How Many Hours - Blog Posts

What is the best rate of study?

I had an epiphany while I was standing in the rain watching my son's team practice for soccer. My son was in junior high school at the time and he has been doing soccer since he was in kindergarten. I had been a teacher and language coach for around 16 years at the time but I never could settle on how much was the best amount of time to study to really achieve results. So, there I was standing in the rain watching my breath dissipate in the air in front of me wondering why the heck they had to practice every day. My mind flashed to Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers and his theory about needing 10,000 hours to become proficient at something. That was it, not only the amount of time but the total immersion of the mind and commitment to a regular rhythm were a key to reaching the next level.

Doubtlessly the more time you dedicate to something, the more you can see improvement, but the rhythm of soccer practices suggested to me that constant and frequent repetition is also important. I thought this was the way to get the students at the company I was teaching at to remember some words for their TOEIC goals. I set up a practice sheet where every three days they had to focus on a single word. The first day, they look up the word in English (afterwards Japanese was permitted) then on the second day they had to come up with a practice sentence. If they followed this program, they would think about the word on successive days and interact, making a better chance to remember. On the third day they would get another chance and they would find some synonyms for the word. The following day was a new word and the cycle began again. The problem is that the students didn't follow the theoretical path and only studied everything on one day, before their class. The most serious students did follow it and I thought it was a good program. The beauty of it was that the students should be thinking about English everyday. They established a rhythm, even if just for 10-15 minutes. If I were stricter about it, I think we would have seen more results.

Looking through the Internet at ideas about how much to study, theories range between 20 minutes and 3 hours per day. An interesting post by Ouino (We know, get it?) language says 30 minutes of active studying and 1 hour of exposure is good. Of course they are promoting their business so it's merely a theory. If you don't subscribe to Medium, you will be trapped by the pay wall, but this post says 1-2 hours is best for rapid language acquisition.

I will say it again though, I believe that the true key lies in the daily rhythm more than the amount of study, though logically more time spent should yield more results.