In my case, I think the answer depends on what you count as when I started. If you count the day that I brought home a copy of TKD and started asking all of my sixth grader friends “nuqDaq ‘oH puchpa’’e’”, the answer would be something like “25 years”. I stopped and started maybe three or four times over those years, and never put in more than a few weeks of half-hearted effort during that time. If you count when I started trying to translate dialog from Discovery (in particular the “‘Iv wInej” call and response thing) to help me understand better, that started about a year ago, and it took maybe six months from that time until I was able to hold on a conversation without the aid of reference materials. Duolingo helped a lot, as did the. KLI’s online course, and the various Memrise decks for vocabulary; I started Duolingo a couple of days after the Klingon course launched; according to Duolingo I have a 260 day streak there. Unfortunately, to date I’ve only had one opportunity to have a conversation in person, when DeSDu’ passed through Austin on his way across the country about four months ago or so. We’ve chatted on voice chat a couple of times on Discord as well, and I’ve chatted with De’vID on Discord once. And of course I’ve chatted with many people textually on Discord. I think the easy access to people to have conversations with despite not knowing any local speakers has helped a lot for sure, as compared to my previous aborted attempts at learning Klingon. I agree with kechpaja that Klingon doesn’t really seem any different than any other language that you’re unfamiliar with as far as how easy it is to learn.
On Dec 7, 2018, at 1:55 AM, Lieven L. Litaer <levinius@gmx.de> wrote:
Hi there,
I'm writing an article about the frequent question "How long does it take to learn Klingon?".
I know that many of us had a non-defined beginning or end of learning, but some really started at one day and ended up quite fluently a short time later. I know of our greek friend (who changes his signature name constantly) and DeSDu', who both got quite fluent in about one year, proving what I'm saying all along.
So - who is here among you or can tell about former Klingonists who may confirm they learned the language in a similarly short period of time?
By the way, I'm not talking about fluent speakers of which there are only five in the world. It's more about those who can do a basic conversation, but still without any dictionary help.
-- Lieven L. Litaer aka the "Klingon Teacher from Germany" http://www.klingonwiki.net/En/LearningTime _______________________________________________ tlhIngan-Hol mailing list tlhIngan-Hol@lists.kli.org http://lists.kli.org/listinfo.cgi/tlhingan-hol-kli.org