rankings are mostly incorrect tho, and German is in fact a category 1 language, but it is closer to a category 2 language than it is to English and Dutch and Norwegian which are the easiest category 1 languages ever and the easiest languages ever, and Icelandic and Norse and Gothic are also way easier to learn and read and pronounce than German, as German has a category 2 pronunciation and many words that have a lot of consonant clusters and umlauts! Icelandic and Slovene are two of the easiest languages ever, they should be listed as category 1, while the Tharcian-Aslavic language that was incorrectly classified as a ‘Latin’ language and listed as the 8th ‘category 1’ languages is at least category 4 same as Czech and Polish with very heavy aspect with many diacritics and mostly non-pretty words that are way harder to memorize, and the languages listed as a ‘category 3 language’ such as Swahili and Indonesian etc are at least a category 4 language as well and aren’t fun to learn, and any language that has mostly non-pretty words that aren’t fun to learn is naturally very hard to learn, while the words of all languages that use different alphabets which are harder than the easiest alphabet ever aka the Latin alphabet are naturally very hard to read and process the written text, while Chinese languages and Japanese (which use characters instead of actual alphabets) and Arabic languages (which have the scripts that are the most complicated and hardest to read) etc are category 10 and category 9 languages, and they are way harder than Russian which is category 5, and Hungarian and Latvian and Finnish and Estonian are very easy category 2 languages with easy pronunciation and easy spelling that uses the Latin alphabet and that are not much more difficult than German and French which have similar difficulty levels, and the Celtic languages weren’t even included, but Welsh / Breton / Cornish / Manx are very easy and are in the top languages that are the easiest and most fun to learn and memorize and pronounce, and Irish and Scottish are the true category 3 languages, especially their spelling, so they are the hardest languages that I am learning, and they are way harder than Hungarian and Finnish etc, but they are not as hard as Polish and Czech and other languages that use harder alphabets tho, so there are definitely a lot of different difficulty levels that a one to five rankings system cannot even convey with accuracy! So the rankings should be from one to ten at least because one to five rankings aren’t accurate and there are many languages with many different difficulty levels, so one cannot properly classify them if it’s just a one to five ranking system, plus many of the languages that they included are incorrectly ranked which are either easier or harder than they were ranked, so these types of rankings and lists aren’t one hundred percent accurate and aren’t complete as they don’t even include most languages that exist, so one should always take that info with a grain of salt!

Re cases, all languages have cases, including English, which still has vestiges of the case system, especially for pronouns, so i is the nominative form and me is the accusative form and to me would be the dative form (tho it doesn’t have a different form in English) and my is the genitive form, and all languages automatically use the cases all the time, even when the words themselves have the same form, so every time one has a subject and a direct object in the sentence one automatically uses the cases, because it’s not possible to express things and ideas without cases - grammar is never hard or easy, it’s just a necessary part of any logical language, and without it that language wouldn’t sound right in sentences, and very few languages work well without different noun / adjective forms, including English which has been modified into a very neutral language with neutral word endings, which is why English sounds right with only one or two forms, whereas most other Germanic languages have strong word endings that aren’t neutral and they have many nouns ending in A etc, so they need the different noun endings and adjectives endings and verb endings to sound right, for example, if one said ‘he do this every day’ in English, one would know that it doesn’t sound right, so it’s the same in Icelandic and Norse etc, as those languages wouldn’t sound right without the different forms, so they need the different forms, just like English needs to use an S or ES ending for the conjugated verb that is used with he, because he do or he go etc wouldn’t sound right, because certainly words and certain pronouns only sound right when used in combination with conjugated verbs and nouns and adjectives that have a specific word ending, as Germanic languages are the most logical languages, so they were designed in a such a way that everything would sound right, and it’s also similar in Latin and Spanish and French and Italian and Welsh etc, as all these languages have different conjugated forms and Spanish and Italian and French and Latin also have different adjective forms like Norse languages, and Dutch also has an extra E at the end of adjectives when used with certain words, so learners need to understand the importance of grammar and different word endings, which are necessary and are not hard or easy, and they should be observed and learnt logically, because it’s easy to use the language if one is learning the language logically and truly understands how these things work and why they are the way they are, as these languages weren’t just randomly made, and are in fact very logical languages with very logical grammar that have a great harmony and sentences that sound right thanks to the different word endings!

In Dutch pronunciation, the CH is literally the same sound as the CH used in German and it is also the same as the CH in Welsh and other modern Celtic languages, and G is similar and almost the same as the CH, especially when it’s in the middle of the word it sounds exactly the same, and it is a K-controlled H-like sound, though the G is in fact a G-controlled H-like sound, and there are many types of Gs, from ultra soft Gs to ultra hard Gs, and the softest Gs are very easy to pronounce as they are like a normal H-like sound that is between a G and an H sound and they have the best sound, so I highly recommend learning the Dutch accent that uses the soft Gs and the soft Rs such as the normal soft R which is a tap like in Icelandic and Brazilian Portuguese and the Americanized R aka de gooise R as that accent is the prettiest and best Dutch accent that’s also the easiest to learn, and the U in Dutch is usually a schwa sound in some words and an YU sound in other words, so it depends on the word, and the UI is an AUY sound that is actually easy to learn if one watches videos teaching this sound and if one imitates the exact sound and the mouth movements of the speaker, as that is also how I figured out how to make this sound, so it’s necessary to make that mouth movement while saying AUY and trying to melt the Y sound into the U sound from above or something like that, and it will come naturally after practicing it a few times, and the IJ is an AY sound in words like hij and jij and mijn etc and it is also pronounced like a sound that’s between a normal A sound and a normal E sound + an extra Y sound at the end in most words like fijn and pijn and trein etc, so one just has to imitate the exact sound one hears, and the sound itself is very easy to make, like, I had no difficulty imitating the IJ sound in Dutch, and the EI is usually pronounced the same as the IJ and, these are some of the prettiest sounds ever, and the UI sound and the IJ sound only exist in Dutch, though I have also heard some speakers of Norwegian using that sound in Norwegian words like greit more recently, plus I started using it in some English words and in some Norwegian words as well because it sounds so cool, but normaIly this sound comes from Dutch, and, in some regions the IJ is also pronounced EY with a normal e sound + a normal i sound said 2gether in one sound, and the EU is usually pronounced EO and in some words it is pronounced EOY like the AU in Icelandic, that is, normaI e should + normal o sound + normal i sound said 2gether in one sound, and it is similar to the EU in German which is pronounced OY, and, in words like leuk I have heard some speakers pronouncing leuk as leok and I have also heard speakers pronouncing it leoyk, so one can choose between the two pronunciations, or one can use both!

I do all of the following. 1. Listen while driving, working etc. no transcript. 2. Watching videos that are difficult while reading translation. 3. Importing videos into LingQ and going over sentence by sentence in sentence mode, listening and reading in target language, looking up and saving words. All good. All helping you get the language into you.

I do all of the following. 1. Listen while driving, working etc. no transcript. 2. Watching videos that are difficult while reading translation. 3. Importing videos into LingQ and going over sentence by sentence in sentence mode, listening and reading in target language, looking up and saving words. All good. All helping you get the language into you.

When you watch a movie, use the subtitles

Kwangu mimi kiswahili ina shida mbili kubwa, ya kwanza ulivyotaja wewe kwamba ni vigumu kupata (kwa mfano) movie nyingi za kuangalia au vitabu vya kusoma lakini pia ukiishafika nchi ambayo wanaongea kiswahili utakuta sio kile ulichokisoma wewe, kile chenye cha ndani tuseme ni tofauti na cha kwenye vitabu. Tuchukulie salaamu kwa mfano, utafundisha kwamba salaam kuu ni jambo, hujambo, unaendeleaje, habari za leo na mambo, lakini sio hivyo, mimi mwenyewe nilikaa tanzania kama mwaka na naishi na mchumba wangu mtanzania, siwezi kabisa kumsalimia kwa kusema jambo au hujambo, ukimwambia mzee hujambo itakuwa kama umemkosea, sana sana hujambo ni salaam kwa watu unaowazidi umri, tunasemaga vipi, shwari, safi, shikamoo (kwa wazee) mambo, za asubuhi na pia wahuni (kwa maana ya watu wabaya au vijana hasa wale ambao wanajifanya wamarekani) wanapendaga kusema hoya inakuwaje, nyaje na salaam zingine zinazzokuja tu nakupotea kwa muda mfupi, tena sijawahi kuona kitabu chochote kinachofundisha -ga wanasema "habitual tense" ni hu - kama huenda shuleweweni lakini kawaida kila mtu anasema unaendaga shuleni. tena ukiwa unaongea kuhusu kiswahili cha congo hadi utakoma, hata watanzania wenyewe wanashindwa kuwaelewa, kiswahili kina mambo mengi ila mi napenda nafikiria siku moja nataka niandike kozi ya kiswahili cha ndani yaani kile ambacho watu wanaongea hata wakiwa nyumbani na sio tu kwenye matangazo ya serikali au kwenye habari wanavyofundisha kwenye vitabu vya kawaida. nakutakia masomo mema hata ukikuta ni vigumu we vumilia tu utafika sehemu kiswahili chako kitakuwa kimenyooka na watu watafurahi mno, ila uwe makini watanzania huwaga wanapenda kudanganya wazungu kujifanya marafiki ili wapate tu hela ukikuta mtu una mashaka naye bora tu umwache hata mimi nilipata shida sana kwenye hilo jambo.

Look at the chart at :11. It’s up to date. His charts in the rest of the video are all outdated. Swahili is not category 3. It’s category 2 now.

@@MrLiveGain good eye 👍

search if you like language transfer on YT - the developer there has put together a solid course for Swahili learners based on FSI methodology

​@@MrLiveGainwhat is your course suggestion for German A1 to C1 level ? I'm looking for German language exam preparation resource which is efficient and the best.