Keith's Voice on Extreme Language Learning

I found a new hero for Japanese language learners. Watch this video! This guy is fluent in Japanese. His speed of speaking matches the speed of native Japanese. It is really impressive. In this, his first video on YouTube, he is speaking without a script. He pauses to think about what he wants to say, not how to say it, nor does he pause to recall any words. The second video he posted is much more impressive, however it is longer and is audio-only, with him and two other people. But if you listen to that one, you will think it is a Japanese guy speaking. Here is a link to that video.



So, what did you think?

Do you use time-boxing for language learning? Does it work for you? I wonder how many language learners are time-boxing.

Time-boxing means to set certain lengths of time for working on tasks. You might have 30 minutes for your French and 20 minutes to work on another language and so on. You manage your time so you are able to work on all of the things you want to do instead of getting carried away with one and not having time for the next one.

In English, it seems the average native speaker knows about 17,000 word families. A study of vocabulary comparing Dutch students entering university to non-native Dutch students found that the average vocabulary size of the Dutch was approximately 18,800 words.

The Common European Framework for Reference of languages (CEFR), appears to cover the most frequent 5,000 words at the C2 level, which is the top level of the test. You can check here on page 186. To pass C2 in English, one needs a vocabulary of around 4,000 or more words. For French, the learner should know 3,300 - 3,700 words to pass C2. These figures are a far cry from what the native speaker knows but apparently enough to perform well on the most advanced level of the CEFR test. So I wouldn't quite call C2 mastery of the language, nor equivalent to a native speaker.

I think one of the most important requirements to learning any language successfully is dedication. Without dedication, there can be no success. The best method doesn't work without dedication. That's really where the off-the-shelf language courses fail. Courses like Pimsleur probably do a great job until the course ends. After that, you can't really apply the Pimsleur method any more. And you certainly aren't finished learning. So you're left to your own devices trying to figure out what to do next. For experienced language learners, this isn't a problem. But I think the average language learner doesn't know what to do.