How Long Does it take to Become Fluent in French?

There are so many factors to consider when thinking about Fluency (hence, the 1,600 word article). First, I will present a "scale" of fluency, then we'll get into the details of how long and how difficult the road ahead would be. To start on the same page, almost everybody has a different idea of what that fluency means. Sadly, what most people consider "fluent", is really the definition of the word literate. Fluency is the ability to communicate (speak, read, write, listen, etc..) in French effortlessly and correctly... without extensive thought towards syntax. While literacy means the ability to communicate and be understood (however, it requires more conscious thought). You can gauge yourself from the fluency scale provided below:

Fluency Scale:
Beginner: (Tourist Class) 

Je n'aurais jamais cru que vous vouliez apprendre le français.

A beginner is limited with vocabulary and grammar. Beginners may know simple greetings and phrases (Hello, how are you? what's your name? how old are you? etc...). They also know numbers, can usually tell time, and talk about the weather. Beginners can ask simple questions about other people (small talk), and express a sense of like and dislike. They may be able to talk to natives with extreme difficulty, and often with aides such as a pocket dictionary or memorization of phrases. Understanding natives is also difficult for beginners in an everyday environment. If spoken to slowly and directly (with conscience effort from a native), a beginner may fair well. Beginners can typically read "everyday signs" such as "no parking", "no smoking", "keep left", etc... However, reading or writing long texts is difficult. An immersion situation would be difficult for a beginner.

Intermediate: (Survivor)
An intermediate language learner can construct phrases and statements. They can utilize phrases that deal with time, weather, location, desires, and dislikes with little to no difficulty. Intermediate speakers can use the present, past, and future tenses, however they still make errors. They can understand native speakers on certain topics, when spoken to directly. Intermediate learners can have simple transactions in shops, can order something to eat, and can use public transportation. They have sufficient vocabulary to deal with day to day topics, and can describe themselves (hobbies, backgrounds, personal experiences). These speakers can read familiar topics and get the gist about what occurs in a television show or film. Intermediate learners can survive in an immersion situation; however, they may still have difficulty understanding natives (and sometimes are hesitant to interact).

Advanced: (Skilled Survivor)
An advanced learner can understand normal forms of media (TV, films, radio, newspapers, music) with little trouble. They can maintain conversation with natives and even be a part of conversations within noisy environments (i.e, more than one speaker or literal background noise). These learners can construct many sentences correctly, and change with a conversation. They have no trouble with the present, past, future, conditional, and imperfect tenses. They may still have some trouble with the subjunctive, but can recognize its use. Advanced learners can use phrases like "that's difficult to answer" to buy time and formulate what to say. They can also keep track of "favorite mistakes" and monitor them from time to time, or correct themselves when a Native doesn't fully understand. Advanced learners can handle reading long, constructed French articles, books, directions, etc. with little difficulty. For example, read this "advanced-level" passage by Flaubert out loud and really test how much you know: Madame Bovary [extrait].

Advanced French learners can create short, clear narratives or compositions, and can debate a topic both on paper or by speech. They have a knack for picking up vocabulary within context, and know some specialized vocabulary for familiar topics. Advanced learners are confident with at least some aspects of their language, and can survive in an immersion situation with little to no difficulty. These speakers are technically "literate" and have the ability to communicate with Natives almost effortlessly.

Fluent: (Literate Individual)
A fluent learner can understand all forms of media, converse with natives, be understood, and figure out context with little to no difficulty. They can talk in vibrant situations and can express themselves with an advanced vocabulary. They understand a good amount of slang terms and idioms, and use them appropriately. They have a good accent (although it may not necessarily be native) and can understand some dialects. They are capable of reading long texts, sometimes having to look up a word or two at most. Fluent learners can express themselves in writing, where their language skills do not hold them back. A fluent speaker could live in an immersion setting, because they essentially have the tools to communicate with those around them on a daily basis.

Native: (Mother Tongue) 
The language is either your first, or you've been speaking it for the majority of your childhood. You understand vocabulary, you can make conversation effortlessly, and you can read and write. You do not have a "foreign" accent, and you can understand dialects. This language is yours.


Fluency depends on several factors. Living in an area where French is predominantly spoken and you can have a good handling of the language within a year or two, this situation is called immersion. If you aren't living in a Francophone area (such as France or Québec for example), then Fluency could take anywhere from 5 to 10 years, (or more!) depending on these other factors:

1. The age when you first started speaking French. The earlier it's introduced, the better.
2. How much effort and time you put into learning French. Practicing everyday versus weekly... taking formal classes, quality of said classes. Think about this, somebody who spends an hour a day should learn more than a person who commits an hour a week. 
3. How capable you are at learning another language. Some people just have a natural talent, or better methods of language learning. There are people out there who can easily speak four, five, or six different languages... then there are those who struggle at their mother tongue. 

Let me add that although age may slow down your language learning abilities or it may not hinder you at all. You are NEVER too young or too old to start a new language. Hell, I just started learning Italian to impress my Italian girlfriend and it's so similar to French. Some people might be starting French as their 2nd or 3rd romance language - they know the rules, the vocabulary is similar... it may be quite easy because they have the experience with understanding other languages.

Regardless, isn't Fluency just a title? I like to say I could speak both French and English... even though, I will gladly admit that I'm not fluent (I am ranked as a C1 French speaker, a.k.a between advanced and fluent, according to the guidelines utilized in Europe). Proficiency is a way for humans to try and quantitatively measure your language skills - certain levels of proficiency may be required or desired for certain employed positions. Otherwise, how do we know if Sophie is a better French Speaker than Jean?

How hard is it to become fluent in French? Well, let me say that it can be quite difficult at first. You literally go from gaining words and phrases (like a baby) to becoming a "French Adult" throughout the whole process. You may get frustrated. You may get impatient. You may get tired. You may quit. However, obviously I'll suggest that you stick with it! Trust me, eventually you'll have enough vocabulary that if you stumble upon a word you don't know then you can figure out the context. But, learning French is difficult... there are many nuances and differences to how the French language is setup as opposed to English. Thinking that the journey ahead is going to be easy would be foolish.

How long to be French fluent? If you're thinking "six months", then you have to wake up and smell the coffee. Practicing everyday is the best way to get better. Without living in a Francophone country and assuming you're taking formal classes, I would estimate that it'll take at least five years (recognize the at least part) to become "fluent". There are tons of n oun genders, verb conjugations, and pronunciation subtlties which need to be learned - let alone sentence construction and vocabulary... the French language isn't something you just breeze through. Now, if you want to be "conversational" or "literate" as discussed at the start of this article, an intermediate level can be obtainable at roughly one or two years of studying well. A beginner level can be obtained from anywhere between 3 to 6 months all the way to two years depending on how effective your learning is.

I would advise that if you don't have the time commitment to learning French, then you need to figure that out now. Let me add that learning isn't something that you just do and then stop; languages are constantly evolving, and there's always so much more to learn! If you're happy with just being able to communicate well, then  it's possible to do so within two years to three years. Being totally serious, I've been learning English all my life and there's still words out there that I don't know... To me, there's no time concern with learning French because I'm a French learner for life and you should be one too. 

If you're going to learn French in a half-ass fashion, then your French will always be substandard, that's just the reality. 

So yes, it is hard work; but I'm here to help. This website provides a  French Language Learning section and Online French Resources to advance in the right direction.

If you have any comments, I'd love to hear them below. 

**THE ESTIMATED TIME OF ACHIEVEMENT is for monolingual English speakers who plan on taking Formal French Classes while using some extra resources. Of course the times are approximate and vary depending on individual language acquisition, quality of the language course instruction, supplemental effort by the individual, amount of practicing etc...

Source:  http://www.frenchcrazy.com/2011/08/how-long-does-it-take-to-become-fluent.html

 Independent Speaker B1 Threshold or intermediate

How to think in a foreign language (it does NOT “just happen”)

This is a guest post by the author of Life by Experimentation, Zane, who quantifies the path to self-improvement.  He creates real-life experiments to assess everything from sleeping less to traveling cheaply in order to live a more productive and skillful life. He speaks Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, French and Arabic with varying degrees of fluency.

Recently a friend asked me how long it would take before she started thinking in French.  My response was “a week or so.”  She was shocked (and understandably so).  We worked on it together and within a week we were both thinking in the language despite it still being quite new to us.

Thinking in a foreign language is an important goal that brings you one giant step closer to becoming fluent.  There is also the fact that language and culture are intertwined, and thinking in your target language is an essential part of being able to connect with the people you are trying to get to know.

It is not necessarily easy to think in a new language (especially if you’ve never done it before) but it is still simple – there is no magic here.  First time language learners often believe that if they study long enough and hard enough they will eventually just start thinking in the target language, as if a switch had been flipped.  This is how I approached it the first time around and it did work… eventually… kind of.

Now I know better.  There are two essential parts of thinking in a language: context and conditioning.  If you’re learning your first foreign language you may want to consider learning Esperanto first, as Benny suggests, in order to become accustomed to thinking in a foreign language.  Once you decide to take the plunge, here are some things to keep in mind:

Context

Where you are mentally makes an enormous difference.  Just a few hours ago I was having a conversation in French and the famous surrealist painter Salvador Dalí came up.  I began to talk about the Dalí museum in northern Spain and before I even realized it I was halfway though a sentence in Spanish.  The act of thinking about that place even for a moment, with all the signs and people communicating in Spanish, was enough to shift my mental context.

There are countless examples like this, and not just in foreign languages.  In this video in the Economist a man reverts to the accent of his youth when thinking about his childhood without even realizing it.  Our brains are pattern-matching machines and one of the major cues they draw upon is that of context.  If you interrupt me while I am doing my Mandarin flashcards, no matter what language you speak to me in my brain’s first reaction will be to reach for Chinese – at least until it shifts contexts.

This is exactly why polyglots associate gestures and other cultural emblems with their language learning. The more context that is associated with the knowledge the stronger your recollection will be. One of my hobbies is following the field of neuroscience, but instead of boring you with all the data let me simply refer to the Wikipedia page on context-based learning and cite two important bits.

1) Context-based memory is the reason retracing your steps is useful when you lose something.

2) From the scientific literature it is concluded, “when a person is studying, he/she should match the context as best as possible to the testing context.”

The first and foremost way we can leverage context is to create a language bubble (even if you’re learning from home where nobody speaks your language).  The goal is to be surrounded by the language as much as possible so it actually becomes inconvenient to think in your native language.  Reading news and listening to music in this way allows you to begin to develop a contextual world to live in where everything is tied to your target language.  A language is much more than words, after all.

Conditioning

Thinking in a new language is a decision you can make.  If you know even a few dozen key grammar words you can begin to think in your target language thanks largely to the 80/20 rule in language learning.  It is easier than speaking in the language because you will not be embarrassed (unless you have a malicious alter-ego).  It requires less confidence but more motivation than speaking.

During the early stages you may be using more of your native language than your target language, and that is fine.  You will also probably be translating at first rather than “thinking fluently,” and that is fine, too.  What is important is that you make a conscious effort to use the target language in your thoughts, not just in your conversations.

To keep up motivation, I highly suggest a journal (digital or analog) that you keep with you at all times.  When you don’t know how to say (ahem, think) a key word just write it down.  At the end of the day look up the words, or even better, ask a native.  You now have a list of practical vocabulary to learn (instead of studying “shoelaces” and “aardvark” from a book)!  For extra credit, date each entry – you’ll begin to notice how much smaller your daily lists get (and how much more esoteric).  That’s progress you can see!

If you are ready to put aside your shame (and have understanding roommates or family members) it is also quite useful to talk to yourself. Aside from being quite liberating and useful in organizing your thoughts, it also allows you to practice pronunciation. Sometimes I even have conversations with myself, acting out different personas which each speak a different language, in order to practice switching between languages. I may get strange looks in the street, but this habit has also been the start of some interesting conversations.

I can promise one thing: if you make a conscious and continuous effort to think everything you can in your target language, you will begin to surprise yourself.  One day you will hear yourself think “a mi me encanta” instead of “I like,” and you will not even know where it came from.  The context of thinking in the language will also mean that you pick up new words that you are exposed to without even realizing it.  A couple times a week now I use a word in a sentence that I don’t remember studying, yet I am sure I have heard other people say.

Thinking Fluently

The biggest challenge with thinking in the language is the frustration that comes with not being able to fully express yourself inside your own head.  As I’ve said, it is fine to substitute your native language where needed at first – but the key to thinking fluently is your frame of mind.  You can choose to become frustrated, succumbing to perfection paralysis, or you can choose to see each unknown word as one more key piece in the fluency puzzle.  One day you will wake up from a dream and not even register that it was not in your native language.

Visualization

Thinking in a foreign language is essentially a form of visualization or rehearsal that prepares you for the real deal (an actual conversation). With visualization we can go through the steps of making an attempt, to identifying a mistake, to correcting it in a very short period of time. In other words, the feedback loop is very tight. As researcher Kathryn Schulz points out in this TED video, being wrong is quite normal and perhaps even good – as long as you become aware of your mistakes and correct them when possible.

I love discussing all the benefits of visualization. The most astonishing thing is that the brain cannot fundamentally tell the difference between real and imagined action. One study has shown that the brain sends identical impulses to the legs when imagining running. In another study, participants who imagined playing the piano showed nearly identical development in the motor cortex of the brain as those who actually played the piano. In short, the brain treats visualization like the real deal.

What does all this mean for us? Well, for one, it means that thinking in a language is much more relevant than we may have previously believed. Every thought that passes though your brain has the potential to act as a mini-exercise in your target language, not just as passive rehearsal but also as an active exercise. When you add up all the thoughts you have in a day, the potential for change is quite impressive.

Have you managed to think in a foreign language?  Was your process similar?  Let us know below.

Source: http://www.fluentin3months.com/thinking/

Thinking in a Foreign Language Makes Decisions More Rational

To judge a risk more clearly, it may help to consider it in a foreign language.

A series of experiments on more than 300 people from the U.S. and Korea found that thinking in a second language reduced deep-seated, misleading biases that unduly influence how risks and benefits are perceived.

“Would you make the same decisions in a foreign language as you would in your native tongue?” asked psychologists led by Boaz Keysar of the University of Chicago in an April 18 Psychological Science study.

“It may be intuitive that people would make the same choices regardless of the language they are using, or that the difficulty of using a foreign language would make decisions less systematic. We discovered, however, that the opposite is true: Using a foreign language reduces decision-making biases,” wrote Keysar’s team.

Psychologists say human reasoning is shaped by two distinct modes of thought: one that’s systematic, analytical and cognition-intensive, and another that’s fast, unconscious and emotionally charged.

'Would you make the same decisions in a foreign language?'

 

In light of this, it’s plausible that the cognitive demands of thinking in a non-native, non-automatic language would leave people with little leftover mental horsepower, ultimately increasing their reliance on quick-and-dirty cogitation.

Equally plausible, however, is that communicating in a learned language forces people to be deliberate, reducing the role of potentially unreliable instinct. Research also shows that immediate emotional reactions to emotively charged words are muted in non-native languages, further hinting at deliberation.

To investigate these possibilities, Keysar’s team developed several tests based on scenarios originally proposed by psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who in 2002 won a Nobel Prize in economics for his work on prospect theory, which describes how people intuitively perceive risk.

In one famous example, Kahneman showed that, given the hypothetical option of saving 200 out of 600 lives, or taking a chance that would either save all 600 lives or none at all, people prefer to save the 200 — yet when the problem is framed in terms of losing lives, many more people prefer the all-or-nothing chance rather than accept a guaranteed loss of 400 lives.

People are, in a nutshell, instinctively risk-averse when considering gain and risk-taking when faced with loss, even when the essential decision is the same. It’s a gut-level human predisposition, and if second-language thinking made people think less systematically, Keysar’s team supposed the tendency would be magnified. Conversely, if second-language thinking promoted deliberation, the tendency would be diminished.

The first experiment involved 121 American students who learned Japanese as a second language. Some were presented in English with a hypothetical choice: To fight a disease that would kill 600,000 people, doctors could either develop a medicine that saved 200,000 lives, or a medicine with a 33.3 percent chance of saving 600,000 lives and a 66.6 percent chance of saving no lives at all.

 

Results of two tests of foreign-language effects on framing biases. In each, people were given the choice between sure savings or an all-or-nothing bet. Bars show how many people preferred sure savings when the choice was framed in terms of gains (black) or losses (gray) and considered in their native language (left pair) or second language (right pair). Image: Keysar et al./Psychological Science

Nearly 80 percent of the students chose the safe option. When the problem was framed in terms of losing rather than saving lives, the safe-option number dropped to 47 percent. When considering the same situation in Japanese, however, the safe-option number hovered around 40 percent, regardless of how choices were framed. The role of instinct appeared reduced.

Two subsequent experiments in which the hypothetical situation involved job loss rather than death, administered to 144 native Korean speakers from Korea’s Chung Nam National University and 103 English speakers studying abroad in Paris, found the same pattern of enhanced deliberation. “Using a foreign language diminishes the framing effect,” wrote Keysar’s team.

The researchers next tested how language affected decisions on matters of direct personal import. According to prospect theory, the possibility of small losses outweigh the promise of larger gains, a phenomenon called myopic risk aversion and rooted in emotional reactions to the idea of loss.

The same group of Korean students was presented with a series of hypothetical low-loss, high-gain bets. When offered bets in Korean, just 57 percent took them. When offered in English, that number rose to 67 percent, again suggesting heightened deliberation in a second language.

To see if the effect held up in real-world betting, Keysar’s team recruited 54 University of Chicago students who spoke Spanish as a second language. Each received $15 in $1 bills, each of which could be kept or bet on a coin toss. If they lost a toss, they’d lose the dollar, but winning returned the dollar and another $1.50 — a proposition that, over multiple bets, would likely be profitable.

When the proceedings were conducted in English, just 54 percent of students took the bets, a number that rose to 71 percent when betting in Spanish. “They take more bets in a foreign language because they expect to gain in the long run, and are less affected by the typically exaggerated aversion to losses,” wrote Keysar and colleagues.

The researchers believe a second language provides a useful cognitive distance from automatic processes, promoting analytical thought and reducing unthinking, emotional reaction.

“Given that more and more people use a foreign language on a daily basis, our discovery could have far-reaching implications,” they wrote, suggesting that people who speak a second language might use it when considering financial decisions. “Over a long time horizon, this might very well be beneficial.”

Source: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/04/language-and-bias/

Citation: “The Foreign-Language Effect: Thinking in a Foreign Tongue Reduces Decision Biases.” By Boaz Keysar, Sayuri L. Hayakawa and Sun Gyu An. Psychological Science, published online 18 April 2012.