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Comment by pastage | Hacker News Reader

The state department says 88 weeks for Japanese[1]. A month is a long time with full immersion, getting the basics right will get you far enough that people will help you with the rest. I could communicate relatively well with two weeks of immersion but I did not finnish learning it in 100 weeks.

[1] https://www.state.gov/foreign-language-training/

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Yeah I highly doubt you could “communicate fairly well” in Japanese after two weeks. You might have memorized some standard phrases, sure. But two weeks would not even be enough when going from Dutch to German or English to French.

It's unfortunate, but I think these "I learned x language in y weeks/months" memes are probably here to stay.

After spending the last year becoming technical (data science -> software eng) and seeing all those "I learned to program in 3 months and got a job at Google" videos, I'm convinced that this is just the dunning kruger effect of not knowing enough about the subject to understand how long it takes to become competent.

Furthermore the "I learned x in y time" meme is almost always perpetuated by false beginners. I remember seeing an "I learned Italian in one week" video where the guy actually knew some Italian beforehand. He also had previously learned fluent French and Spanish beforehand, so to say he learned Italian from scratch is a huge stretch.

My point with was actually that fairly well is too relative, same as learned a language. Languages are hard communication is easy, it takes way more than 100 weeks to learn Japanese, but I base it of my self.

Side note: I don't generally put much weight on the FSI numbers. Sure they provide a useful ranking of how long it takes to learn various languages (e.g., Spanish < Polish < Arabic), but I'd recommend ignoring their actual time estimates.

Most people don't learn languages at the FSI so to expect it will take you as long is not accurate. It may take you way longer, or maybe you'll be way faster depending on how good you are at learning languages and how much time you're putting in each day.

But yeah, to summarize, the FSI rankings are good, but I don't agree with the actual estimates.

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