Sat 18 Dec 2010
10,000 Hour Rule
Posted by 馬先生 under Learning
I came across this video explaining what it takes to “master” a language. There is a rule of 10,000 hours in order to master anything. It would take 30 years of 1 hour per day to master a language, 10 years of 3 hours per day, 5 years of 6 hours per day and so on.
Then why is it that people can go overseas and speak very good in whatever language they are studying etc… The point is “good” but not “master”. There is another rule called “pareto principle” describing the 80-20 ratio of achieving something. This means it would take 20% of time to achieve 80% results, but 80% of time to achieve the remaining 20% of results leading to mastery.
So this brings me back to my Cantonese. I could say I speak it “well”, but far from near native. It also be maybe people are adjusting themselves when talking to me since I would need a mighty lot of years to get that last 20%. Anyway, this is a good video and makes me realise how much hard work you need.
The 10,000 hours principle explained:
http://www.coachingmanagement.nl/The%20Making%20of%20an%20Expert.pdf
Hong Kong
December 19th, 2010 at 3:36 pm
I wouldn’t worry too much when people are adjusting themselves when talking to me. In fact, we do it all the time unconsciously when we speak our first language to different people.
December 20th, 2010 at 8:41 am
This video is quite interesting, although I doubt there’s an absolut specific amount of hours that are required for the mastery of any language, for it varies so much with the learner’s background and the languages the he already knows. Say a Spaniard who is a monoglot and is learning Romanian. He would take some good many hours of study until he reached high fluency,perhaps even more than 10,000 hours. Now, take another Spaniard who already speaks Portuguese, Italian, French and Latin and is learning Romanian. Who is likely to learn faster? Knowing a lot of languages from the same family of your target language obviously reduces drastically the amount of hours you need to spend until fluency. And lets not forget personal factors too. Regardless of how many languages you already know, there are some language learners who are simply better than others. There are people who struggle their whole life with Spanish rolling r’s and French gutural sounds and there are people who can do them effortlessly. There are people who can understand complex grammatical patterns instantly, due to their linguistical background, and there are people to whom those patterns make no sense until they have spent some ridiculous amount of listening and getting used to the language. But other than that the video was great.
January 3rd, 2011 at 7:10 am
Neat post, thanks for sharing! How long have you been studying Cantonese now?
January 3rd, 2011 at 9:37 pm
I think the “1 hours per day for 30 years” thing is a bit misleading.
When I first moved to France a few years ago, I spoke French as little as possible, because I spoke it very poorly. Every conversation begun with “Parlez-vous anglais” (do you speak English) and if they didn’t, then I pointed or mimed or called in a French friend for support. I was, however, actively studying French at least 1 hour per day–4 hours per week with a tutor. Of course there was much french speaking going on in the background at the office or in the grocery store, but I really only spoke French when I absolutely had to.
After about a year of this (I spoke nearly no French when I moved here) I pretty much stopped “studying”, and I quit seeing the tutor after about 6 months. I had the basic grammar down and enough vocab to get by in my daily life, so I actually started speaking it. After about 2 years I was comfortable enough that I would even prefer to speak French with people that I knew spoke quite fluent English and therefore knew that the conversation would go much smoother in English. I watch TV in French, read French magazines. etc. so even though I only “study” French for a couple hours per week at most now, I am exposed to it (learning via osmosis I suppose) at a much higher rate.
Of course I am nowhere near masterly level, I am not even fluent yet, I just want to point out that depending on your language learning environment, you might quickly get to the point where you are “studying” (passively) for more than 6 hours per day, even though you only actively devote a few hours per week to learning new vocab, studying language books, etc.
I would imagine that you were in the same boat, learning Cantonese in Hong Kong, where you get much more daily exposure/practice than just the time you specifically set aside for language learning.