How diplomats learn a language

A diplomat posted to Madrid gets about 30 weeks. One posted to Tokyo gets 88.

That is how the US State Department's Foreign Service Institute in Arlington, Virginia, plans language training for people who will need the language to do their jobs: full time, in classes of a handful of students with a native-speaking instructor, most of the working day in the language, and homework after it. For the hardest languages the second year is usually spent at a field school in the country.

The institute's own training page sorts its languages by how long they take an English speaker to reach what it calls professional working proficiency, roughly the level at which you can do a job in the language. Category I, the languages closest to English, such as Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese: 24 to 30 weeks, 600 to 750 class hours. Category II, such as German and Indonesian: about 36 weeks.

Category III, most of the rest, from Russian to Thai: about 44 weeks. Category IV, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Korean: 88 weeks and 2,200 class hours. The page adds that these are averages, and that aptitude, prior languages and motivation move them.

What I take from this is that the one institution that has to get adults speaking on a deadline does not do it with a trick. It does it with hours, most of them spent listening and talking, and the harder the language, the more hours.

It is not pure immersion; there are structured lessons in there. But the unit of planning is the hour in the language, not the rule learned.

That is a useful answer to "how long will it take?" Take the hours the diplomats get, and divide by the hours you have in a week.

The number is large, and it should be. Its use is not as a target but as a corrective: a slow year is not failure, it is the hours arriving at your pace.

Nobody I know has 30 weeks free. What you have is a slot each day, and the way to spend it is the way FSI spends its: inside the language, with meaning within reach.

A story read to you does that. Aloglot reads you a book at your level in 93 languages, with the words lit as they are spoken and any word explained on a tap, so that a daily twenty minutes goes on the language and not on the dictionary.

Sources

• U.S. Department of State. Foreign Language Training.
• Wikipedia. Foreign Service Institute.