Learning A Language With Minimal Daily Study

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Lysander
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Learning A Language With Minimal Daily Study

Postby Lysander » Thu Jun 21, 2018 2:46 am

smallwhite, iguanamon, and I are all interested in hearing about people's experiences with successfully learning a language with minimal daily study time. See here for the genesis of the thread you are currently reading:
https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 82#p108477

Step on up. Anyone ever learned a language with only 45 minutes study a day? 30? 20? 15?

Anyone tried to learn a language with a low amount of time and fail? If you were to do it over, could you have succeeded if you had done something different? Or was it doomed no matter what?

Share any and all thoughts! But, of course, we are most excited to read a success story.
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Re: Learning A Language With Minimal Daily Study

Postby Fortheo » Thu Jun 21, 2018 7:58 am

Hopefully he'll correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe expugnator only spends around 15-30 minutes a day on the majority of languages he's studying and he seems to be making good progress.


Hopefully he'll stop by this thread.
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Re: Learning A Language With Minimal Daily Study

Postby smallwhite » Thu Jun 21, 2018 9:03 am

Thank you to Lysander for the thread!

I don't doubt short study days could still bring about progress, but at what speed and to reach what results? If you study a lot per day, you'd be able to connect dots more easily because more dots are there fresh in your mind, whereas if you study less per day, there'd be more forgetting which means more recall attempts so you benefit from the testing effect and the spacing effect. Now, which way is better? I wonder.

Here is a recent post of Expug's where he details the actualy studying part of his daily schedule, and an older and briefer one here.
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Re: Learning A Language With Minimal Daily Study

Postby brilliantyears » Thu Jun 21, 2018 9:21 am

smallwhite wrote:Here is a recent post of Expug's where he details the actualy studying part of his daily schedule, and an older and briefer one here.

7+ hours a day.... :o Mad respect!

I guess a lot also depends on how you spend your 'minimal daily study', doesn't it? If that's 15-30 minutes of intensive study (i.e. actively learning grammar, vocabulary, etc.), but alongside that you passively interact* with your language by watching movies or listening to music (and you don't count that as 'daily study'), that also makes a difference.

* I guess these two words are mutually exclusive? :?
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Re: Learning A Language With Minimal Daily Study

Postby tarvos » Thu Jun 21, 2018 9:51 am

Nope.

Sorry. :(

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Re: Learning A Language With Minimal Daily Study

Postby iguanamon » Thu Jun 21, 2018 12:07 pm

I think that there's a difference between someone who has already learned a second language to a high level vs someone who has yet to do this. Monolingual beginners have a lot more to digest in learning a language- learning how a language works and grappling with concepts that they haven't thought much about before; learning how they learn best; learning how to navigate and use learning resources to help and not hinder their learning; etc. Experienced learners have this under their belt already and can profit more from short learning sessions. So, I'd like to see if someone limited themselves to 10-15-20 minutes to learn a language from scratch as a monolingual.
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Re: Learning A Language With Minimal Daily Study

Postby tastyonions » Thu Jun 21, 2018 12:55 pm

That's actually how I always start out learning a language, maybe for the first six months to a year. Then once the quantity of stuff that I don't understand gets less intimidating, I like to add in more time when my schedule permits.
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Re: Learning A Language With Minimal Daily Study

Postby Axon » Thu Jun 21, 2018 2:53 pm

Success story? Depends.

In 2015-2016 I was extremely busy at university, taking advanced German and intermediate Chinese among quite a few other obligations. I "needed" to also learn Vietnamese and Russian for a trip, and I allocated a pretty minimal amount of time for them. I started both around October '15 and set off in July '16.

Vietnamese I basically did a ton of pronunciation practice and eventually met an advanced non-native tutor weekly to look at textbook drills. I also watched YouTube videos and tried to have short conversations online. I had Glossika but didn't use it much. Definitely didn't study every day, rarely for more than half an hour at a time. When I got to Vietnam, I became a successful tourist in about a week's time, to the point where I could use the language to navigate taxis and restaurants. At the end of two weeks in-country I was very comfortable with menus, numbers, and restaurant language but couldn't really have a conversation beyond introductions.

I took Russian a little more seriously. I went through the first 1000 sentences of Glossika and did Duolingo every single day, plus sporadic Anki and YouTube. I also had weekly group classes with a heritage-speaker teacher. I worked on pronunciation a lot as I'd just started to get really into phonetics and chorusing. There were no days of zero Russian, though there were quite a few of only Duolingo. I didn't touch Russian for about a month before I got to Russia (traveling in other countries) and I'd deceived myself into thinking that I was at a conversational level. I was definitely a beyond adequate tourist, but virtually every conversation I had ground to an awkward halt. After two weeks in Russia I didn't notice a lot of improvement, plus I was fatigued already from a long trip. Since then, I haven't had a whole lot of enthusiasm for the language even though I know it's important.

Now that I've devoted even more of my life to languages, I feel that I know much better now how to tackle a pretty crazy challenge like that. Like iguanamon said, I know my own learning better and I know languages in general better.

If I were to take on something comparable like Thai and Armenian right now, I think I could be disciplined and consistent enough to reach a comfortable tourist/limited conversation level in nine months of 20 minutes a day. Beyond that level, though, talking about real fluency - I think that could take more than 18 months and there would be a big danger of burnout in the intermediate plateau. At 20 minutes a day you can't really get into much of a groove and absorb the language like you need to for fluency.
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Re: Learning A Language With Minimal Daily Study

Postby Cavesa » Thu Jun 21, 2018 2:55 pm

Lysander wrote:Step on up. Anyone ever learned a language with only 45 minutes study a day? 30? 20? 15?


What is "minimal" about that? putting in half an hour every day is already more than most learners (even those who get quite far, it just takes them longer). I don't struggle with the length of my study sessions. I struggle with everyday consistency. 45 minutes a day equal over 5 hours a week, that is not little.

I'd say it would make more sense to ask about "minimal weekly study" perhaps. Or about learning slowly but consistently. And the success stories shouldn't be that rare.

What would be rare are people that really study every day. No matter whether for 2 hours or 20 minutes, just every day. I admire them and I think they are on the best way to succeed.
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Re: Learning A Language With Minimal Daily Study

Postby smallwhite » Thu Jun 21, 2018 3:19 pm

Thread: How much language study do you do?

"How much language study do you do on average per day?"
"<Less than 1 hour a day" 22% voters.

We'd like to hear from you!
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