Sup doods?

I have recently changed my language goals, and now seems as good a time as any to tell you why.

The short version is that I want my language goals to be fluffy and achievable, and they are to speak five languages (other than English) to a level of B1 (on the CEFR scale) or above.

If you don’t know what the CEFR scale is, look it up and return.

I’ll wait ..

You are back?

The obvious question you now have and that you want to ask me is why B1?

B1 is quite achievable in a reasonable timeframe, and is somewhere between 200 – 400 hours. There is a good consideration of the time needed on the blog how to get fluent.

The figure of 400 hours is probably more reflective of my learning speed, but still is not an enormous time investment.

So, we have a reasonable length of time and a level which is sufficient to get by, function and exchange pleasantries in most situations.

I like languages, but I am also interested in numerous other things.

Additionally I have a full-time job, run a few websites, have a family, friends, a dog and so on.

In other words, I live a normal life and have a fairly limited amount of free time to dedicate to what could be considered a fairly strange hobby.

But anyone (almost anyone) can find an hour a day to spend on a hobby.

And the other final reason is that I don’t like over-estimating my level at languages or anything else.  If I say I can speak a language at B1 level, I want to feel sure that I can communicate at that level or considerably higher.

BTW. I completely love learning Croatian and am spending considerably more than an hour a day on it.

Besos and baci,

MF