Is 30/40 minutes 5 days a week with a teacher effective?

4 comments

1. I had a language teacher who explained us that the part of the brain dedicated to languages we are learning “warms up” after around 20 minutes, so she suggested, before tests, to start listening to audio in the target language or something similar, so that we would be more effective. I cannot point you to a specific study, but you could try that and see if it works for you.

2. If you have only this time, you can study in advance and use this 30~40 min to practice the grammar points or vocabulary. It is a very short time to learn, but you don’t need to increase if you manage the time and use it wisely.

   Edit: Sorry, now I read that 30 min a day. Can you do like twice a week 1:30h?

3. Well its quite simple, the more time you spent learning, the faster you progress. 14h a week vs 3-4h a week is ~3-4 times faster/more.

   You will still progress at this rate, but you will be much slower, but there are many people that are not able to learn 2h+ daily (job, family, other hobbies), you just have to be realistic and accept that you wont progress as fast as others.

   Is 2 hours daily more effective? yes, but 4h is even more effective as 2h a day etc.

   Its not a question about how much hours are effective, but more of how many hours you can handle/want to invest, at the end of the day you wont get worse and can only get better.

4. There are two points. There is no magic and learning N1 takes around 3000-4000 hours, so we need at some point to spend more time using Japanese in any possible way (even if reading books or watching movies). But language isn’t homogeneous and learning vocabulary/kanji differs from grammar or practice. For example, there are extremely time efficient ways to learn vocabulary/kanji like SRS as Anki. Even 20-30 minutes of Anki is very productive and learning more won’t bring any additional result, you can try to learn 200 words in 3 hours with Anki, but result won’t differ from ordinary 85-95% retention approach (usually 20-30 words in a day). On the other hand grammar and practice takes more time and 30-40 minutes/day simply isn’t enough.

   Thus even 30-40 minutes can be very effective if you focus on SRS, but at some point you will learn all words and if you keep the same amount of time for other aspects of the language, you will need around 20 years to learn N1. Happily practice basically means to use Japanese in any possible way and usually people can switch from English media to Japanese media, so you will learn without any intentional learning.