A busy schedule holds too many people back from learning languages. And not because it means you don’t have time to learn a language. It means you think you don’t have the time to learn a language. Let’s talk about how many hours you should study per day to learn a language.
How many hours should I study per day? More than you spend on YouTube.
The first reason why you don’t have time to learn a language is because of YouTube. Lots of people come on here and post videos about how they spend however many hours every single day learning a language until they magically get fluent in like seven weeks. Is this possible? Sure. Is it reasonable? No.
It’s not reasonable for normal humans with busy schedules like you. But a reasonable schedule is not going to go viral. Thanks to these viral YouTube videos, people tend to think that language learning needs to be a part-time job for it to be worth it. It’s really easy to feel like you need to spend an hour or two every single day to learn a language to make it worth your time.
And we’re all adults. Nobody has that amount of time just hanging around. So you assume that you don’t have time to learn a language. You’re too busy. How many hours should I study per day? You don’t need a lot of time every single day, you don’t even need to every day because the truth is that spending hours every single day to learn a language is less conducive to learning a language than spending 10 minutes here, 15 minutes there, a few times a week.
Because language learning is a marathon. It’s not a sprint. It’s not something that you can sit down for hours on end and study and study and study without all your other responsibilities bothering you. And bam, you learn a language. That’s not how it works. A little bit goes a long way, a lot farther than you may think it does.
So if you want to learn a language, but you feel like you’re too busy because you have a busy schedule, you don’t have an hour every single day to commit to a hobby, remember that you don’t need to spend that much time every day. Consistency is the most important thing. And if you can’t consistently find an hour in your day every single day, that’s fine. But if you can find 10 minutes, 15 minutes, maybe even 20, every couple of days, you’ll be golden.
Because coming back to the habit time after time after time over the long term will get you there a lot faster than you think it will. Because, yes, there are people who can commit a part-time job’s worth of time to language learning. But they’re the exception, not the rule. Most language learners do not do that because it’s just unrealistic. People have to work. People have families. People have other hobbies.
Spend more time on strategies you enjoy
The thing to consider when asking “How many hours should I study per day” is what you consider “studying” to consist of. The only experience that you have about learning languages or learning any number of skills is sitting down with a textbook and reading and doing activities and being told what to do step by step by step, which is boring for most people.
You think you need to memorize grammar rules to a T, you think you need to have excellent vocabulary. You think that textbook knowledge is all of the knowledge you need. If that sounds like you, welcome to the 21st century. We have so many different ways to learn languages that are a lot more fun and they require a lot less sit-down time because again, we’re all busy people. There are audio lessons, there is music, there are books. There are ways to turn Netflix into your favorite language learning activity.
If I didn’t know about any of those strategies, yeah, I would feel like I was too busy too. I don’t have the time to force myself to sit down and go through another textbook. But if you have a podcast specifically made for language learners that you can listen to on your commute to work or whatever, learning a language becomes a lot easier and a lot more interesting. And it takes a lot less time because it’s time that you’re already spending doing something else, which is kind of brainless.
These days, learning a language means finding little pockets of your day-to-day so you can keep your normal real-life routine and not completely try and blow up your entire schedule just to learn a language. You don’t have to do that.
How many hours should I study per day? Fewer than you think.
The next thing to realize when asking “How many hours should I study per day?” is that you don’t have the patience to wait for it to happen. You know that learning a language is a long-term thing and you just don’t have the patience to do something for six months or a year before you see results, which I get. I don’t have that kind of patience either.
Fortunately for us, language learning is a little bit more nuanced than going from absolutely zero to native fluency. There are like a million different steps in between, and the important thing is being aware of those steps and being able to see when you reach them. So that way you don’t have to wait six months or a year or two years to finally reach your goals. Let me give you an example that a lot of my clients have gone through.
A real-life example
Let’s say that you want to have Spanish conversations. You know some beginner vocabulary, like you’ve probably gone through Duolingo, maybe taken some beginner classes in school, but you can’t say anything in being able to have a fully-fledged, confident, comfortable conversation just seems completely unrealistic and like it’s never going to happen.
Because of this, every single time you try and get back into learning Spanish, you give up quickly because why are you spending this time in your busy day-to-day life disrupting your busy schedule for apparently no reason? Because you don’t see, you’re not you’re not fluent yet. You can’t have conversations yet. So what a waste of time. You’re still at zero, maybe one in the language and you want to get 20. That’s a big jump.
So how about we take several steps back and focus instead on getting to level one or two? Depending on you and your goals, this could look like all sorts of things, this is what I teach my clients in The Method, how to plot those progress points in a way that makes sense for them in their language learning.
But level one or two can be something as simple as introducing yourself in Spanish because you may know the words, but have you practiced saying them at all? Have you opened your mouth? And this isn’t like a “you” problem. This isn’t something that you’ve done wrong. This is what traditional language learning teaches us to do, that learning to recognize the words more or less is what you need, and don’t worry about speaking them.
But can you confidently, and consistently introduce yourself in Spanish? That could be your step two. And then step three could be talking about your family, expressing how many siblings you have, where you live, how many pets you have, your favorite color, things like that, all that beginner stuff that you may know theoretically in your brain, but you’ve never actually used it because using the language is a part of language learning that a lot of traditional methods don’t focus on and don’t care about because it’s hard to measure.
So if you get to level two and you can introduce yourself in the language, can you have full-fledged conversations? No, but you are one step closer and that is a big deal. Because once you get that one step closer, if you’re at level two and you want to get to level 20, that’s two steps less, fewer than you have to do, you only have 18 steps left. And then you get another step where you can talk about your family and where you live, and that’s only 17 more. So you get closer and closer and closer, you take those baby steps, and all of a sudden you realize that you’ve reached your goal.
You don’t have to wait six months to a year to make progress. You can make progress in like 30 minutes.
How many hours should I study per day? As many (or as little) as you want.
The next reason why you don’t have time to learn a language is because you have so many other hobbies that are probably more useful and productive in your life. Maybe you’ve invested a lot of money in them, so you should probably do those first.
Now, this all-or-nothing perspective is really common. I mean, I struggle with this myself, feeling like you have to be perfect in a thing before you’re finished with it. Now, remember we already discussed that you don’t have to spend hours upon hours every single day learning a language for it to be effective.
You also don’t have to just learn languages. You can also do other hobbies. Doing other hobbies, and doing other things in your life does not make your language learning less valid. if you have a goal to learn Italian, for example, you can do other things in your life that have absolutely nothing to do with learning Italian. And that’s perfectly fine. This is a hobby.
You don’t have to spend your entire life listening to Italian, speaking it, reading books, writing in it, all that jazz. I mean, you are perfectly welcome to, and if you find it fun and interesting, you can plug your two hobbies together.
So for example, if you want to learn crochet, you can find somebody who teaches crochet on YouTube but teaches it in Italian. And you can do that, but you don’t have to. And both are fine.
I know it’s really easy to feel like you should be more productive, but it’s okay. You are allowed to just enjoy things and you are allowed to do it whenever is convenient and reasonable for your own life. And you don’t have to feel guilty about it.
We tend to make language learning something that should be a huge priority in our lives if we want to accomplish it. But that’s just not necessary. That’s why you don’t have time to learn a language because you feel like you have to get rid of everything else in your life and focus all of your energy on language learning. It’s just not true.
If you find 10 minutes in your day to think in the language talk out loud, listen to an audiobook, or listen to music or whatever it is that you enjoy doing, that is language learning.
How to spend less time procrastinating
That is an excellent segue to the next answer to “How many hours should I study per day?” is to understand how often you procrastinate. Now, when I say this is not to be judgmental, this is just a symptom of an underlying problem. What’s the problem?
Language learning feels like a giant world that is just very overwhelming and filled with lots of negative thoughts and criticisms and failure and vulnerability and fear. And just like a whole ball of like, stress. It’s really difficult for you to commit because you’re afraid that you’re going to be embarrassed or you’re not going to do it well enough or you’re not going to have enough time, or something as simple as if you start learning a language, then you’re going to feel bad every single time you’re not studying the language.
And all of that is so stressful that it’s easier just to scroll Netflix for an hour. And if this is why you don’t have time to learn a language, be kinder to yourself. You’re setting your expectations for yourself and your language learning way too high.
You don’t have to learn a language perfectly, actually, there’s no way to learn languages perfectly. That’s not what language learning is. You also don’t have to commit every single second of your free time to do it effectively. You are allowed to do other things in life. You are allowed to have other interests. You’re allowed to take a day off, take a week off, take a month off.
There are no real rules for learning a language, and as soon as you internalize this, then you will finally have time to learn a language.
If this resonates with you, I highly recommend you take my free quiz – it’ll tell you the next steps that you need to take in your language learning and the mindsets that you need to adopt to give you that time that you’re looking for to learn a language.
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