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Comment by bsder | Hacker News Reader

I'm always skeptical of these poorer language learning results.

It took me 3 years of about 2 hours a day in high school to learn approximately 6000 words in English, my native language. This was in addition to my schooling where I was writing essays and book reports pretty much weekly. Probably 10+ hours per week for history and english. Plus all the interactions in my native language.

That's a LOT of language practice. That's almost 1800 hours on vocabulary alone. Add on 1500 hours for essays. That's approaching 3200 hours which strongly exceeds the amount of time required to gain general proficiency in a Category V language (2200 hours). That's almost 10+ hours per week on top of school hours themselves.

How many people ever put in that amount of effort into a second language? How many people have the time to put in that amount of effort into a second language?

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I've re-read your comment multiple times and still don't quite get it. If English is your native language, why did you spend 1800 hours learning English vocabulary when you were in high school? Did you feel that your native level was not sufficient, or were you just interested in advanced English as an academic interest?

As a native English speaker, I'm not sure how many English words I know, nor how I would even start counting! However, I am currently learning German, and seem to have found a comfortable pace of learning about twenty words each day, studying for half an hour each day. This doesn't include general exposure to the words through other German practice. If it is possible to keep that up long-term, that means that 6000 German words would take just under a year for me to learn in the ideal case (probably a bit longer, as so-called 'strong' words have multiple irregular forms that are effectively different words).

> If English is your native language, why did you spend 1800 hours learning English vocabulary when you were in high school?

Mostly SAT prep. It took my verbal score from 550 to 780 (out of 800).

However, extra vocabulary is also one of the fastest ways to improve your writing. My writing got a lot more concise the more vocabulary I commanded. Essays that used to take 20 hours+ and maybe 6-8 pages were now 4-5 hours and 2-3 pages.

And, once you do this, you find out how very few words we actually use on a daily basis.

“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. ’tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.” -- Mark Twain

I dunno, if you're an adult who moves from India to America, you're not going to be speaking Hindi much (unless you speak it at home, to be fair). You'll be conducting your life entirely in English. And if you move to the States for university then you'll be doing academics in English too. You'll easily achieve thousands of hours of practice in this way.

While most people don't have time to put that many hours into studying a second language outside of a country where it's the native tongue, many immigrants have no choice but to immerse themselves in a new language just by the default behavior of living their life in a new country that doesn't speak their first language.

Yes, such immigrants will always be a few thousand hours behind people who started in America, but surely there's some plateau where the improvements become marginal. I don't think the critical period advantage is about the early volume of hours so much as the age period when they're spent - i.e. if you compare someone who moves at 20 vs. 40, the results will be the same, but both will be worse than someone who moved at 8.

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