Theme: Talk about languages

Level C1 and C2: Advanced Fluency

• I’m combining these levels into one description because they’re shades of fluency. A C1 speaker rarely has to search for a phrase, has full grammatical knowledge, knows idioms, can read technical papers, etc. A C2 speaker has essentially the grammar and vocabulary grasp of a native speaker.
• Often at the C levels, learners will dig into a specific topic more, such as legal, scientific or business specific language skills.
• Think Christoph Waltz’s English in Inglorious Basterds. Not really native, but super close.
• The time it takes to progress through the C levels vary based on what your specific goals are and how you’re working your way there. The Goethe Institut says it takes about 1000 hours of total class time to reach C2, so maybe another 300 hours after you’re done with B2. From scratch, 1000 hours means about 4 years of being in class for an hour every single weekday, plus studying time.

If you did it absolutely full time, in a classroom or with a tutor just about all day, every day, you could probably get to C-level language proficiency from scratch in about a year of constant work.

Reaching Your Goals

• Of course, all of these estimates are based on various assumptions – it will take longer to reach these levels in languages that are more dissimilar from your native language. Learning Portuguese if you know Spanish will probably take much less time, whereas learning Japanese if you only speak English may well take twice as long as what we’ve talked about here.
• The main point is that it takes a long, long time with a lot of work. There is no shortcutting this. There are many organizations and governments who have worked for a very long time to make this process more efficient and it’s just not possible to get to these levels a whole lot faster.
• If someone is telling you that they hold the key to becoming fluent in a few months, they generally mean by working 8 hours a day. If they say you can learn a language in only a few minutes per day, their definition of “language learning” is probably different from what we’re talking about here – a complete lack of verbal production or listening skills perhaps.