what will practicing vietnamese for 2000 hours get you?

tl;dr: into the slog

All tracked time is active, 100% focused on the task at hand.

Passive listening time I estimate at 800 additional inattentive hours.

Starting from: English monolingual beta

Current strategy: Consume fiction, podcasts, books

Long-term goal: D1 fluency and a paid original fiction publication by 2040

Past updates:

• 530 hours
• 1000 hours
• 1500 hours

Current level:

• Can watch movies and television in several genres in Vietnamese without subtitles and follow the plot, understanding all the dialogue in 3/5 scenes. When I don't understand a sentence, I can usually identify the words I would need to know in order to complete my understanding.
• Can find nonfiction books meant for adults where I’m only missing 5 or so words a page.
• Candid demo video of my current reading and listening levels.

Rejected Strategies:

• Apps (too boring)
• Grammar explanations (too boring)
• Drills, exercises, or other artificial output (too boring)
• Content made for language learners (too boring)
• Classes (too lazy for them, and not sold on the value prop)

Reflection on last update:

In my 500, 1000, and 1500-hour updates, each update described a qualitatively different experience of the language. I believe this is because during the first 1500 hours, I was building an intuition for the sound system, an intuition for the internal logic of the language, and achieving first access to real, interesting content.

1500 to 2000 hours has not been like that. The change has been quantitative: I know more words. I understand more of what is said to me. I can express a greater variety of ideas at a greater level of complexity.

Predictions, assessed:

• From 1500 hours: “I think by 2000 hours I'll be able to just casually put on a Vietcetera interview with an author or translator and enjoy what they have to say.” → Yes, this is true. Some of it is a function of that I’m extremely used to partial understanding, so “enjoy” is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
• From 1000 hours: “This milestone, ‘conversational’, […] I predict it will come at 4000 hours.” → I honestly have no idea what I thought I meant by this. There are a few topics I can talk about pretty easily, but there’s a million topics.

Methods:

Since the last update, I have forsaken Anki. I used Anki for corrected listening practice by attempting to transcribe audio on the front of cards and then checking my transcription on the back. My listening comprehension is high enough now that I don't find this intense practice more important than just watching a show with subs.

Additionally, I've noticed that my ability to figure out the correct transcription of something I have heard grows with my vocabulary. Even when I am listening extensively without subs, my ability to guess at what was probably said provides constant feedback on my listening errors.

My routine is as follows:

1. (1h) I step through a show that has subtitles and make the subtitles hidden (asbplayer). When I don't know a word or I couldn't make out what was said, I will check the subtitles and repeat the line over and over until I can comfortably hear what was said.
2. (30m) I read a novel or a book with the corresponding audiobook and a hover dictionary to look up any words that I don't know.
3. (30m) I extensively listen to a podcast, YouTube, a show, etc.

After work, if I feel like it and have time, I'll extensively read manga or extensively watch a Vietnamese show.

Time Breakdown:

I use atracker on iOS since it's got a quick interface on apple watch.

• 58% listening (1156h03m)
• 31% reading (616h46m)
• 6% conversation (127h30m)
• 5% anki audio sentence recognition cards (104h19m)
• 0% chorusing practice (0h30m)

Pros/cons of my methods:

• My speech is clear, but: I sound weird. I've had two tutors assess and begged them to be very critical. They say my speech is clear with an occasional error, but that I sound like a dub actor or an audiobook narrator, and that this is strange and something I should consider fixing in the long term. It makes sense that I would end up sounding like this because dubs and audiobooks are my primary source of audio input.
• I have a large passive vocabulary, but: This doesn't always work in my favor. It helps me engage with content like books and shows, but I have a problem of activating vocabulary before I really understand what it means. For example, I recently used the word sống sót (survive, in a “last man standing” sense) in a situation where I should have used sinh tồn (survive, in a “just make it to tomorrow” sense). Compared to more common words, these words require a long baking period between entry into passive vocabulary and sufficient understanding to activate and use correctly. I have tons of words in this limbo state where I know them just well enough to reflexively pull them out but not well enough to use them right.

Recommendations:

I'm not yet fluent so I have no qualifications to give advice. My next update, which I'll write at 2500 hours, may contain different opinions.

• Read Peak
• Relax
• Have fun

Best of luck to other Vietnamese learners, and see y'all again after 500 more hours!