Realistic expectations

by moonface Posted on June 29, 2021

Sup y’all?

Well, today, dear reader, I’m going to write about realistic expectations in general, and in particular how this leads to learning a language to a B1 level.

This is something that I have been giving some thought to recently, as I go about my daily life. As you might or might not know although I am interested in languages, enjoy learning lists of words, studying grammatical constructions, parsing Latin, among other activities.

However, I am not obsessed and I am not a linguist. In fact, languages are not a big part of my life in terms of time. I mean obviously I run Surface languages and Easy Afrikaans as hobby projects but I am largely occupied with other non language related activities.

This presents something of a conundrum. I like to learn languages, and I don’t have a lot of spare time so what do I do? How good should I expect to get in a given language – given the time I am willing to spend.

It’s taken me a while to get to this point which only make sense of you know what a B1 level is. If not the ubiquitous wiki gives a good explanation.

If you want to avoid extra reading, a B1 level can be summed up as good but not fluent. It will take you between 350 and 600 hours to reach depending on the language, whether you know similar languages, your aptitude for learning and so on.

In other words, a B1 level is very, very reachable, and you don’t have to dedicate your life to learning language to reach it. It is a reasonable expectation that you can reach that level by spending 30 minutes a day for two years or so.

Having lived on this planet for a considerable time now, and if not having gained particular wisdom, I have at least gained a sense of perspective. It is easy to have unrealistic expectations of what is achievable in a given time frame, and what you should achieve. It is also then easy to be overly harsh on yourself if you don’t achieve whatever it is that you set out to achieve, or if you fall short in some way.

It is easy to fall into this trap with languages, and to feel that your level isn’t quite good enough. The beauty of learning is that you will never finish, and this applies very much to languages. There is always something else to learn and practice, slang, specific vocab, improved comprehension. The list is endless, and infinite.

You will never know *everything* about another language. You will *never* understand absolutely everything. Everyone’s language ability falls within a continuum from hello/goodbye to educated/widely read mother tongue speaker.

This leads me back to where I started and the point I am trying to make (to me as much as to you) which I will illustrate with my Croatian level.

I have spent the last two years learning Croatian, and with a bit of a warm-up (let’s say a week) can speak at a low B1 level. I could continue, and I do really like the Croatian language, but nowadays am particularly motivated more than anything else by a planned visit. We had intended to visit Croatia last year, next year and maybe the year after.For obvious reasons this hasn’t happened, and for other reasons France is likely to be my destination next year and the following.

I had realistic expectations of the Croatian, and the Croatian I could learn, in the time that I was spending. I never expected to become *fluent* or even *near fluent*. I’m happy with my level. I had intended to carry on for two more years and maybe reach B2 to perhaps feel like I had learnt enough the language. Again this was a realistic expectation.

In the current circumstances, I no longer have the impetus to spend (due to changed travel plans) my language learning time solely on Croatian. I will maintain it, and with luck very gradually improve over time, but it is no longer my primary focus.

It is fine to have a realistic expectation that is a B1 (or A1/A2) or whatever works for you. It is fine to reach that and move on.

My aim with languages is to speak Spanish well, and others at a B1 level. This fits in with my lifestyle, interest in languages and time available.

And in other news, I’ve been struggling with my solar powered pond water feature. The battery, converter and solar panel are nicely wired up, fused and working.

The (second) pump however is not connected.

There is a helpful phrase ‘measure twice, drill once’. This is as you would imagine applicable to any measurements, not just to drilling. It is very applicable to pipe sizes.

I have guessed/roughly measured three times the bore of the pump for the water feature, and three times have wasted £5 ordering tubing which doesn’t quite fit.

I now have some calipers arriving tomorrow.

Besos and Baci,

MF

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Verbum sapienti sat est

by moonface Posted on April 23, 2021

Sup?

Or should we say:

Verbum sapienti satis est?

It’s up to you really.

Be that as it may, its time to parse a short Latin phrase which I want to remember.

Verbum (word) is a second declension neuter noun. Back in the day, bellum was used as the model for declining such a noun, and here it is in all its glory in both the singular and plural:-

bellum, bellum, bellum, belli, bello, bello,

bella, bella, bella, bellorum, bellis, bellis.

Let’s assume that verbum is a nominative, and so the subject of verbum sapienti … and parse from there.

sapiens, sapientis (wise, judicious … ) is an i-stem adjective and declines like ingens. Ingens was the adjective used as a pattern that I was forced to learn a lifetime ago, and which has surprisingly remained firmly entrenched in my brain.

And here it is in the singular :-

ingens, ingens, ingens

ingens, ingens, ingens

ingentem, ingens, ingens

ingentis, ingentis, ingentis

ingenti, ingenti, ingenti,

ingenti, ingenti, ingenti

Well look we can use a little initiative here. Sapienti could be either in the dative or accusative case, but dative makes sense as is translated as to giving us:-

Verbum sapienti A word to the wise.

You can use this on its own.

As in:-

Hey you, verbum sapienti, you need to water your geraniums.

Don’t spoil it by adding ‘a‘ as in:-

Hey you, a verbum sapienti …

satis (enough)

est (is) is from the irregular verb esse (to be) which you should know by now, but here it is in the present anyway:-

sum, es, est, sumus, estis, sunt

The parsed Latin is fairly clear and is :-

A word to the wise is enough.

In other news, I have been planning and starting to build a water feature, as a bid to make part of our garden more interesting.

But, verbum sapienti, solar powered pumps can be more tricky than you think – especially if you want to avoid draining a battery also being charged from the same panel.

The naive implementation of attaching one pump directly to the battery isn’t a great one. The pump can drain the battery, and once a lead acid battery drops below a certain voltage, the charge controller will stop working. This is bad!

The trick, or so I think, is to have two pumps. The first is a more powerful pump directly connected to the solar panel. The second will be activated by a motion detector and is less powerful and only used at night. The sounds of water can then be heard in the darkness. This pump will be connected to the load terminals on the charge controller (fused obvs.), and fall within the allowable tolerance of the controller.

Food for thought!

And finally, I have added a Sindarin crossword to Surface languages, which is possibly the only one on the internet:)

Oh, and just one more observation: I personally prefer Verbum sapienti satis est to verbum sapienti sat est. The second is to my ear a bit chi chi.

Chi chi isn’t acceptable either. It just happens to neatly encapsulate my thoughts.

Besos and baci,

MF

Posted in Latin, Parsing, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

And now I know!

by moonface Posted on April 16, 2021

Sup?

I don’t know if you remember, but I was recently musing on whether or not I should continue learning Croatian. The very fact of putting pen to paper helped me make my decision, which is to park it for a while or until we have some concrete plans to visit the country.

And so what now?

Obviously I have a new language project:-

Welsh:)

I have set myself the gentle goal of reaching an A1 level in Welsh by the end of the year. This is more than achievable.

But won’t you miss Croatian?

Yes I will:( The thing is that without a definite goal (e.g. a visit, friends I can practice with etc), my motivation stalls and my attention wanders.

So back to the subject of Welsh!

I’m not Welsh. I did however have a Welsh speaking (or understanding) grandmother (who I never met), and my mother was born in Cardiff.

It follows that Welsh should have been one of my languages by default, so I can reclaim a little bit of my language heritage.

The only word that remains having passed down the generations is ych y fi (yuck), and its time to build on that.

Dw i’n mynd i dysgu Cymraeg:)

Knowing where to put the emphasis on the word gwasanaethau will also be a bonus. I’m not going to tell you why it is important, but if you need a clue think motorways.

In other news, having finished building a (large) woodshed and decent raised bed, I’m going to build a water feature of some sort. Our garden isn’t that big (13 x 6 metres) so planning is key.

Still, I’ve always wanted to have a …

… stream.

I’m an ex-automation engineer remember:) And I have an extremely large solar panel and controller to make use of …

Pictures to follow at some point.

And on that thoughtful note, I bid you farewell.

Baci ‘n besos,

MF

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What should I do now?

by moonface Posted on April 13, 2021

Sup?

It’s been a while, and I hope that you are all keeping well. I’ve been extremely busy and am metaphorically putting pen to paper as I can’t decide what to do next (language wise).

Let me set the scene with a few factual sentences setting out the situation.

I have been learning Croatian for about two and a half years and have reached a lowish B1 level. It is a difficult language, and needs time and effort to improve. B1 to B2 would take me another two years.

I learnt a few words of Croatian before a visit to Croatia, and enjoyed it so much that I continued.

We had planned to visit Croatia again in 2020 but due to the pandemic changed our plans instead to visit this summer (2021).

This is looking increasingly unlikely as the pandemic rumbles on.

If we don’t visit Croatia this year, it is unlikely that we will visit over the following two years (for various reasons that I won’t bore you with).

Following this thought process, our next likely visit would be in 2024!!!!

This is hardly a disaster in the overall scheme of things, and I fully appreciate how lucky I am to be thinking about something so trivial, but from a language learning perspective it has knocked my motivation.

I love the Croatian language, but I need a purpose to learn a language, and various visits were the purpose and motivation to keep me on the straight and narrow.

I can’t decide what to do.

Much as I love the Croatian language, I’m not sure if I can continue learning in a vacuum.

Learning a language is never pointless, but personally I need a reason to help me continue.

I’m leaning towards maintaining my level of Croatian, and maybe language dabbling with purpose over the coming year.

Besos i Baci,

MF

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Never trust what you read on the internet

by moonface Posted on January 11, 2021

Dear All?

Forget anti-vexers and other conspiracy theories for a moment. This isn’t the real danger of the internet (unless you are easily swayed).

The real danger on the internet is people writing for SEO purposes without any understanding of that they are writing about – in other words 99 percent of article and content creation is generic papp.

Sense check everything you read.

Long gone are the days when *most* people wrote about subjects of which they had an understanding. Nowadays, the majority of internet content is written primarily to try and attract the google gods and so sales/money.

Remember that and read critically, especially if you are looking up anything to do with health, finance or basic DIY.

I have no objection to people writing to increase traffic to their websites (to increase sales) provided the information is in some sense useful – and not generic platitudes copied from other site.

I wonder when or if Google will ever improve their algorithms to filter out the wheat from the chaff. There doesn’t seem to be much weighting as to quality, but more importance placed on where ‘key sentences’ are placed in the text.

Here is a good example of what I am writing about.

I wanted some specific information about changing or substituting a transformer in a ceiling light (and yes I know how to do this).

The first result returned by my search was full of wisdom such as:-

Turn off the power. Remove the transformer. Install the replacement.

It is generic rubbish written for SEO, and clearly by someone who has never swapped a transformer out. Fine, you need to follow all these steps, but the information is hardly enlightening. It does not help anyone achieve the task. It is not adding anything.

The way article writing for SEO works, and it is easy to do is (in essence) as follows.

  • Type in some sort of relevant search term.
  • Open the top ten result pages in different tabs.
  • Copy, paste and rewrite theses pages into a new *article*.
  • Improve the on-page SEO slightly.

This is why so many articles appear to be the same. The research is in fact a quick trawl through similar articles, and the author has no knowledge of experience of what he or she is writing about.

The situation is so bad that if I want information I will always prefix my searches with:

NHS for health.

WIKI for information.

And so on.

Or I will go to specific sites that I know are of high quality.

I, for example, have been a lawyer, games programmer, automation engineer, worked in manufacturing, and have studied languages formally. I can write about those subjects with some degree of knowledge, and while it might be imperfect is based on practical experience and exposure.

If I write outside these areas, I am on more shaky ground.

This doesn’t matter normally, but when you are looking for advice on how to do something important, it would be useful to find it high in the search rankings.

I would never (for example) write an explanation of how to do anything electrical with mains voltage.

Why?

I am not an electrician. FFS. I don’t want to inadvertently mislead anyone with bad information in an area where is matters.

Fine, if you want to automate your water butt like I intent to do and water spills over your garden does it matter? No. If you wire up a transformer the wrong way, it might …

This is exactly the reason, that I won’t publish the circuitry for the water butt/greenhouse projects on my blog. It’s not secret nor is it particularly sophisticated.

The thing is that while I am confident that I know what I am doing, I don’t want to mislead anyone.

Just don’t trust the internet (and you know what the same applies to all the conspiracy theories floating about).

Your irritably,

MF.

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Removing enormous ivy roots

by moonface Posted on January 6, 2021

Sup?

Presumably you know the story of Jack and the beanstalk? If not shame on you, and maybe you should look it up. These old amoral fairy tales are perfect for our time. They are truer to life than the sugar coated stories that children are reared on nowadays. There is no messing around with right, wrong and undue moralising. It is left for the reader to decide, and think about.

In Jack and the beenstalk the giant was a bully and thief. Jack kills him. Was Jacks response proportional to the theft of a magic harp committed by the giant or not?

Discuss.

The definition of murder in UK law is ‘one person kills another with intention to cause death or serious injury unlawfully’.

Jack cut the beanstalk down when Gogmagog was on it. There is intent, and it would be very difficult to argue otherwise. He knew the giant was on the beanstalk. He knew the beanstalk would crash to the ground when chopped down. He knew that death or serious injury would result.

I used to love academic law.

Behind our shed something akin to the beanstalk had sprouted. Not as quickly, for sure, taking more like twenty years as opposed to the days required when magic beans are planted.

Gogmagog might have been at the top for all I know and ready to roar:-

Fee-fi-fo-fum,
I smell the blood of an Englishman,
Be he alive, or be he dead
I’ll grind his bones to make my bread

In case you hadn’t guessed, back in the real world, English Ivy had sprouted, unreachable and untouchable growing as it did behind the shed inches from the fence at the Back of Beyond.

The shed has now gone. The ivy hasn’t.

Wondering if there was an easy way to remove english ivy (Hedera helix), I chanced across a post suggesting that it would be possible to gently remove ivy and brush away the leaves.

After smiling to myself about this for the briefest of moments, I moved on, checking my L & S for the meaning of Hedera. I discovered that Hedera is the literal Latin word for ivy, so zero out of ten for the botanists originality quotient.

L & S also told me that Hereda was sacred to Bacchus and hence wound around the thyrssus. Thryssus being a bacchic wand tipped with ivy.

Ignoring the wise words whispered by the internet, I started to gently persuade the ivy to leave the fence with an axe and saw.

The roots are thicker than my arm, and are not keen to be persuaded. Dark and deep they go into the earth, grown and entwined around small pebbles and larger bricks. And this linked to the vulnerable fence is making them difficult to remove.

I’m sawing the roots out in chunks. Good for me physically and probably helping me to develop mental fortitude as well.

I’m digging down to below ground level, removing as many roots as I can, and will spread poison over the stump. I’m not entirely chuffed, in fact distinctly dechuffed with spewing venom in the garden. There is no other way of removing enough of the roots to stop the ivy, resurfacing under the woodshed (and fence) like a phoenix or more likely Hydra.

I have nothing against hedera which is good for wildlife and in the right quantities adds a certain dark something to a garden. Despite our gardens small size (13metres long and 6 metres wide), there is plenty more on the run so its not going anywhere soon. I will keep enough for wildlife purposes.

It gets dark early at this time of year, and when it did and the temperature dropped, it was time to do something inside.

More ivy removal pix coming soon …

Besos, baci and Pax,

MF.

Posted in Garden, Ivy, law | Leave a comment

What next?

by moonface Posted on January 5, 2021

Sup?

I woke up bright and early today (not by choice), and wondered as I lay there what next for me?

No doubt a lot of people are thinking the same. Another year. Another lockdown. The same pandemic. Limited employment prospects.

OK. Well, I can’t control that but I can control the content of this blog and Surface Languages.

Surface languages will continue as before and I will add bits ‘n pieces as and when something tickles my fancy, such as the Dalmatian language or Lingua Ignota.

My language learning goals will continue as before, that is an interest but not something that dominates my time.

The water butt automation project will continue (as will the yet to be mentioned woodshed building project),

But what of this blog?

Up until now, I have mainly written about languages, but this has always been a bit of an uneasy fit for me.

It has felt a bit limiting.

I give you fair warning, that as well as including my thoughts on languages, Latin parsing and so on, from hereon in, this blog will include politics, law, automation, programming, crosswords, gardens, pandemics, brexit …

Let’s pretend it is a diary.

Think Samuel;)

Besos, baci i pax,

MF.

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Catus amat piscem, sed non vult tingere plantam

by moonface Posted on December 17, 2020

Sup?

The morning is bright and beautiful, and after yesterdays foray into the world of water butt automation, what better way to start the day than to parse some Latin?

I stumbled across the above by chance, and like many good sayings, it seems to have fallen out of use.

But don’t worry, we can resurrect it and use it in meetings, with our nearest and dearest and so on.

Catus amat piscem, sed non vult tingere plantam

The phrase looks like medieval Latin, and like many such sayings is straight-forward to parse and ideal for practice, diversion and learning a few new words such as catus (cat).

I can feel my vocabulary increasing already.

Lets parse away, and get on with the day …;)

Catus (cat) is a second declension masculine noun, which declines as follows in the singular:-

catus, cate, catum, cati, cato, cato.

It is in the nominative case, telling us that it is the subject of the verb:

amo, amare, amavi, amatus (to love)

which is a regular verb of the first conjugation.

For practice, it is conjugated as follows in the present:

amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant.

giving us amat (he, she or it loves).

What do cats love? They love :-

piscis (fish) which is a masculine noun of the third declension and declines (in the singular) as follows:

piscis, piscis, piscem, piscis, pisci, pisce (or maybe pisci).

From this we can see that piscem is in the accusative case (as we would expect for the object of the verb).

Catus amat piscem (The cat loves fish).

As an aside the Italian, Romanian and Spanish words for fish, are pesce, pește and pez respectively.

And what don’t cats love?

sed non vult tingere plantam

thats what!

sed (but)

non (not)

Vult comes from the verb volo (to wish, want) which conjugates as follows (in the present):

volo, vis, vult, volumus, vultis, volunt

It is irregular, common and just has to be learnt, or at least recognised.

The t at the end of vult is a typical second person singular Latin ending.

We now have:-

sed non vult (but he or indeed she does not want) to tingere plantam!!

I didn’t know the meaning of tingere but as often turns out to be the case there is a relation an English word.

tingo, tingere, tinxi, tinctus (wet, moisten, dip or soak) as our metaphorical cat is loathe to do, also means

colour, dye, stain or …

TINT and so gives us tincture, tint, tinge and so on.

Who would have thought that tint comes from the stem of the Latin verb tingere? These are the kind of reasons that dabbling is Latin is rewarding – if you like this kind of stuff.

And not everyone does …

… which I understand but if you don’t I’m surprised that you are still reading;)

And now it only remains for us to look up the meaning of

planta (sole of foot).

This is a first declension feminine noun and declines as follows:-

planta, planta, plantam, plantae, plantae, planta

Plantam is the accusative from and the object of the verb which is what we would expect – as cats don’t like getting wet paws.

The literal translation of

Catus amat piscem, sed non vult tingere plantam

is

The cat likes or loves fish, but he or she does not want to wet (his or her) paws.

The more usual English form is:

The cat would eat fish and would not wet her feet.

This either means:

that often you have to do something unpleasant to get to do something that you want to do

or

that you don’t always do something unpleasant to get to do something that you want.

I have in the past (and I mean in the past) heard it used in both senses.

Finally, I started with an almost rhyme and so will end with an almost rhyme:

Parsing a Latin sentence a day, keeps boredom at bay.

I might work on these.

Besos, Pax & Baci,

MF

Posted in Latin, Parsing, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Automating a water butt

by moonface Posted on December 16, 2020

Sup?

I’m pretty sure that I don’t have any regular readers, but if I did, and let’s pretend that you are one of them, the question that would be on your lips would be:

Don’t you normally write about languages or parsing Latin?

Yes. Yes. Yes. Mainly. I also have other preoccupations/hobbies/interests and if I can’t write about them here, where can I write about them?

One of these preoccupations is our Garden, and in it half way down on the left hidden by a small yew tree is a water butt.

But I get ahead of myself.

The garden is 13 metres long by 6.6 metres wide, shaded at the far end due to being slightly below ground level and surrounded by other houses.

There is an ash tree at the bottom left, and at the far end tucked against by (the falling down fence) a silver birch (dead centre) and slightly towards the house a eucalyptus tree.

I planted the eucalyptus.

The garden has been neglected for years. I can’t even tell you why, as I like gardens, gardening and being in the open.

Due to various reasons that I’d rather not detail here (but Brexit, pandemic and an idiot surely feature), I became an ex-automation engineer.

I now have time, but more importantly the inclination and motivation to korak po korak (step by step) transform our garden into what it should be.

Today, with assistance from SWP, I placed the new water butt into its new home.

But again, I’m getting ahead of myself.

You are of course wondering why I should want to automate a water butt, what that really means and maybe even how you could do the same.

So, chill and consider the situation I found myself in last summer, when we could still travel, and did, for several weeks.

The garden as a whole has been neglected, but small areas have always been loved and nurtured, and within one of these I had planted a tomato plant and extra geraniums.

While most of our garden is shaded either some or all of the time, luckily there is also an area which receives a fair dose of summer sun, and it is in this area that my tomato plant lived and (briefly) thrived.

The soil in what shall be known as the arid zone dries quickly.

The sun beats down.

Time passes.

No rain falls, and no water is watered.

After two weeks of no water, the tomato plant was more or less history, and the geraniums didn’t thrive as they could have done. Think brown leaves.

And now we find ourselves in December, driven inside because of the rain, with my non-automated water butt slowly filling.

This begs the question as to what I need to do to automate it, or encourage it to dispense water to the needy. Admittedly, at first blush, it is straight-forward :-

  • check moisture content around plant
  • turn on valve
  • turn off valve after a set time.

Of course, anyone who has ever done, anything oft this nature, soon realises that there is more to the problem domain than meets the eye.

Consider for example, as an illustration the humble teapot, and the steps required to make a cup of tea. Again this looks straight-forward, and in days gone by was used as an illustration as to the complexity off simple tasks.

So we have for starters:-

  • Pour water into kettle
  • Boil kettle
  • Put tea bags into a teapot
  • Pour water into teapot.

which is what n00bs tend to come up with as their first attempt.

Hmmm.

If we wonder a little bit more what is appertaining, the following questions might bubble to the surface …

… You are going to pour water into your kettle are you? How will you fill the kettle. How much water? Are you going to fill the kettle to the top? If so, how are you going to detect the kettle is full? How will you get the water into the kettle?

  • Decide on how much water is needed
  • Move kettle to water source
  • Turn on water source
  • Observer closely and turn off water source when kettle has reached the required level.
  • Etc.

And as it was with the teapot example, so it is with water butt automation.

Simple on the surface, but with hidden depths which become more intricate for any other than the most basic solution.

What am I going to do?

I am going to massively over-engineer the solution, partly for fun, partly because I can, but mainly as an experiment for the later greenhouse automation project.

This is what my system needs to be able to do:

  • provide differing amounts of water to four different areas
  • monitor the water content of four different areas
  • call for help if a fault is detected
  • run using solar power
  • monitor the water level off the butt
  • make intelligent decisions depending on the water level.
  • allow control from an external controller if installed..

Being wise to such things, and not wanting to bother with a pump, my water butt is balanced on thick pieces of wood about a foot (30cm to you heathens) above the ground. Balanced does not do the construction justice. It is carefully placed within a wooden structure built for the purpose. I used dowels, sleepers and a brace drill from e-bay with a 22mm 😉 bit for this purpose.

I didn’t want a pump because …?

Why do you think?

Why shouldn’t we use a pump here?

No peaking until you have guessed the answer.

I knew that you would know.

I don’t want to use a pump because of the power consumption required.

This is the same reason that I won’t be using a PLC. These are usual in the automation world where reliability is crucial. The current drain from a PLC will be orders of magnitude higher than the system I will build. Now normally that wouldn’t matter, but I want to power my system using solar power and low current which hits power consumption (P=IV) matters.

I’m going for a professional although not properly industrial design – remembering, in the real world, industrial mostly means PLC.

My first step will be to decide on a manifold and appropriate low power consumption electric valves.

I’ll keep you up to date, as and when this project develops further.

Besos and Baci,

MF.

Posted in Automation, Garden, Water butt | Leave a comment

How long does it take to learn Croatian?

by moonface Posted on December 15, 2020

Sup doods?

I now comfortably speak (and understand) Croatian at a B1 level, and I feel pretty smug about that.

My language goals were to speak four languages to a B1 level or above, and to maintain that level while mainly spending my time doing other things in life.

The key word here is mainly.

For example, at the moment in my spare time I’m mainly attempting to make our garden a thing of beauty ready for next year. I’ll tell you about the garden at some other point.

Anyway, I’ve got there and now speak four languages at a B1 level, with Croatian being the last of the four languages.

Now in case you don’t want to read further, I’ll answer the question that I just asked, and that you presumably want answered, but with ‘to a B1 level’ grafted onto the end.

The answer to:

How long does it take to learn Croatian to a B1 level?

for me was:

two years.

This was the time that I needed to get to a B1 level.

My experience has been that it is not possible to learn languages particularly fast, and this is an *honest* and *realistic* approximation as to how long it will really take you (while mainly doing other things).

Keep in mind though that the length of time it takes to learn any new language will largely depend on:

  • whether you speak any similar languages
  • how efficiently you learn and
  • its distance from your mother tongue.

Croatian is a slavic language, with all the attendant cases and complicated grammar. Slavic languages are more difficult than romance languages for english speakers. Despite having flirted with Polish years ago, I don’t speak any slavic languages so I was starting from zero with Croatian.

This gives me two crosses and one tick concerning the length of time needed to learn Croatian. I don’t know any similar languages and am an english speaker. However, on the plus side, I know how to learn efficiently, and have had an overarching strategy to follow for Croatian.

For the record, I don’t log the time I spend on languages so I am sticking a finger in the air to an extent to come up with these figures.

That said, my best guess with Croatian is that I have spent thirty minutes a day for five days a week of focused study. I have also had a one hour lesson alternate weeks for the previous two years.

Equally importantly, I have also listened to Croatian audio for hours and hours when doing other things – like automating a water butt;).

Put another way, I have spent about three and a half hours a week over the previous two years, to reach a B1 level.

I know how to learn efficiently, and in general I have been learning Croatian efficiently. That doesn’t mean that every single minute of every single hour of ‘focused’ study has been focused, but it does mean that on balance I have been effective.

I’m not describing the strategy or learning style that I use again here, not because it’s secret, but because it isn’t likely to be useful for you and because it changes or evolves over time.

My learning style and yours are likely to be different, and this is something that you will develop with time (if you are interested in languages).

Your strategy needs to account for your learning style, but you need a strategy (even if it changes as you progress) to learn efficiently.

Besos and baci,

MF

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