Completely agree. Pomodoro technique is very flow-killing, but great for getting yourself in the mood for doing something that you don’t exactly look forward to doing.
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This is a valid point, but can very easily become an excuse for somebody who just has bad study habits and isn’t disciplined enough to do what they should or need to be doing. Your threshold for cognitive load is also something you can stretch with practice.
There’s also a point to be made that for most people the mental (or biological, for e.g. sports and athletics) capacity doesn’t vary enough to ever make a difference until you get to the top of your field or otherwise optimize your workflow and need to push even further to get very small gains. In other words, most people will never push themselves this hard, especially in a hobby, for those variations to ever make a difference. I’m guessing you gave the 30 minutes - 16 hours just to make a point, but if somebody “wants to learn a language but finds spending more than 30 minutes too much of an effort” then the problem isn’t in their natural capacity but most likely in everything else.
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Yeah, I picked extremes too make a point. But I think my message has been lost, judging on the responses. I’m not saying people should use their natural capacity as an excuse, but rather to understand that if they are doing their best and feeling burnt out, despite not doing as much as other people on this forum, then that’s okay. And if they want to use the concept of innate capacity as an excuse, then good luck to them. For me, I find it useful to look through this particular lens because helps me from feeling dissuaded when I see people claiming to gain a level of fluency in an incredibly short time. I just am not capable of that with the intrinsic and extrinsic resources available to me. And suspect others struggle with that comparison too
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@stuartcalvin: I know the feeling!
There are many dimensions to this topic. The discussion feels like globs of mercury squirting round on a flat surface. I hoped there might be more definite things to say, but nothing has emerged beyond “It depends…”
I thought your point about natural capacity has a place. I’m certain military’s selection process for language training is not entirely arbitrary and we could learn from it. Though I would separate that capacity from burn-out limits.
I question how far anyone, regardless of capacity, would get learning a language at 15 minutes per day. It seems to me that rate would just keep someone “warmed up” so that when they were ready to plunge ahead with longer, more effective study periods, they could.
How much target language would the same person know at 15 min/day for four years compared to 60 min/day for one year? Are there people at 15min/day who really get somewhere with that schedule?
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This video is relevant to your above question. They said if you are following 20 minutes a day routine, it will take almost 2 decades to learn japanese.
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The video does cover the area of my question. So thanks.
However, all the arithmetic seems to be guesstimated on the fly and is incorrect.
Furthermore, they don’t answer my question of whether there is difference between studying for 15 min/day for 4 years vs 60 min/day for 1 year. They assume it’s strictly a matter of the cumulative total.
More importantly, they devote the first half of the video explaining that 15-20 min/day isn’t really the plan, but the starting point for building up gradually to 120 min/day, which they consider an ideal daily goal and will yield solid results without burn out.
According to the video it takes 3900 hours to reach functional fluency in Japanese, though they don’t say where that number comes from. (It sounds reasonable; I would just like to have a source.)
Accepting the 3900 hours and that learning is strictly a matter of time spent, the years to functional fluency:
20 min/day – 32.05 years
60 min/day – 10.68 years
120 min/day – 5.34 years
I knew there was a reason I wasn’t learning Japanese! 
Matt vs Japan has already answered this question in one of his videos on his youtube channel.
if you get more exposure in a day you forget less since there is a likelihood of hearing or reading the same word or phrase again. With more language exposure you are increasing the probablity.
That’s why it is better and efficient to watch 4-5 episodes of the TV show in one sitting after watching first episode of the show actively (looking up meanings of ceftain words or phrases)more likely they will be repeated in the next episode. Good chance to reinforce it.
In my humble opinion both aproaches are slow but given a choice I would choose for second approach. I am giving a chance to reinforce words that I have just come across.
Here I can quote a learner who has been using LingQ for learning German. He spends an hour a day on Lingq and kept at it for 3 years so obviously his listening and reading stats were on the lower end of the specturm.
Overall his level in German hovered around A2.
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I envy you the 6 h/day. I currently spend 1h-3h/day with Spanish, with 1hr active the rest passive listening in parallel with other tasks (commute, yardwork, exercise, etc.). I have found this productive enough to see improvement.
At my current level, I can listen/read to content I like for hours without burnout. I have tried as much as possible to replace the English audiobooks and podcasts I used to listen to with Spanish ones, so the content compels me through and I’m not thinking so much about the fact that it is in Spanish.
I agree with ericb100 that there would be challenges in conducting meaningful research on this due to the difficulty of accounting for the variability of all parameters. This is also one of the reasons I feel some of the conclusions drawn from comprehensible input research seem overly broad and prescriptive, given the methodology and sample sizes, even if I am convinced that CI is extremely important. I’d be very interested if someone were to do a post or series of posts on the actual studies that have been done, including how they were done, not just the conclusions.
tldr: I did 15 min a day up into the midlevels and made a lot of progress. Now I’ve added more listening, but still do only 15 min or less of reading a day. Still progressing.
Long version:
I’ve done 15 min/day or less for some time. You can make a lot of progress, but you have to be patient. I started German in 2016-ish. I started with Memrise, their A1 course (which is unavailable to newcomers anymore). Towards the end of that I found LingQ and switched pretty much solely to that for some time. Again, probably doing 10 min or less of reading. Maybe 5-10 of listening (to appropriate level content). At some point my gf and I got the German cable package, so I started watching a lot more German…but definitely not level appropriate, so I’m not sure how much it helped, if at all…at least until I got to intermediate levels where I could at least start to understand some of the documentaries (dramatical shows are still extremely difficult).
I probably kept a similar schedule to around 15,000-20,000 words known–looking on my profile this is around 4 years-ish. Definitely slow in terms of overall time, but I’m quite pleased with the progress.
I believe I could’ve continued on at that pace…and reading-wise I do. What’s changed is I’ve added much more listening. Probably about 15 min to an hour a day. I felt I was really lagging with this more than anything. The good thing is that I was starting to understand a lot more, so podcasts and youtube videos from Easy German for example (intermediate level) started to make more sense and were therefore enjoyable to listen to while doing certain chores, so I could easily squeeze time in there…vs. the need for reading to be focused.
I have also started to fit in some reading and listening at the same time…an additional 13-26 min a day.
So the last year or so, I have ramped up things a fair amount. I still know I would’ve made progress with my 15 min a day of reading (since I’m still doing this and gaining vocabulary strictly from this). The additional listening time has really mostly just helped my listening capabilities a lot. I am also trying to spend 5-10 min a day speaking…to myself.
So yes, you can progress a substantial amount on 15 min a day. It would just take a long time to get where you ultimately want to be. I’m sure there probably is a point where one would stop making much progress at this pace and definitely for some, this pace might not be very rewarding. I do think it’s not optimal, but it fits with my schedule and the other many hobbies and interests I have.
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That is a lot of time devoted to language. If you enjoy it, and you are making progress, that’s excellent. I believe the American Foreign Services Institute does immersion courses for US government employees including diplomats. So they will study huge amounts each day.
I spend 15 minutes a day with Anki and French, then 15-30 minutes with Anki and German. I listen to French podcasts and watch French films for 1.5 to 2 hours a day. And I spend ~45 minutes with Lingq and German.
I have a feeling that anything less than 30 minutes a day is inadvisable because you won’t retain it. I can listen to a lot of French because my comprehension is very good, so it’s often like listening to English, and it isn’t tiring, in fact it’s usually fun. I went through many months of understanding the gist but not the details of podcasts. Films are still a challenge.
I struggle with German. I did Babbel, and now the short stories here. I don’t have enough vocabulary to listen to podcasts or watch videos. And 45 minutes study is tiring.
How to progress in German is an issue for me. I just hope that in six months the cases will have sunk in and listening will be easier.
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Thanks for your personal account! I’m intrigued and happy for your success. That’s a useful data point.
I’m at 14,000 known words after about six months study at 4+hr/day – 720 hours.
Call your stats as 15,000 words after 5 years at 15 mins/day – 450 hours.
So it would seem your approach is more efficient than mine!
Of course, without more rigorous checks to make sure we’re comparing apples with apples, it’s hard to say more than that we’re in the same ballpark.
This suggests that language learning is more a matter of cumulative time than concentration.
Thanks for the thoughts and your account! I find it quite useful to hear other people experiences.
Speaking of FSI – According to FSI, for French it takes 30 5-day weeks at 9 hours/weekday (total 1350 hours) to reach:
Minimum professional proficiency. The person can speak the language with sufficient structural accuracy and vocabulary to participate effectively in most formal and informal conversations on practical, social, and professional topics.*
The FSI (Foreign Service Institute) Rating Scale*
*
I"m at ~720 hours of French on LingQ and I"m nowhere near that description.
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The FSI link above contains this interesting tidbit, germane to our discussion:
Human attention is limited. No one can absorb knowledge steadily for six hours a day, week after week; some of the time in intensive courses is necessarily “wasted” in relaxing, clearing one’s mind, or plain daydreaming. Moreover, things that seem confusing one day sometimes clear up by the next, after they have settled into place in one’s mind. This “incubation” factor favors a non–intensive learning schedule. In short, it is not certain that people who spread their language learning over a longer period necessarily require more total hours than those who concentrate. They may even require fewer.
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Do you listen to massive amounts of comprehensible input? One year ago I started listening to French podcasts. Today I can follow most at a near 100% level, apart from occasional new words and phrases. There are still some speakers who I struggle with by virtue of their accent or vocal habits. It has been very frustrating, but the biggest reward is when I go back to a podcast that I struggled with, and I breeze through it. I still have to concentrate, but I believe that over time it will become more natural and effortless.
Also, do you practice speaking? I talk to myself, which allows me to practice making the sounds, and discover holes in my knowledge e.g. vocabulary. Also, are you covering enough subjects? I have noticed that a lot of online teachers cover the same old material, whilst missing an awful lot of useful language. As an example of more unusual phrases:
Il l’a jeté par dessus bord.
Elle a trébuché sur ses pieds.
Il a passé la matinée à élaguer ses arbustes.
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Yes, it’s really hard to tell some of these things. I like to think I’m doing things as efficiently as possible. I know it’s working, but is it most efficient? I am always interested in hearing what others are doing and whether I think what they are doing makes sense, and if it can fit in my limited routine time.
Also, my primary focus has been to acquire vocabulary and so what I’ve done mostly has catered to that (mostly reading since it is so easy to do anywhere any moment I have even a minute or two). LIke I said though, this has left gaps in listening and speaking to some extent, which I’m trying to rectify with additional activities in both. This has added to my daily average spent with the language lately, mostly because I’ve found ways to squeeze those activities into my normal routine.
I also think, to some extent, while I may only be spending a limited time each day, there is still the opportunity to think about things I may have done or read in that limited time, over the course of the day. Or perhaps by not cramming too much, it may absorb better. Very difficult to measure though, so who knows.
I do think consistency is key. Whether you spend 15 minutes a day, or several hours a day, if you can spend at least some time with the language every day (with only occasional days off) you will improve. I will take potentially a week or so off, if I’m on vacation, but on normal days, i spend at least 10-15 min a day minimum. I’m at a pace that doesn’t burn me out. That is key too.
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One thing that is quite sure to me is that when I was doing only “15’/day” Anki I wasn’t progressing at all. Same thing for other types of programs.
Instead, doing just a little (for different reasons) every day with LingQ, made me progress along the time without even realising it.
Yes, I could add other tools (even Anki back) but only if I wanted to dedicate more time and for specific tasks that would be really necessary at certain point during the process (there is no need to have this western obsession to go faster and faster so we can learn more and more). The amount of quantity that we can actually learn is very very limited, so we need to be more strategic and efficient and improve on that.
I’ve been actually doing even less in this period as I manage all 4 languages at the same time and changed my priorities for different reasons. But what I’ve noticed is that I can start reading stuff in German, sometimes, and understanding the most of it, depending on the vocabulary present. Once my brain will be at easy with the reading and listening, I can start to perfect declensions and other stuff, if needed and necessary to my development with the language.
I treat it as a sort of background knowledge hidden there, somewhere in my brain, that it could quickly increase and become more active IF deciding to go deep and accelerate the studying.
At the gym, we workout and we rest, during the resting phases the growth happens. Same thing for learning languages but in a different way. For some reasons, it is better to do less every day than doing more hours twice a week. But we need to give time to grow neurons and cells to tackle different vibrations and neural paths. We seem to forget, when we deal with the mind, that there is a physical part about it and that it requires time to grow that we cannot manage consciously, in the same way we are not controlling the muscle growth that it is managed by our unconscious mind, and it can very a lot depending on many circumstances our body is in.
Probably the key is our capacity to stay focused during that time we are studying. I believe there are at least 2 factors that can increase our capacity to make our time more productive:
- the capacity to stay focused and the ability to increase more focus for the same amount of time, then increasing the time,
- the capacity to dialogue with our unconscious mind and start a sort of tennis productive match between our two main areas of the brain. Our unconscious mind guides us through what to learn and our conscious mind does the job without giving our unconscious mind the possibility to escape; amongst other things.
Exactly. I like this quote.
Even more, we need to understand that our mind can only focus for a period of time per day. If we are also doing other activities that require mental effort, it would be very difficult to increase our time of mental effort also for learning languages.
Same thing applies to the body when we go to the gym (or sort of) and it is also tied to our body variables, job, and daily extra physical effort, injures and a ton of other elements we have.
As always, there are many individual variables that make it difficult to standardise, although we are all trying to do it! Plus, we definitely enjoy learning about it.
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As I’ve said in other topics, I’m not interested in advice or coaching. I’m here to compare notes with other language learners.
I do many things while learning. I don’t provide a full inventory in my comments.
I appreciate your concern. I don’t find the phrases you list unusual.
Well, that’s the big question, isn’t it? Learning a new language is a huge project. Efficiencies can make a huge difference.
Then there’s the question of whether one’s approach might kill one’s motivation.
Another question is whether to cover some aspect now or later.
When I study, I work intensively on listening and pronunciation. Many normal French sentences are tongue twisters for me. I spent a couple minutes getting this simple one right:
Je ne peux pas vous voir.
Zhuh nuh puh pah voo vwah.
It’s not my first priority, but I do want to speak French reasonably well some day.
I like Steve Kaufmann’s recommendation, given that fully correct native pronunciation takes years to nail, if at all, one should settle for pronunciation that doesn’t annoy native speakers!
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I thought of you when I quoted that quote!
I’ve never been a jock but I do work out and I’ve certainly noticed that one’s rest periods are as crucial to one’s progress when it comes to building strength or endurance. Not enough rest = injuries and time lost healing.
Most people imagine that mental processes occur in some frictionless Platonic domain. However, as you point out, language learning involves growing new neuronal connections and even new neurons themselves. It’s a biological process, which doesn’t respect working harder and longer.
That said, in my life, I’ve noticed that a high-energy obsessiveness makes a big difference in my learning. I come from a math/programming background where one absolutely must strap in and focus for more than 15-30 minutes to get anything significant accomplished.,
It appears to me that language learning is more like solving huge jigsaw puzzle. One can dip in for 15 minutes, place a few puzzle pieces, then dip out, without incurring the loss of one’s train of thought.
I don’t read other topics before replying to a post. Given your rude and arrogant post, I will in future avoid commenting on your posts.