There is NO HARD language -A polyglot's perspective

As a polyglot, I always get this question: Is Chinese like Japanese, as Turkish is... blah blah? Language hard to learn? The answer is, there is no hard language. Hard language doesn't exist. Hi, guys! It's me, Dory. For those who are new here, I'm a polyglot. I can speak Japanese, English, Turkish, and German fluently. A lot of people get confused when I say polyglot.

Polyglot is basically a word which is combined by two words: poly and glot. Poly means multiple and glot means tongue. So, people who can talk multiple languages fluently are polyglots.

Anyways, today we'll talk about how long it takes for someone else to learn a language or how long it will take for you to become fluent in any sort of language. As I said in the intro, there is no hard language. There are languages that are harder for you to learn. Language itself is not hard; it's just hard for you to learn.

What do I mean by that? If language itself is hard, then these native speakers wouldn't be able to speak their mother languages. But even the dumbest person—I'm not talking about the health conditions—can speak their mother language. So, the actual thing that makes language hard is making time for it, actually really prioritizing that language, and scheduling a time for it. This is what makes a language hard for you.

Also, it depends on your mother tongue's language group and your target language group. There are a lot of factors that make a language hard for you to learn. Today, we will look at different data, compare them, and understand which languages are hard for you to learn and which languages are easy.

So, let's get started. Firstly, starting the video, let's talk about what fluency actually means. What does fluency mean to us? For me personally, fluency means when somebody can express themselves without really thinking much or translating in their brain. If somebody has a second or third or fourth brain, and if their personality and way of thinking or their voice is changing, or if they're switching between languages, I think it means that person is fluent in that language.

For me, for example, when I talk in Turkish or when I talk in Japanese, German, or English, my personality slightly changes between those languages. When I talk Turkish, I become more friendly. When I talk Japanese, I think I'm much funnier. When I talk in English, I'm kind of more confident. And when I talk in German, I don't know why, but I'm kind of shy. I don't know why. I'm not a shy person at all, but when I talk German, it kind of changes.

If I would give an exact number for fluency, I think it's something around like B2 level according to CEFR, which stands for the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. Okay, so I think it's around B2, and B2 level according to CEFR is here; you can read right here. Yes, that is what I think fluency means.

I personally think that language certificates don't necessarily express how fluent or how good you are in that language. When I got my DSD 2 German certificate in high school, which stands for C1, I guess a lot of people got this certificate even though they weren't literally fluent in German. However, when you read the guidelines of the DSD2, you're expected to be very fluent in that language. However, there were a lot of people who weren't fluent at all.

There is a certain way to pass an exam, and if you know that way, you can pass actually most of the language certificates if they're not like C2 or something, in my opinion. Anyway, I understand why language certificates are important because when you are applying for a university or like for a job interview or something, they cannot really test every single person's language skills or something, so they just look at the certificate. I do understand that, but for me personally, I don't learn a language to get a language certificate.

I learn that language because I need to talk, or I need to express myself in that language. But anyways, if you want to take language certificates, it's totally up to you, but if you want to become fluent in that language, it doesn't necessarily mean that you have to have a certain certificate.

So, how long does it take to learn a language? Let's talk about that. There are a bunch of guidelines showing how long it takes, but today I'm using the FSI guideline, which stands for the Foreign Service Institute, as a guide. What is FSI? Let me read real quick. FSI is the U.S. government's training center for diplomats, ambassadors, and spies. They have been in the language business since 1947, and they have a wide range of data on language difficulties for English speakers. I'll put also the other guidelines that I found down in the description below so that you can check them out.

As I said, the FSI data only shows for those who are native English speakers. But since I'm a good girl, I want to include everybody else who is watching this video. So today, I'll use the future of the Busu study plan programmer, which allows you to see how many days or how many months it will take you to achieve your own goals.

Let's get started, and I'll show it to you guys. You can use Busu as a web version or an app version, but today I'll use the web version. When you open this study plan programmer, firstly you can choose your main goal for learning English. I picked English, but you can pick other languages that are in Busu, as you can see here.

Let's say I want to learn English to develop professionally or to help with my education. What level do you want to achieve? Let's say B2 because, as I said, B2 is a level that I think is enough to say that you're fluent. So let's go with the B2.

Let's learn for five times a week; let's just chill on the weekends, and let's set the reminder at 1 PM every day so that we won't forget studying. How long would you like to study? You can, of course, go like 30 minutes a day, but let's go for 10 minutes. We'll just commit for 10 minutes; everybody has 10 minutes to learn a language.

And let's continue. So it says you'll reach your goal by 24 August 2022. Also, like before setting the study plan, you can take a test, showing you where you are currently at, which is your language level, and you can pick a goal for yourself from that point when you create your study plan.

As you can see, it shows what you should be doing today, and I think it's very good because when we are learning a language, we can easily feel lost when services show what we should be doing today. So let's start learning a language in Busu. They have a bunch of varieties of courses that you can select from. They have a complete English course for beginner, intermediate, and advanced people.

Also, they have an English pronunciation lesson. They have the World in English lesson where you can learn a language from The New York Times. It literally shows you how to say hello and hi, etc. But it's not only for beginners; in the exact same course, it doesn't mean that this is only for beginners. Even if you're intermediate or advanced, you can still use it.

Let me show you an example. We're going to learn about Queen Street West, a neighborhood in Toronto, Canada. Let's get started. Gentrified! It pronounces the word for you, and then it gives an example: "Gentrified." Okay, the neighborhood of Queen Street West has been gentrified in the last few years.

Then you pick vocabulary, and then you continue. They don't only focus on your vocabulary; you can also train your grammar, your listening, and you can also train in the general area of learning a language. Busu is an amazing way to learn a language. You can start using it for free, and you can use the premium version for additional features, but you can start using Busu for free. There is a link down in the description below. Don't forget to check it out, and thank you Busu for sponsoring this video!

So, yeah! Anyways, if you are a non-native English speaker, you can check Busu's feature for calculating how long it will take for you to learn, but let's continue looking at FSI data. This part is only relevant if you're a native English speaker because if you are not a native English speaker like me, this part is probably not relevant to you.

But let's continue. FSI calculated the time you need to learn a language by study hours, but these organizations only calculate classroom hours. We don't only learn languages in a classroom, right? We do also study by ourselves.

I've read the book "Fluent Forever," which is an amazing book if you want to learn any language. I would highly recommend you to read that book; I'll put a link down in the description. Anyways, I got all of these images from that book, and when we look at the data right here, Level 1, which are languages closely related to English, requires 575 to 600 class hours.

As we said, one classroom hour is two study hours. So, if you want to learn these languages on your own, you have to duplicate this number by two, which makes up around like 1,200,000-ish hours to learn a language by these. If you're a native English speaker, you need like 575 to 600 class hours to learn African, Catalan, Danish, Dutch, French, Italian, and these are the languages.

Now, let's look at Level 2, which are languages with significant linguistic or cultural differences. Cultural differences really affect the difficulty of the language itself because language is involved in culture. It changes with the culture, so we can't ignore the culture itself when we want to learn a language.

If you want to become fluent or confident in that language, we have to make sure that we know the culture of the language itself. So, let's look at Level 2. Here you can see for these languages you need 1,100 classroom hours, which makes 2,200 self-study hours.

Here are the languages you can see: Georgian, Hindi, Kurdish, Persian, Mongolian, Russian, and Thai. Oh, and Turkish is in this group as well. So, Turkish is a language with significant linguistic and cultural differences when you compare it to English.

Now we have the data of the Level 3 languages, which are exceptionally difficult for native English speakers. These are Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Minon, and Wu Chinese. These require 2,200 class hours, which makes 4,400 self-study hours.

I wasn't really surprised by that because for Japanese people, it's really hard to learn English, and for native English speakers, it's really hard to learn Japanese. Not the flex, but I can speak both languages. Maybe I'm trying to offend you, but I am telling you that it's possible because, like in this Level 3 languages, you need 2,200 hours to learn Japanese if you're a native speaker.

Also, if you are a native Japanese speaker, it's super, super hard for you to learn English. I think these details are kind of true because when I look at my Japanese friends, they always say that it's super, super, super hard for them to learn English.

It was hard for me to learn—I mean, I'm a native Japanese speaker, and I'm kind of fluent in English. Not the flex; I just want to tell you that it is possible to learn the language even though it is in a very hard group or something like Japanese and Turkish. Both of my mother languages, when you compare English, it's pretty hard to learn English for a native Turkish speaker and also for a native Japanese speaker.

But even though these languages are in a hard group, I can speak both of the languages. So, I just want to tell you that it's not impossible. If you study in the right way and if you have the right mentality towards the language, you can learn whatever language you want to learn.

It might take a bit more time compared to those easy languages, but it's not impossible. As you can see from me, I will put also the ACTFL, DLI, and CEFR guide down in the description below so that you can just look through the guidelines and kind of figure out how many hours you need to study those languages.

But you know, if you are a non-native English speaker, you can use Busu for calculating your estimated time to learn a new language. I think these data are kind of true, but these data can also be misleading. Because when you look into this data, I need like 4,400 hours to learn English as a native Japanese speaker, but you know, I became pretty fluent in English by only watching YouTube videos.

Hey, friends! Welcome back to the channel. Today we're talking about learning, and I became fluent in maybe like 10 months or so. I wasn't really fluent; I could understand English, but I wasn't able to express myself. But in like 10 months or so, by watching YouTube videos, I became like pretty fluent like I am right now.

So, if these details were misleading, then why? Why? Why do I share this guide? The reason that I shared this guide is that there is no hard language. Firstly, I want you to understand that there are harder languages for you to learn. Don't really consider these hours when you are trying to learn a language.

Like when you look at Japanese as a native English speaker and say, "Okay, I need 4,400 hours to learn a language," don’t just use the hour data or something. I shared this data for you to understand how hard a language is for you to learn and how much time it will take approximately for you to learn that language so that you won't feel like you're not improving.

Learning a language takes time and practice, and you have to prioritize it in order to learn it. So, I just shared these guides to encourage you to learn a language because it takes time, but it's 100% worth it. Busu is an effective way to learn a language. You can use my code if you want to support me. You know, you do you.

But anyway, I hope you guys find this video helpful, and yeah, let me see you in my next video. Bye!