The question “How long does it take you to learn a language at B1 level?” was rather
senseless, as the duration is directly related to the effort and time given to the language
learning. Therefore, the answers differed greatly, from one month to several years. Some
of the respondents acknowledged this fact and as there was a space to type an arbitrary
answer, some of them chose to give more complex answers.
The answers tackled not only effort (“It would depend on how committed I was.”) and time,
but also the methods, school systems and more importantly, the language itself (“It depends
on the language”).
One respondent for example stated: “It depends on the language; 3-4 years for ‘easiest’
languages as English and Spanish, more [longer] for more complicated ones like Russian.”
As a speaker of a Slavic language I would for example argue that Russian can be easier
for speakers of Slavic languages and contrarily Spanish and English can be harder.
This connection between similar families was confirmed by answers of other respondents,
e.g. “I arrived at B1 level in portugues [Portuguese] in few months, because I already spoke
Italian (mother tongue), Spanish and French and especially because I spoke (and speak)
portugues [Portuguese] every day”. Lomb has a different opinion on the issue concerning the
“easy” and “difficult” languages as she believes that “all languages are different in their
learnability”.
One respondent also pointed out that he/she was learning more than one language at the time,
saying that “That depends! Because I don’t focus strictly on one language all the time, and
am trying to maintain others”.
These many opinions and impacting factors only confirm that this question is too complex to be
answered so sporadically. However, I used some of the more complex answers to this question in other sections as the respondents focused on different factors as well in their answers to this question.
