How often should you be on your language learning app? How fast should you be making progress? There’s no one-size-fits-all answer to questions like these but, hopefully, this short blog can help you think about them more helpfully!
Your pace of progress when learning something, especially when learning a language, might not always be even. The progress may even begin to feel non-linear as you go. You’ll start to feel like you’re going backward on some things and forward on others. Don’t get discouraged! In the long run, you do make progress! But on the day-to-day level, you still need to think about how you’re going to approach an important task of self-improvement and find flexible schedules in language apps!
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Flexible Schedules In Language Apps Enable Strong Foundations
Your goal should be to make the most persistent, sustainable pace of progress that you can. This definitely does not mean trying to go as fast as you can. In fact, going as fast as possible can often cause your progress to slow down. It can demoralize you, and you might even give up altogether.
Part of the issue is you want to not just cram any task you can into as many hours as possible thinking this will make you progress more quickly. You need to think through what tasks you have before you, and rethink it at different steps throughout your language learning journey.
You should take some time every week to tackle different tasks that are troubling you: read up on grammar, practice reading and writing (maybe the language you’re studying has a new script, or unfamiliar spelling conventions in a script that you already know), etc.
You can always find MORE time for anything you’re practicing or learning. But if you don’t set aside any particular time for things that you’re putting in a conscious effort, it can easily fall by the wayside, next to so many other discarded hobbies! Make sure that you take note of any recurring pattern in your language learning, and set aside particular time to address questions that you have!
But that being said, you need to return to some kind of “home base” of regular language practice to bring it all together. Maybe that’s a class, but for many of us, that’s going to be a language-learning app!
What Is A Good Schedule For Learning A Language?
When you’re planning your week, it’s easy to not think about things like planning for language practice if nobody else is involved. The app doesn’t need a special time, because it’s available whenever you are, right?
It’s easy to see things that way, but you could easily be undermining yourself and your own progress. Having a baseline schedule and discipline of practice is important for gauging your own pace and progress, and for maintaining it.
Start small and work your way up, to avoid overwhelming yourself. Commit to practicing at least one day a week (if it really only is one day, make it the first day of the week), at a time you know you’ll be able to commit to your practice: maybe you have a long commute and then set yourself a reminder for a time lining up with that. Maybe you know your mind will be occupied until you get off work, in which case schedule yourself some time for just after work. But make sure you have a way to hold yourself to practicing at a specific time.
If you start with some days of the week “off” from your practice, and find this is “too easy”, ramp up by adding more DAYS, not more times within a day. If your whole week can be scheduled this way and you still crave more practice, then you can start adding more practice in after your scheduled time. But if you start off scheduling yourself the maximum amount of possible time practicing a language that you’re learning, you may bite off more than you can chew: overwhelmed, you’re likely to stop practicing altogether, and that’s what we’re trying to avoid.
How To Schedule Learning A Language: Some Practical Tips
I consider that there’s an upper limit to the usefulness of increasing the frequency of the same tasks where it no longer serves the purpose of helping you master the thing that you’re practicing, but also burns you out and makes you give up, leaving you demoralized.
- It’s very important to have a general practice time, a baseline discipline to build up your foundations in the language as a whole. And the more days of the week you spend on this, the better. But the usefulness of drilling yourself on the same general things in the same general way does run out. Even outside of other things you need to be doing and your brain’s need to rest and absorb, consider keeping a realistic limit on the quantity of practice and diversifying the quality:
- I like to spend a certain amount of time every day when I’m learning languages just drilling myself on verb conjugations. But if I did this for an hour or more, my eyes would definitely glaze over and I’d cease to be seeing any benefit from it. That’s why I try to switch between vocabulary memorization, verb conjugation, case morphology, conversation practice, and other specific sub-tasks, both reading about them in the abstract and practicing them.
- I speak quite a few languages and hold a degree in theoretical linguistics, and even I can’t spend much more than an hour all together on tasks like those listed above. I try to maintain a regular discipline and cycle between a sections of my language studies, once a day, and then I move on to other things, because we all have busy schedules!
Non-Linear Progress And Doubling Back
As I hope that I’ve made clear, learning a language isn’t just a matter of clocking a certain number of hours. There are many things to learn, from vocabulary to sentence structure, from morphology to syntax to lexicon and idioms.
Often when we’re learning a new language we’ll feel that we’re forgetting one thing even when we’re making progress somewhere else. There’s no need to feel discouraged, demoralized, much less to give up because of this!
Make sure you keep up a regular timed discipline and be ready to be flexible with different aspects of your study. If you feel that you’re outpacing yourself or even forgetting key things in a given area of your language studies, don’t be embarrassed to go back and review things from earlier chapters, lessons, or modules.
You’ve got no one you’re accountable to but yourself. You owe it to yourself to meet yourself where you’re at, and make sure you understand what you’re learning so you can enjoy the satisfaction and fun of speaking a new language in real time with friends and family for whom you’re learning!
Is There An App For Learning Different Languages? Try Ling!
One app I like to use because of the diversity of languages it offers is Ling. The Ling app offers more languages than almost any other app, and many of the languages on offer are available nowhere else! This is perfect for someone like me who enjoys learning languages that are less frequently taught, like Dravidian, Iranian, or Southeast Asian languages.
Ling offers all of its languages, and all of their material, bundled together for the same price when you subscribe. Created by fellow enthusiastic students and teachers of foreign languages, Ling’s curriculum covers the same basic topics over a diverse curriculum whether you’re studying Yoruba or Bosnian. It’s a great place to start and a great place to keep up your practice!
Why Choose Ling?
- Ling’s curriculum covers realistic conversations with extensive vocabulary for all of their languages, offering illustrated flashcard type quizzes of basic vocabulary, isolated sentence deconstruction exercises, and conversation simulation all from the same app. It’s a great place to look for your “home base” of language practice in your busy schedule, no matter what language you’re learning!
- Scheduling becomes easier with Ling too. Ling’s easy to use daily reminder settings allow you to remind yourself to study just one day a week, for every weekday, every single day of the week, or any combination of days you might choose.
- You’ll get a regular reminder at the time you select to make sure you keep your practice up. You can always go back to the app and practice more later, or change your settings to practice at a different time, or more or less days of the week.
Outside of scheduled practice which can feel like training, it’s important to remember that language is a social act, and something fun to do! The team behind Ling understand this, and in addition to the app itself with its lessons and quizzes, they’re producing blogs, videos (ranging in content from short-form fun comparisons of vocabulary across languages to in-depth explanations of individual languages) on platforms such as TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram, as well as working to build a community through the official Ling Discord channel.
There are many others like you, across the world, choosing to study a new language despite whatever apparent immediate obstacles exist. Ling is a great, cost-effective way to get the resources and materials you need for your learning journey on a budget, no matter what language you’re learning, as well as meet a new community, right now, today!
Download Ling (available on the App Store and Google Play Store) and try it for yourself! See you there!
