Fluent Forever: How to Learn Any Language Fast and Never Forget It

by Gabriel Wyner

As they predicted, Russian (a level 2 language) took me nearly twice as much time as French (a level 1 language), and I suspect that Japanese (a level 3 language) will take me twice as much time as Russian. I reached a comfortable intermediate “I can think in French and use a monolingual dictionary” level in three months, working for an hour a day (plus weekend binges), and a similar level for Russian in six months at thirty to forty-five minutes a day (plus weekend binges). I then used seven to eight weeks of intensive immersion to bring both of those languages to advanced “comfortable in a cafe, comfortable chatting about whatever, somewhat uncomfortable describing car problems” levels. I’ve seen similar results with my students. Without an immersion program, I suspect advanced French would take five to eight months, working for thirty to forty-five minutes per day on your own. Level 2 languages like Russian and Hebrew should be twice that, and level 3 languages like Chinese, Arabic, Japanese, and Korean should take four times as long as French.