Question: How many languages can you learn in a year?

Susan Cartwright answered on 23 Jun 2015:

I think this depends strongly on the individual. For example, people who are bilingual (i.e. brought up speaking two languages from infancy) are much better at acquiring new languages later, and children are generally better than adults. It also depends on the language – for example, if you were a native French speaker, Italian and Spanish would be easy to learn, German noticeably less so, and Japanese or Chinese very much harder.

Studies show that *how* you learn a language is very predictable (in other words, specialists know which bits you will master first, and what kind of mistakes you will make along the way), but *how fast* you learn is extremely variable.

Also, of course, if you were learning the language full-time, and you only wanted to become good enough to carry on everyday conversations or read a newspaper, that would be very different from doing it part-time or wanting to be good enough to write a book in the new language.

I found a blog post by an American diplomat saying that in the diplomatic service, with very intensive training (5 hours of classroom time per day in small groups, plus homework and access to language labs for independent study – let’s guess about 35-40 hours per week), they were expected to master “easy” languages like French and Spanish in 4 months, while “hard” languages like Chinese or Arabic took a year or more. This is consistent with another blog which estimated 10 months for “easy” languages and 2 years for “hard” ones, based on 20 hours study per week (i.e. half that expected of the diplomats, and about double the time).