I got asked the following questions, and decided make a post about it with the Synergy stuff: I’ll get to those questions, but first let me talk about time in general. How much time should you study? Ideally, as much as possible while maintaining adequate attention, mental health and physical health. Here’s a sample situation. You have no other obligations during the day. You require 8 hours of sleep, and 1 hour a day of cardio vascular exercise. You also require an additional 2 hours a day for meal breaks, and a 5 min break for every hour of study at the computer. That leaves roughly 12 hours a day that you could study. If you maintain a normal level of attention, don’t feel yourself getting drowsy, and don’t harbor regrets for spending all this time studying, 12 hours a day is ok. But I think that it’s a very rare individual who can study consistently 12 hours a day. For our mental health, and to stay fresh and alert during our study hours, we normally need to spend time doing other things too. I consider myself above average regarding my ability to study a lot, and I find it hard to maintain 8 hours a day for more than a few months, and that’s with the occasional 2 or 3 hour day thrown in for mental health reasons. Another thing that’s not realistic about this situation for most is the premise of having nothing else to do in the day. Most of us have jobs and responsibilities outside of our studies, which severely limits out study time. But most people can come up with a rough idea of how much time they can spend, which is important when trying to come up with a study plan. One warning about the amount of time to study. (I’m talking about learning a language here, not maintaining it.) If you can’t devote at least, on the average, an hour a day for at least a year, you will probably never reach B1 in a language, regardless of the method. This is because you won’t be spending adequate time in the language to be able to remember enough to make steady progress. There is a sort of critical mass in languages learning, and it happens somewhere around 1 hr/day. Now I’m going to talk about time management for each step of Synergy. Pre-learning research (no fixed time). This isn’t really time critical. You can do it all in one night, or over the course of several years, discovering just how you want to tackle your next language. Step 1 – Isolated pronunciation and orthography (30 min/day minimum). I recommend working on this daily, at least 30 min/day, until you have reached the goal of this step, which is to be able to repeat isolated words correctly after hearing them, and be able to read isolated words out loud with correct pronunciation. I usually use more than 30 min a day, because it’s the only thing I’m doing at that point. You can do less if you want, as long as you reach your goal before going onto the next step. Step 2 – Sentence level pronunciation, vocabulary and listening (1 hr/day minimum). Now things get a little busier, so I will itemize them. 1) Pimsleur (primary) – 30 min. That’s the length of a lesson, so it’s fixed. If you’re not using Pimsleur, do 30 min/day of parroting your other material. 2) Listening (primary) – at least 10 min of native material. If you’re listening to podcasts that contain a lot of L1, you want to listen to enough of them so that the native material in them totals over 10 minutes. 3) Reading – at least 10 min. Usually reading your flashcards out loud will be enough to fulfill this. 4) Writing – at least 10 min. Writing out vocabulary words or flashcard sentences should be enough. 5) Vocabulary/Sentences – use your SRS to review Pimsleur as a minimum. Creating the cards will probably take you at least 10 min. The time to actually do the cards is probably accounted for in 2) and 3) above. Where to cut time for this step: Because the minimum time here is so short, and there is so much going on, it’s hard to cut. You could try to get by without SRS reviews, thus wiping out 3) thru 5), but it’s not recommended because reviews are being used for more than just helping you memorize things here. Step 3 –Grammar, reading, writing, and conversation (1¾ hr/day minimum). Unless noted, these are the minimum times per day. 1) Conversation (primary) – 30 min. 2) Reading (primary) – 15 min. 3) Writing (primary) – 15 min. 4) Grammar (primary) – 30 min. 5) Listening (primary) – 15 min. 6) SRS – no more than 60 min. Where to cut time for this step: Eliminate or greatly reduce your SRS time 6), and stick to the minimums. Step 4 – Take reading, writing, listening and conversation to C1/C2 (1¾ hr/day minimum). These are the minimum times per day. 1) Conversation (primary) – 30 min. 2) Reading (primary) – 30 min. 3) Writing (primary) – 15 min. 4) Listening (primary) – 30 min. Where to cut time for this step: I don’t recommend going below these minimums. Study more than the minimums. Remember, the above numbers are not optimal. Optimal would be the highest multiple of these numbers that you can fit in your schedule. For me, it’s probably 3 or 4 times these numbers when I’m not working. But when I am working, I use the minimums as a lower limit for my studies. It’s not necessary to do exact multiples of the minimums, or keep exact percentages. If you have extra time, I recommend working on your weaknesses, and trying to keep your skills reasonably balanced.
Interesting post, but I think you run the risk of scaring beginners off with these numbers. An absolute minimum of an hour a day for a year and a recommended minimum of up to 1 3/4 hours per day is going to be a huge deterrent to a lot of people. Of course more is better, but I think it's possible to make progress with much less study time. It's not ideal, but I think progress could be made by alternating a 60 minute learning day with a 15-20 minute review day, for example. Another way to cut time would be to reduce speaking to every other day or even twice per week. It's not as good as speaking every day but the learner will still improve. Another possibility is alternating periods of learning with periods of maintenance. The method I used for learning Thai is similar to interval training: hard, short bursts of energy followed by rest periods. I don't claim that this method is more effective for language learning but it's what I used due to fluctuating motivation, other interests, and other commitments. But I was still able to make good progress in the language. Here's what my Thai studies looked like: For about 2 months I went to school an hour per day Monday-Friday and maybe studied an hour per day on the weekend. I quit because I was going to take a trip to the U.S. and thought I would start up again when I returned. After I got back I decided that my main problem was a lack of vocabulary which is something I could learn on my own. For about 6 months I worked on learning vocabulary, studying for about an hour on most days but taking many days off and occasionally taking longer breaks of several days up to one week. Once I felt like I plateaued I signed up for 60 hours of private lessons. I did 2 hours/week with my tutor which was mostly used to answer questions from my studying. I probably averaged about 5 hours of total studying per week during this time. After the 60 hours were finished I felt like I was ready to learn on my own again, but after a month or two I got bored with it and took a break of a few months where I was only studying for maybe an hour per week. My motivation was rekindled by finding the forum at http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/default.asp . Then I met you and you got me motivated to focus on conversation. Up to that point, I would very rarely speak Thai and would quickly switch to English if either I or my partner was having difficulties. I made a Thai friend who couldn't speak English so we were forced to communicate in Thai. For about a year I probably averaged about 6 hours/week of conversation with her and I did a few hours of other studying. She moved away and I went into another maintenance period of about 3 months. My final push consisted of two things: reading a 700 page novel while using the English translation as a guide, and watching Thai movies and pausing the movie to read the subtitles and look up unknown words in the dictionary. For about 6 months I did this for about 1-3 hours per day maybe 5 days per week. I planned to learn all the words on the vocabulary lists from the movies and re-watch them multiple times until I could fully understand them but I didn't follow up on it. But just the act of looking them up and writing them down helped me to learn some of them and the intensive listening really helped with my listening comprehension. For the last approximately 3 years I haven't done any studying other than maybe an hour/week of conversation and watching a movie every month or two. I feel like my level has slipped a bit but I know it would quickly come back if I focused on it again. I'm probably at a low B2 level now with my conversation which is sufficient for my needs. Unfortunately I don't have any motivation to try to progress beyond this point. One interesting thing to note about my studying is that I never really had a balanced program. I totally excluded writing which I think hurt me, but other than that it worked out pretty well in the end. For a long time I focused on only reading and vocabulary, then a good grammar book was finally written for Thai so I studied that for about a month. Then came a period where I did mostly conversation, then I read a novel which helped to reinforce all the grammar I'd learned and finally I focused on listening when I did the movie projects. I plan to have a more balanced approach when I learn Russian (except to focus on listening right away) but it won't be broken down into using all 4 skills every day. I like to either focus on what I feel like I need to work on at the time or just do whatever I'm in the mood to do that day. The thing I will do differently this time is to make sure that no one skill lags too far behind the others and to hopefully not take so many breaks.
Nice post. It was interesting reading about your Thai learning experience. Regarding the one hour a day "on the average" (not "absolute") recommendation, I feel pretty good about it. I admit that one hour is a conservative rule of thumb. Critical mass is probably more like 200-250 hours a year, and is affected by lots of other things like being immersed, etc. But if I said 4 hours a week, I'm afraid people would plan for that and fall short. I'm more afraid of that happening than scaring people off. Plus, according to several discussions on the forum you mentioned, most successful learners average much more than that. Regarding the Synergy limits, they are designed to get one to C1 as efficiently as possible. I'm not saying you will fail if you go below them, but you will not learn as efficiently, meaning you won't make as much progress in the same number of hours. I set the limits up on a per day basis. I could have set them up on a per week basis too. You don't have to do each skill every day, but you should do each skill at least 3 times a week. This reminds me of learning in spurts.
