[huhkerrf]

> And the State Department's FSI estimates are unfortunately pretty accurate for hours to fluency [1].

It's worth noting that the FSI estimates are hours of direct classroom instruction, and that FSI cares a lot more about input than output. For someone who is looking to be fluent across all four competencies and is self studying, you can expect a lot more time to be invested.

[bunderbunder]

Also the FSI estimates are for what it takes to get people who've tested into a FSI language program to that level. Individual differences are known to be a huge factor in language education, and FSI has the luxury of only needing to worry about teaching people who they know are well-suited to learning using their methods.

I doubt they're accurate at all as an absolute measure of how long a random person needs to study to reach S-3/R-3 on their aptitude scale. But based on my own experience and comparing notes with others who've studied languages from more than one of their categories, it does seem that they're at least a good indicator of relative effort. E.g, I wouldn't say that any English speaker can learn Mandarin in 2,200 hours just because that's what the FSI guideline says. But I do think it's true that the same person could learn French in about 1/4 the time it would take them to learn Mandarin.

[jamager]

FSI estimates are taken from diplomatics who study full time in preparation for their job. Not a good approximation for most people.

This is a far better one: https://www.cambridge.org/elt/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/1...

[mtalantikite]

Yeah, for sure, thanks for pointing that out. For them it seems like fluency is defined as the ability to work comfortably in a professional setting in that target language. I self studied some of their French courses and found them helpful. I've never taken a course of theirs before, but a family member did do a year immersion in Arabic as part of their training for the foreign service, and of course it was a lot more intense than self-study.

[bombcar]

There's also various levels of "fluency" - and what you're trying to achieve will inform how you're going to go about it.

There's a big difference between "I need to speak this well enough as I'm going there soon" and "I want to be able to read news from there" and "I need to pretend I'm a native."