/jp/ - Otaku Culture

Level A1: Super Beginner

“Hulk Smash” – the Hulk at A1

When you reach the A1 level, you will have a rough working vocabulary of about 700 words. Some will be derivatives (“run” and “running”), some you will be able to recall quickly and others only slowly and with a lot of effort, but it’s a good ballpark number.

Grammatically, you should be able to understand some really simple past and future constructions, some comparatives and superlatives (“this is larger than that”, “this is the biggest”), basic questions, modal verbs (“could”, “should”) and a little more, but overall it’s pretty basic. The ability to consistently produce all of this is even more limited, if you can produce many coherent sentences at all.

Now, 700 words and superlatives may sound like a lot, but in a spoken language, it’s a surprisingly limited set. You’ll be able to explain simple things in a very basic way and interact with native speakers only if they really are willing to slow down and work with you.

This is a super important point. At A1, you’re not having really sophisticated conversations with people. Think Paulo, Rachel’s Italian boyfriend from the first season of Friends. Or, from another of Jennifer Aniston’s former love interests, Brad Pitt’s Italian in Inglorious Basterds. Perhaps the Hulk from the Avengers movies. Hulk smash. You can get things across, but it’s not going to be easy on anyone involved.

It will take you about 80-120 hours of work to get here from zero, depending on what you count and how you do it. For example, if you take an Alliance Française intensive course, it’s 80 hours of class time plus probably another 20-40 hours of home study, which can be done in four weeks, but that’s all day, every day. If you’re spending maybe an hour a day on it, it will take closer to four months or so.