So we have a few sets of guidelines/descriptions about levels/scales:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_Reference_for_Languages
This is by the European Union. I'd say it could be of more use for European languages, esp. those used in the EU. My German textbooks (namely Themen) do state the Niveaustufe (level) clearly on their cover. I also read quite a few discussions elsewhere, and I have a few observations:
1) For German, for example, Goethe Institut has clearly set up different levels for language classes, namely A1, A2, B1... In terms of the textbooks (again, Themen) they usually use (at least in Hong Kong), my wild guess is that: of course, language levels depend on BOTH grammatical knowledge and how much vocab you know, but grammar alone could indicate the level somehow, because some grammatical concepts, so to speak, tend to be "advanced topics", not to be discussed at a low level. For example, A1 learners don't have to know the passive, at least in German, until they reach A2+. And there are also some more subtle nuances that teachers won't discuss at all until somewhat later. At my official level (A2, which I almost outgrew already), the teacher still hasn't discussed Konjunktiv (subjunctive) in detail, which I already learned using Assimil.
2) Then it leads to another interesting issue. It seems that a comprehensive course, like Assimil (with ease series), does bring me (or just me) to a decent level to learn further. Somebody claims that Assimil with ease reaches B1. It can't teach everything, and I do think you lack quite a lot of vocab even with a (single) book like this, but your grammatical knowledge could be very solid.
My argument is that, when you're learning a language naturally - i.e. you don't just study the grammar of language X for the mere fun of it, but instead, that you do learn X normally, picking up vocab here and there throughout the course of study, so to speak - you should have picked up a lot enough vocab when you are half-way done with the grammar. By half-way I mean that you know the whole basic framework of the grammar, though you don't know how to use at least half of the possible subordinate clauses, and you don't know a lot of the written language.
The American standard is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILR_or_Foreign_Service_Level_language_ability_measures
3) As some of you might know, FSI does publish a series of courses, in different formats and in different periods of time since the end of WWII. What scale does an FSI course actually claim? FSI Spanish now has a privately updated version (Platiquemos), and this new one claims to reach 3 according to the ILR scale.
I have no idea how the ILR scale might match the European (CEF) scale. But that Platiquemos/FSI Spanish, among some others, might teach the whole basic grammar, I actually find it safe to GUESS that, according to the EU, the B2 level should, at least, require that you know the basic grammar.
This is all based on my assumptions; I don't know a single word of Spanish. But at least I have gone thru a lot of chapters of FSI German, supposedly a less comprehensive course than FSI Spanish (old or new), up to Unit 15. Judging the content of grammar notes, I'd say FSI German ALREADY exhausts pretty much of the "basic grammar" (German grammar, that is).
4) Hence, again, my wild guess: if there exists a comprehensive course like that of FSI, regardless of its archaic language, drills you might not like, ... since there does exist some courses for this purpose (FSI Spanish for Spanish, FSI German for German), I'm quite sure that you can test drive a language of this sort thru, really, using courses like such (and it's free thanks to some of the netizens).
5) No matter how you slice it, though, I find it safer to, first, underestimate your level of proficiency when considering taking a test, so to speak (at least this what I think, according to my cultural background). Again, judging the CEF scale, I'd say that if you haven't even reached a C1 level, or something similar, you can't claim any fluency in the language you learn. I think you don't even have to take a test (any sort) to see if you reach C1.
By FLUENCY, here, in general, it means that you can practically listen to everything in that foreign language very well, without any obvious difficulty, with (this is very very very normative, subjective, and full of ambiguous vocab, but I can't put it more "precisely") ALMOST full-fledged fluency in every area - listening, speaking, reading, writing, that is.
6) But naturally, you can well guess that "C1" isn't easy at all, and you can't foresee to reach it, given that you also have your own life - you have a job, you socialize, you study, etc, without learning language X for at least 1 year or 2.
My observation is that a few netizens out there do say that, to reach C1, it's more like a plateau. You can outgrow A1 and A2 very easily (Assimil is easy enough to read, even though I'm not an English native) within a few hundred hours of study, even throughout a year. But then comes the B1 and B2 levels. You can't really master the grammar merely by studying the grammar book. You have to, so to speak, fill a lot of holes of your knowledge. You often have questions like: what is this clause for? Why is this verb conjugated like this? How to say "according to", "in my opinion", "as a rule", "so to speak", "to look into", etc, in language X?
The six-level scale of the CEF (and the five-level scale, according to the ILR) might look more like an inverted pyramid. At first, you pick up words and phrases and grammar very quickly using whatever methods. But then, at higher levels, you might it hard to make progress, i.e. you think you may have reached a plateau without any obvious ladders to climb up the plateau to reach the peak.
7) For one thing, to conquer this linguistic plateau, you might find it necessary to spend multiple times of hours you need to go through lower levels - say 2000 hours, compared to 500 hours for a low level, and probably two/three of them combined.
For another, it may be very convenient (but too ambiguous, really) to put it like this: you need 10000 hours to master an ability - to play chess to win almost everybody in a national chess tournament, to win the gold medal in 100m running in your country, to reach native-like fluency in language X, etc. The time issue aside, again, I find it interesting to see how people put such estimates in some other ways.
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/e/guide/vocabulary-learning/how-many-words.html
If you believe the rule of 80/20 (Pareto law), then, like the webmaster of this site says, you can master 80% of the language by, according to him, knowing 3000 words. This estimate is very rough, because you can't even know how much 3000 words count. (3000 words, with all the declension and conjugated forms? Then German, Russian, French count far more than 3000 words, because they have multiple times of word forms for just 3000 words) Do 3000 words also count some amount of idioms for these 3000 words?
80% mastery and 80% comprehension AREN'T strictly synonyms. 80% comprehension is MEANINGLESS, I think. The reason is that you understand comprehend a message probably with just 80%. This is like getting 1/5 of your answers wrong when answering what this message means. By comprehension, you are supposed to know EVERYTHING, 100%. But the page above, then, calculates that
the 25508 most common words make up 99% of occurences
A safe, rough estimate might be that you need at least
1) 10000 words,
2) practically all (this is only my argument) word forms, and a considerable amount of idioms, related to these 10000 words
3) knowledge of the basic grammar, at least the grammar covered in the most comprehensive FSI courses, which are intended to make you work well in very demanding situations as a diplomat
4) a considerable amount of cultural information/knowledge related to the fields you work on, in this language (this is again my argument)
in order just to know this language decently.
8) At least, my own strategy is that, for long-term investment, if I want to learn a language and reach fluency, I might at least be in a perfect position to learn this language independently.
How? I should be learning this language only in this language - no more Chinese translations, or English. I should use monolingual dictionaries only, and think in this language, without any L1 crutches (Chinese, in my case).
A more balanced approach, in fact, might be to listen and read decently. I must admit, tho, that while my English is like this (you can see), my listening comprehension is still quite poor. Personally, I think the priorities are:
Listening>Speaking>Reading>Writing
if you are learning language X in your country; it might even apply to that you are in country X. I listen to my language all the time in my country, I speak it all the time with my family and any folks here, I read less in my language.... and I rarely write.
When I was asking the German teacher for advice, she only said I should watch more films. Yeah, I do think this makes sense; but first, I should also consider doing the same for films in English and Mandarin.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_Reference_for_Languages
This is by the European Union. I'd say it could be of more use for European languages, esp. those used in the EU. My German textbooks (namely Themen) do state the Niveaustufe (level) clearly on their cover. I also read quite a few discussions elsewhere, and I have a few observations:
1) For German, for example, Goethe Institut has clearly set up different levels for language classes, namely A1, A2, B1... In terms of the textbooks (again, Themen) they usually use (at least in Hong Kong), my wild guess is that: of course, language levels depend on BOTH grammatical knowledge and how much vocab you know, but grammar alone could indicate the level somehow, because some grammatical concepts, so to speak, tend to be "advanced topics", not to be discussed at a low level. For example, A1 learners don't have to know the passive, at least in German, until they reach A2+. And there are also some more subtle nuances that teachers won't discuss at all until somewhat later. At my official level (A2, which I almost outgrew already), the teacher still hasn't discussed Konjunktiv (subjunctive) in detail, which I already learned using Assimil.
2) Then it leads to another interesting issue. It seems that a comprehensive course, like Assimil (with ease series), does bring me (or just me) to a decent level to learn further. Somebody claims that Assimil with ease reaches B1. It can't teach everything, and I do think you lack quite a lot of vocab even with a (single) book like this, but your grammatical knowledge could be very solid.
My argument is that, when you're learning a language naturally - i.e. you don't just study the grammar of language X for the mere fun of it, but instead, that you do learn X normally, picking up vocab here and there throughout the course of study, so to speak - you should have picked up a lot enough vocab when you are half-way done with the grammar. By half-way I mean that you know the whole basic framework of the grammar, though you don't know how to use at least half of the possible subordinate clauses, and you don't know a lot of the written language.
The American standard is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILR_or_Foreign_Service_Level_language_ability_measures
3) As some of you might know, FSI does publish a series of courses, in different formats and in different periods of time since the end of WWII. What scale does an FSI course actually claim? FSI Spanish now has a privately updated version (Platiquemos), and this new one claims to reach 3 according to the ILR scale.
I have no idea how the ILR scale might match the European (CEF) scale. But that Platiquemos/FSI Spanish, among some others, might teach the whole basic grammar, I actually find it safe to GUESS that, according to the EU, the B2 level should, at least, require that you know the basic grammar.
This is all based on my assumptions; I don't know a single word of Spanish. But at least I have gone thru a lot of chapters of FSI German, supposedly a less comprehensive course than FSI Spanish (old or new), up to Unit 15. Judging the content of grammar notes, I'd say FSI German ALREADY exhausts pretty much of the "basic grammar" (German grammar, that is).
4) Hence, again, my wild guess: if there exists a comprehensive course like that of FSI, regardless of its archaic language, drills you might not like, ... since there does exist some courses for this purpose (FSI Spanish for Spanish, FSI German for German), I'm quite sure that you can test drive a language of this sort thru, really, using courses like such (and it's free thanks to some of the netizens).
5) No matter how you slice it, though, I find it safer to, first, underestimate your level of proficiency when considering taking a test, so to speak (at least this what I think, according to my cultural background). Again, judging the CEF scale, I'd say that if you haven't even reached a C1 level, or something similar, you can't claim any fluency in the language you learn. I think you don't even have to take a test (any sort) to see if you reach C1.
By FLUENCY, here, in general, it means that you can practically listen to everything in that foreign language very well, without any obvious difficulty, with (this is very very very normative, subjective, and full of ambiguous vocab, but I can't put it more "precisely") ALMOST full-fledged fluency in every area - listening, speaking, reading, writing, that is.
6) But naturally, you can well guess that "C1" isn't easy at all, and you can't foresee to reach it, given that you also have your own life - you have a job, you socialize, you study, etc, without learning language X for at least 1 year or 2.
My observation is that a few netizens out there do say that, to reach C1, it's more like a plateau. You can outgrow A1 and A2 very easily (Assimil is easy enough to read, even though I'm not an English native) within a few hundred hours of study, even throughout a year. But then comes the B1 and B2 levels. You can't really master the grammar merely by studying the grammar book. You have to, so to speak, fill a lot of holes of your knowledge. You often have questions like: what is this clause for? Why is this verb conjugated like this? How to say "according to", "in my opinion", "as a rule", "so to speak", "to look into", etc, in language X?
The six-level scale of the CEF (and the five-level scale, according to the ILR) might look more like an inverted pyramid. At first, you pick up words and phrases and grammar very quickly using whatever methods. But then, at higher levels, you might it hard to make progress, i.e. you think you may have reached a plateau without any obvious ladders to climb up the plateau to reach the peak.
7) For one thing, to conquer this linguistic plateau, you might find it necessary to spend multiple times of hours you need to go through lower levels - say 2000 hours, compared to 500 hours for a low level, and probably two/three of them combined.
For another, it may be very convenient (but too ambiguous, really) to put it like this: you need 10000 hours to master an ability - to play chess to win almost everybody in a national chess tournament, to win the gold medal in 100m running in your country, to reach native-like fluency in language X, etc. The time issue aside, again, I find it interesting to see how people put such estimates in some other ways.
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/e/guide/vocabulary-learning/how-many-words.html
If you believe the rule of 80/20 (Pareto law), then, like the webmaster of this site says, you can master 80% of the language by, according to him, knowing 3000 words. This estimate is very rough, because you can't even know how much 3000 words count. (3000 words, with all the declension and conjugated forms? Then German, Russian, French count far more than 3000 words, because they have multiple times of word forms for just 3000 words) Do 3000 words also count some amount of idioms for these 3000 words?
80% mastery and 80% comprehension AREN'T strictly synonyms. 80% comprehension is MEANINGLESS, I think. The reason is that you understand comprehend a message probably with just 80%. This is like getting 1/5 of your answers wrong when answering what this message means. By comprehension, you are supposed to know EVERYTHING, 100%. But the page above, then, calculates that
the 25508 most common words make up 99% of occurences
A safe, rough estimate might be that you need at least
1) 10000 words,
2) practically all (this is only my argument) word forms, and a considerable amount of idioms, related to these 10000 words
3) knowledge of the basic grammar, at least the grammar covered in the most comprehensive FSI courses, which are intended to make you work well in very demanding situations as a diplomat
4) a considerable amount of cultural information/knowledge related to the fields you work on, in this language (this is again my argument)
in order just to know this language decently.
8) At least, my own strategy is that, for long-term investment, if I want to learn a language and reach fluency, I might at least be in a perfect position to learn this language independently.
How? I should be learning this language only in this language - no more Chinese translations, or English. I should use monolingual dictionaries only, and think in this language, without any L1 crutches (Chinese, in my case).
A more balanced approach, in fact, might be to listen and read decently. I must admit, tho, that while my English is like this (you can see), my listening comprehension is still quite poor. Personally, I think the priorities are:
Listening>Speaking>Reading>Writing
if you are learning language X in your country; it might even apply to that you are in country X. I listen to my language all the time in my country, I speak it all the time with my family and any folks here, I read less in my language.... and I rarely write.
When I was asking the German teacher for advice, she only said I should watch more films. Yeah, I do think this makes sense; but first, I should also consider doing the same for films in English and Mandarin.