Have you spent 10,000 hrs studying Chinese?

[sthubbar]

I was intrigued by this post by wushijiao. In particular the statment:

The book Outliers, quoting current research, says that to “master” a skill (like a musical instrument), one needs to put in roughly 10,000 hours.

This theory is new to me. I also like how wushijiao did a rough calculation about passing the 10,000 mark.

3 years = 1,095 days.

1,095 days x 8 hours = 8,760 hours.

Then, if you add up my previous, and subsequent hours, it should be well over 10,000.

Let's try and get an honest guesstimate of the total hours that each of us have put in.

Here is my calculation:

04/2005-07/2006 (15 months) 2 hours/day = 912.5 hours

07/2006-07/2007 (12 months) 8 hours/day = 2920 hours

07/2007-09/2009 (15 months) 3 hours/day = 1368.75 hours

This gives me a grand total of 5201.25 hours which seems about right. According to my guesstimate, I still have 3.5 more years at my current rate to achieve "mastery".

PS. I suggest including a percentage of hours outside of class in the calculation. So for example listening to the language in the background for 1 hr might count as 1/10 hour. Watching a movie and trying to understand might count as 1/25th. Reading casually and not looking up new material might count as 1/2 - 3/4. I think you get the idea.

Edited August 23, 2009 at 03:39 AM by sthubbar

[yonglin]

Summer 2006: 8 weeks * 30hrs = 240 hrs

Year 2006/2007: 26 weeks * 6hrs = 156 hrs

Summer 2007: 4 weeks * 30hrs = 120 hrs

Year 2007/2008: 25 weeks * 6hrs = 150 hrs

Summer 2009: 4 weeks * 15 hrs = 60 hrs

Total: 726 hrs

I still have 41.3 years at my current rate to achieve *mastery*. I bet I'll be a long-standing member of this forum!

(If I get to count living in an English-speaking country (studying in English) as English learning, I should have achieved mastery in English a couple of months ago. )

Edited August 23, 2009 at 02:51 AM by yonglin

[Hong XQ]

Well I'd hate to know, as that would make comparing how far we got in that time relatively easy .

I had a hard time counting:turns out I've taken 750 hours of classroom spread out over 13 years and ending 6 years ago. Add to that 2500 hours of passive listening.

I comment because I've also heard the number thrown around as the number of hours of training it takes someone with "the necessary inborn qualities'TM to make it to 'world class level'TM in 乒乓球.Now that you mention it, it doesn't sound all that much.

[wushijiao]

I suggest including a percentage of hours outside of class in the calculation. So for example listening to the language in the background for 1 hr might count as 1/10 hour. Watching a movie and trying to understand might count as 1/25th. Reading casually and not looking up new material might count as 1/2 - 3/4. I think you get the idea

Hey,sthubbar,actually I think that, by all means, casual reading, watching TV movies, and so on should count as full time. In fact, accordng to research on how the brain works, this is really when your brain is starting to figure out patterns of how the language works. Also, this is how you start to learn words in their proper context. So, at least from my point of view, this is much more valuable than studying with a textbook or in a classroom.

But, as far as my original calcualtion, on second thought, I don't think I was able to put a full eight hours into in in mid 2004 through mid 2006 (because I was teaching full time), so it was more like 6 or 7 on average, with weekdays being something like 4-5 and weekends being something around 8-10.

In any case, combined with my studying from Sept 2001 to May 2003 (at about roughly 1-3 hours per day) and later 2007-8-9 (at 2-5 hours per day), I still think the 10,000 mark holds- although once again, the concept of "master" I used in quotation marks to hopefully give it a sense of being relative and with caveats.

But anyway, I hope that counting studying time by actual hours studied (even if one's own estimate is only a good guess) can help people look at themselves with a more critical eye. One of my friends back in Shanghai used to always measure his studying based on how many years it was since he started (and then he would get depressed because he wasn't where he "should" be for studying that long). But years since the start of studying really only measures how many times you've gone around the sun since the day you started to learn Chinese. Hours spent actually studying, however, seems to me to be a better yardstick.

Edited August 23, 2009 at 03:28 AM by wushijiao

[Hofmann]

You know how many people can call themselves "master pianists" using that criterion? I could. Yet I can't win a statewide competition.

[wushijiao]

You know how many people can call themselves "master pianists" using that criterion? I could. Yet I can't win a statewide competition.

But can you play the piano to a high degree of competence? I don’t think we’re necessarily talking about competitions here, ie. which foreigner is the best Putonghua speaker in all of Beijing? (or something like that). Of course, it would be expected that in competition circumstances people will have well over 10,000 hours. Just think how many hours the average professional athlete has put in! (Such as a golfer who wins the “Master’s”).

Basically, I’m not in any position to know whether or not the 10,000 hour hypothesis is correct or not. What I was trying to express was that, many times I had the desire to start a new language, but I felt that I still needed to put more work into my Mandarin. (See here and here). And, I simply find it interesting that the point in which I felt that my Mandarin was acceptable enough and good enough to start something else roughly overlapped with the 10,000 hour mark. (And this is a realization came fairly randomly I after my wife read the book Outliers and was explaining some of the key points to me. And of course, when I felt my Mandarin was acceptable was at a subjective point as well, admittedly). Then, I think it has relevance to the concept of polyglottery had how much time one should be prepared to allocate when choosing a language to serve as an anchor for learning others in that family. Based on those assumptions (which very well may be wrong), it wouldn’t be a good idea, in my opinion, to start from scratch, and try to learn Cantonese, Mandarin, and, say, Korean all at the same time (and it seems to me that people often attempt to do things like this). I really think people would be spreading themselves too thin, and they wouldn’t end up good at any of those, but I might be wrong.

[sthubbar]

Figuring out how to count the hours is not an exact science. There used to be some nice graphs and stuff here showing how they count different hours to come up with what they say is something like after 600 "hours" of learning their students should automatically start speaking.

The example I had in mind with the 1/10 hour for passive listening was: I know foreigners who have lived in China for 15+ years. I would say at an absolute minimum they are exposed to hearing the language for 2 hours per day, whether riding in cabs, being in public and hearing people and announcements, or hearing random commercials on TV.

By the calculation 365 days/year * 2 hours/day * 15 years = 10,950 hours.

What I find is that unless they have specifically put in effort to learn the language, their level of Chinese is about equivalent to someone who had spent 1000 hours of more focused study. Hence the 1/10th.

[muyongshi]

I estimated a tad high I think and I counted pretty much every hour of watching tv or anything passive as a whole hour. I think what I would up doing was counting the estimated hours of exposure and learning. If I counted actual time spent learning I would probably only come up with around 2000 hours.

[xianhua]

An interesting theory, and one which helps make things clearer for me. While I have been studying off and on for about 8 years (of which one year was spent in China, teaching) I would estimate that I have spent barely a third of this total actively learning; it's difficult to even manage an hour an evening with a family. Thus day forward, when people ask me how long I have been studying the language, I will reply in hours and not years - which makes me seem like less of a slow learner - given my level. Either I'd better start getting up earlier, or going to bed later to increase my study time.

[Erbse]

The example I had in mind with the 1/10 hour for passive listening was: I know foreigners who have lived in China for 15+ years. I would say at an absolute minimum they are exposed to hearing the language for 2 hours per day, whether riding in cabs, being in public and hearing people and announcements, or hearing random commercials on TV.

By the calculation 365 days/year * 2 hours/day * 15 years = 10,950 hours.

There is a difference between You and the guy with total disinterest listening 10000 hours .

[imron]

I'm really curious to see if anyone has studied between 9,999 and 10,000 hours. That's pretty impressive record keeping if they can estimate it to that degree of accuracy

[skylee]

Interesting.

Assuming that I took 8 hours of Chinese lessons a week, then multiply it by a factor of 2.5 (for the time spent on homework, studying during weekends/before examinations, and leisure reading etc), then multiply it by 39 weeks for each year (discounting three months for summer vacation / easter and spring holidays etc), then multiply it by 12 years (6 for primary school and 6 for middle school), the total number of hours spent was 9360 hours.

And I've spent about the same amount of time on studying English. Interesting. And my English is nowhere near "mastery".

[gato]

And I've spent about the same amount of time on studying English. Interesting. And my English is nowhere near "mastery".

You left out the passive learning time. For someone living in a Chinese environment, you should count almost every waking moment. Basically, every moment you are not "learning" English, you are learning Chinese, which could explain your mastery of Chinese. Right?

[skylee]

It also means that because I was not in an English environment, the 9,000+ hours spent on learning English were not as effective as those spent on learning Chinese.

[onebir]

The book Outliers, quoting current research, says that to “master” a skill (like a musical instrument), one needs to put in roughly 10,000 hours.

Perhaps we just implicitly define mastery as a level of skill that takes about 10,000 hours - ie a *lot* of practice - to attain....

[gato]

See the original NY Times article about the 10,000 theory. It turns out that not just any type of practice will do. You need to do "deliberate practice." So passive learning is out.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/07/magazine/07wwln_freak.html?

A Star Is Made

By STEPHEN J. DUBNER and STEVEN D. LEVITT

Published: May 7, 2006

Deliberate practice entails more than simply repeating a task — playing a C-minor scale 100 times, for instance, or hitting tennis serves until your shoulder pops out of its socket. Rather, it involves setting specific goals, obtaining immediate feedback and concentrating as much on technique as on outcome.

This is not to say that all people have equal potential. Michael Jordan, even if he hadn't spent countless hours in the gym, would still have been a better basketball player than most of us. But without those hours in the gym, he would never have become the player he was.

[wushijiao]

And my English is nowhere near "mastery“

I think you've probably underestimated your time spent on English. For example, you could include time spent on English-language forums (like here), time spent watching movies, TV shows, writing emails in English, using English at work (although I don't know if you use English at work, but if so, I think you can include it), plus books, newspapers, and magazines in English. Obviously, you write in English as well as a native speaker (or perhaps better than many), so that's one indication of "mastery".

I think people who learn English in a non-immersion environment often don’t understand some of the more subtle uses of the language and many of the cultural references, and certainly understanding subtlety should be an indicator in measuring “mastery”. But then again, language subtlety can also be a culturally bound thing, and I may not understand certain uses of English in Australian English or references in other regional forms. So, although understanding of subtlety in spoken and written forms and cultural references should be a factor, I think it’s hard to know exactly where to draw that line.

I will reply in hours and not years - which makes me seem like less of a slow learner - given my level.

That's the spirit, xinhua! As far as Spanish, I used to be hard on myself when I had studied for seven years and could only speak at such and such level. Thinking it terms of hours can liberate you from that, especially if you've been studying on and off.

Edited August 23, 2009 at 02:24 PM by wushijiao

[sthubbar]

@imron, Good catch. I'm sure an admin can fix that small mistake.

@skylee: Aren't you a native Chinese speaker? As gato mentioned, you should factor in some percentage of all of your hours exposed to the language. I agree that passive hours exposure are less valuable than active, just don't think they count as zero.

BTW, I wanted to come up with a calculation to estimate when native speakers achieve the equivalent of 10,000 hours of active learning. Let's try and make a rough estimate.

0 - 2 (2 yr) 6 hrs/day passive listening = 365 days/yr * 2 yrs * 6 hrs/day * 0.10 factor = 438 hrs (438 total)

2 - 5 (3 yr) 6 hrs/day passive + 4 hrs/day active = 365 days/yr * 3 yrs * ( 6 hrs * 0.1 + 4) = 7008 (7446)

5-6 (1 yr) 6 hrs/day passive + 6 hrs/day active = 365 days/yr * 1 yrs * (6 hrs * 0.1 + 6) = 2409 (9855)

So this would indicate that around 6 or 7 yrs of age, native speakers achieve some level of mastery of their language. Sounds about right to me.

Edited August 23, 2009 at 04:19 PM by sthubbar

[muyongshi]

If it's active well then, I'm probably only at 1500 -2000.... wow, sounds like so little!

[renzhe]

I think what I would up doing was counting the estimated hours of exposure and learning. If I counted actual time spent learning I would probably only come up with around 2000 hours.

Same for me.

But I assume that I'm underestimating the time spent. I find it difficult to gauge. Sometimes I'll spend 8 hours at a time reading, other days, I'll only do 30 minutes of flashcards.

I'm pretty sure that I'm way below 10,000, however you count.