Language learning is hard. Learning them as an adult is even harder. There are times when you will feel like it has been months since you have made any progress matched by days where you will feel your target language pours out your mouth with native ease. Over the last six years and across two new languages, I’ve gone through piles of language learning content to find what works for me. I want to share my routine that steadily shows progress, in both immersion and without.
Consistency Is Key
I want to address the first thing. I’m about to be in my forties, I work 50+ hours a week in the American corporate hellscape, and I don’t have a lot of time to study. I fit these steps in anywhere I can: the bus commute, waiting for an appointment, queueing for an event. For that reason make sure everything you setup you can do from your phone.
Second, consistency I’ve found is key with 15 minutes a day better than 2 hours one day a week. For that reason I’ve broken this down into a few loops: daily, weekly, and monthly. These loops are designed to resurface and cement core items into my memory.
Each of these have a minimum and then more on top for when I find myself on an extended bus ride or sitting at a doctor’s office. What’s important is to avoid scrolling in your downtime until you have done the bare minimum. From there, your pace of progress is your choice.
Before I get to the loops though lets talk the progression. I could break this down into Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) levels, but then I would have to explain what each CEFR level means. Instead my descriptive progression path is:
Stupid Baby
V
Hearing Words You Know
V
Not Being Lost Sometimes
V
TV With Subtitles
V
Natural Learning
V
Unnatural LearningEach of these levels require greater time commitment to break through and diverse times for every individual depending on the language. The last two I’ll quickly explain as they may not be obvious. Natural learning is when you can ingest content and learn through regular consumption of media. Unnatural learning is when you want to reach a higher level such as academic or technical understanding, a level of language you would not find in most published media or conversation.
When you first start, Stupid Baby is fun because you pick up a lot fast. You’ll be a great hit at parties as you know annoy everyone with what you’re excited about having learned (they don’t give a shit). Once you reach Not Being Lost Sometimes things become hard and you will have to put in the work. I didn’t start doing the loops I’m about to explain until that point with my first language, but with my second I did them from the beginning. Choose your own adventure there, but I feel that I’ve retained more at a faster rate in the second language.
The Daily Loop
First thing is first, try to intersect your every day with your target language. As soon as you can, switch your phone. You can toggle apps one-by-one to your native language if you need in the settings, but doing this you will quickly learn days of the week, common computer settings, and a host of regularly used vocabulary. This is a freebie because you aren’t going to not use your phone in your daily life and you have already memorized all the button layouts anyways so you can robotically move through the motions while picking up vocabulary.
Anki
This is the bare minimum every day. Anki is an app that’s expensive but worth every penny for learning with spaced repetition (the benefits of which have been well described by Gwern). Do not download pre-canned decks and only add words as you come across them naturally. Vocabulary needs context to be useful.
I complete Anki every day, 100 notecards per language, and each takes me between 7 to 15 minutes. That’s my bare minimum. I consider this stopping the bleeding when I don’t have time to go deeper. Before I made this my bare minimum I would sometimes go a week or two without a lesson due to work and find I’d regressed. Not anymore.
15 Minutes of Reading
If I have more time I jump into reading. I learn best reading, you might learn best another way, but either way this is a skill we want to learn in a new language. Finding digestible content is key. In the beginning a grammar book may have this, but as you progress you can read news articles or children’s books. Eventually you’ll be reading real books, but on the way there consider using Generative AI, whatever free service you can find, and ask it to write you a one page essay in your target language on a topic you do not have the vocabulary for yet.
Once you can switch over all of your news consumption into your target language. Congratulations you now get to doom scroll in your target language and it counts as studying. Add any vocabulary you read and don’t recognize to your Anki.
15 Minutes Listening
Listening takes the longest time to develop and I would be tempted to put it ahead of reading, but you just can’t beat the ease of consuming new things in written form. Luckily, listening can be done just about anywhere. Target beginner podcasts for starters. Every language has them and it’s a great way to get grammar lessons, pronunciation, and listening practice rolled into one.
Then hop immediately into music, toggling on the lyrics mode on whichever streaming app you use and adding vocabulary you do not know to your Anki. This is free reading practice too and interpreting the lyrics can make great fodder for writing prompts later. As you progress you can hop into podcasts in whatever genre you like, but personally I hate most podcasts and opt to go right for Radio Garden. Radio Garden lets you listen to live radio around the world. Leave it on in the background whenever you are able. I got this tip from a teacher and I do not know how but I absorbed better pronunciation and a more natural sound from listening to how natives use the language.
Lastly, I had some prior success with setting up a separate TikTok and YouTube account in my target language and purposefully picking only target language content. I ended up wasting too much time chasing content and filtering the feeds. Once you are to the TV With Subtitles phase you will be able to consume this content somewhat naturally along with TV and film so I wouldn’t waste time trying to build the perfect feed until then.
15 Minutes of Writing
Great I’ve had a really open day. I honestly get this maybe three times a week unless work is slow. Just being honest. Write three paragraphs on whatever topic you like. If you have extra free time pick a topic you know you’ll have to lookup vocabulary for (add it to your Anki) and use it. As you progress, write your notes and shopping lists in your target language. You’re now studying for free again, good work. As soon as you’re able find the subreddits for your target language and when you build up the courage start replying, get eviscerated, keep replying. Add all that rude slang they used to insult you on the internet to your Anki if you don’t recognize it.
The Weekly Loop
Where the daily loop is intended to maintain and slowly ratchet you forward, the weekly loop is intended to do big leaps. If the daily loop takes about an hour a day if you get through all of it, then the weekly loop adds on about 2 hours a week of work. Only about one hour a week is a bare minimum so you are seeing about 3 hours bare minimum a week to 9 hours if you can get through it all. If you don’t think you can do that look at your screen time app on your phone and tell me you haven’t spent 3 hours on TikTok today alone.
One Live Lesson
This is the bare minimum each week. Do one live lesson, more if you can. Throw any dumb AI garbage where you talk with a robot out the window. The entire point of learning a language is to use it with the people. Use Preply or Italki, find a real tutor, maybe make a friend for life. One of my tutors and I have gotten so close we call each other brother and talk near daily. I stay with him when I visit. Don’t skimp out on this experience and your shoe in to a good time when visiting another country. Plus if you want to actually speak the language you need to use it with a native if you can.
Finding a good tutor can be difficult, but my tips are find one first that shares your interests. Unless you’re studying Cherokee or Hawaiian or something with a small speaking population there should be enough tutors that you can find one that shares your hobbies. This will make them easy to talk to and it won’t feel awkward. From there look for one that teaches grammar and particularly pokes at places where you are weak. You want to feel challenged when you come out of the lesson. Listen to your gut when you feel that things are getting too easy or that you have plateaued with a tutor, then move along to another.
One Grammar Book Lesson
A tutor will cover grammar, but I cannot stress enough how much it helped me to grab textbooks and work through the exercises for each level. Concepts will be explained in a different way that may cement them in your brain better and the book will cover topics your tutor may gloss over. Additionally a grammar book lesson gives you a pile of content to ask your tutor about later, illuminating small details in the language. Sometimes I’ll go every other week with this, sometimes two a week, but at least one a week is the sweet spot and where I feel I’m progressing the most.
Verb Conjugations
This is a temporary member of the weekly loop, but one that has served me well in both languages. Create a worksheet that has a blank spot for every conjugation, tense, and mood of a verb in that language. Print out 200 of them. Google the top 200 most commonly used verbs in that language. Do 5 to 10 of them a week if you can. By the time you reach 100 you will feel that you have the use of verbs down by heart. By 200 you will cement them so well that you will be rambling off conjugations in the nursing home even after the dementia kicks in.
The Monthly Loop
If the daily loop is to maintain and slowly ratchet forward while the weekly loop is big pulls of the crank, then the monthly loop is looking for the parts that fell off the machine and putting them back on. Luckily the monthly loop also ties in to your daily writing practice so does not add any additional time unless you want to do extra.
Suspended Anki Card Essays
Anki has a concept of “suspended cards” or cards that the algorithm determined that you had learned, but then got wrong when they came up again for review. The idea is that whatever situation you were in or how the card was presented made that thing impossible to learn at the time. Once a month I take 10 or more of these suspended cards, write an essay or a sentence for each, then toggle them back into the Anki rotation. The additional context of using them is usually enough to remember them going forward.
Reworking Notes
Inevitably as you are learning you will collect a pile of notes around conjugations, declensions, adjective agreement, and whatever other features your target language has that differs from your native language. Once a month I like to sit down and compress these into a single notebook or cheat sheet. Not only do you come out the other end with an excellent reference for yourself, but rearranging the rules and specifics of a language in another way is a great way to cement them in memory. I like to then copy these into my Notes app so that I can review them on the fly if I come across content and have a question about the grammar.
At some point your knowledge of the language becomes good enough that you are naturally intersecting with it most days and it no longer feels like study. If you are lucky you will have moved to the country and progressed so quickly through immersion that you are beyond all of this. For the rest of us though, continue finding structured ways to fill your downtime with language and continue making progress.