Quickly acquiring foreign languages for research?

[MastersHoping]

Hello everyone,

      I have recently discovered the general direction I want to take my PhD research, which will require research abroad in at least 3 different countries, making particular use of interviews. I will have no problem getting financial support for this research, and I am not exactly a shy individual about interviewing people. However, I am not fluent in any of these three languages, which are unfortunately about as hard as foreign languages can get for native English speakers. I have had succes learning a foreign language to fluency in the past through formal training and self-study, and have self-studied another foreign language to a high level (not fluent yet) completely through self-study. Does anyone have any strategies/experiences to gain working knowledge of foreign languages for research? Thanks! 

[NateL]

The book "Fluent Forever" has a good science-based method that uses spaced repetition flashcards, connecting foreign words to memorable images and sounds instead of translations. There is also an affordable website called italki that has fluent tutors or licensed teachers you can Skype with at different hourly rates that range from 10-30 USD in my experience. Far cheaper and more effective than taking a university class.

[fuzzylogician]

You won't ever achieve fluency by just taking a university class. The best way to learn a new language is through immersion. Be forced to speak the language -- get better at it more quickly. Maybe summer courses are the solution. Maybe the solution is instead to employ a local translator to help you. Picking up three distinct languages from scratch during a PhD program sounds very difficult to me, and I say this as someone who speaks multiple languages and picks them up fairly easily. 

[bubble_psych]

In addition to the other poster's advice, you can also check out the app duolingo. I used it to learn german for a trip I took a while ago. I'm not sure how long it will take to become fluent using the app though.

[PaulaHsiuling]

I'm curious as to what your advisor recommends. I'm in history, and I can't imagine that my advisor would ever approve a dissertation topic that required me to learn any more than one additional language, especially if I needed to do more than read.

[hats]

Three new languages, difficult ones, is an extremely heavy lift. I'm kind of surprised you're asking this, if you have as much experience learning languages as an adult as you wrote in your first post. Surely you've been able to tell that real fluency is not something you can achieve in six months? I can't tell from your post, however, whether any of these three languages are the two languages you've been studying already. If they are, that makes a big difference. If you're starting from zero, as I'm sure you know, this is going to be a multi-year commitment. 

As an anthropologist who works with languages foreign to me, my rule of thumb is that it takes me about three years to learn a really difficult language pretty well (i.e., to 50% of the capacity I would need to do non-basic interviews), given limited opportunities for immersion. If I had done the full Peace Corps/Fulbright thing, I expect I could get to that in, oh, a year and a half, if I had done "a year's worth" of introductory language prep beforehand. (University language classes, especially academic-year ones, often move really slowly, so "a year's worth" can often be accomplished in six weeks or less, either of self-study or an intensive course.) Maybe that could be condensed into less time, but I'm being conservative. Also, my estimate assumes the kind of writing system you can pick up in a couple weeks or less.

Of course, standards do differ based on which languages you're talking about. If your project is comparing Buryat experiences in Russia with the experiences of Uyghur and Mongolian speakers in China, intermediate levels of Buryat, Uyghur, and Mongolian are probably fine, if you already know Russian and Chinese. (Although good luck with the political permissions for that project.) If you want to compare pop culture in Mandarin, Japanese, and Korean, you will be expected to speak at least two of those three really well, as I'm sure you know. Going from zero to fluent in any one of those languages requires more than a year of work, so I hope you've started on at least one of the languages you're hoping to work with.

[RunnerGrad]

How adept are you at learning new languages?  It took me one year of intensive language instruction (8-4 every day in a classroom, learning German, plus homework in the evenings) to reach ILR level 3.  Note that’s a full year of doing nothing else - it was my job to attend language school.  Other students at the language school, who were expected to be able to work competently in the foreign language, had similar training (one year).  Those learning more difficult languages (i.e. Korean, Arabic), had a minimum of two years of full-time (8-4 plus homework) language instruction.