Many language apps have you study a language for just 15 to 30 minutes a day and the lessons are over for a day, however, what if you instead listened to audiocourses (like Pimsleur or FSI for example) for 2 or even more hours a day, would you manage to learn stuff as efficiently as you would if you studied for half an hour or so if you had the motivation?
Without motivation you wouldn’t study efficiently even for 5 minutes, let alone half an hour, but let’s assume that you do have the motivation, are there any other factors, like some sort of a “limit” on how many words or things a brain can learn in a particular time frame?
In schools (at least where I’m from) you’re expected to listen to various classes from Maths, through English all the way to Chemistry and you have to listen to them for 5 to 6 hours, with only a few small 5 or 15 minute pauses in the mean time, not only that, but when you come home you also have to study again and often do homework, so essentially that’s around of 6 to 7 hours of studying, so based on that, would studying a language for 2 hours be ok if you had the motivation and want to speed up the process a bit?
I would say “Yes” but with two “buts”.
The more time you spend studying the better, within reason (and two hours is still within reason).
But #1: Two hours is a long time to concentrate in one sitting. No matter how motivated you are, after the first 40-50 minutes your mind may start to wander.
You can fight it, but IME it’s best not to fight things like this: you need to be honest with yourself and work around issues like this. Take regular breaks or mix up your study in ways that will keep your interest.
But #2: A lot of real language learning is putting yourself out there. Getting praised or corrected by others, or even being laughed at, is great for solidifying memories.
On TV, and internet lore, smart people become fluent from self-learning. In reality, it almost always needs significant real world conversational practice.
If that’s not possible for your situation, then OK, but bear in mind it’s a significant disadvantage off the bat.
Edited to add: A third “but”
But #3: A lot of memory consolidation happens during sleep. So in fact 2 hours of study in one day is probably not as effective as 30 minutes for four days.
(But of course 2 hours for 4 days is going to be better than 30 mins for 4 days).
Learning languages is one thing; studying languages is another; memorizing pieces of languages is yet a third thing.
In an immersion environment you’re learning a language for about 16h/day, but you’ll be spending a relatively small amount of time looking at flashcards and lists of verbs.
Babies do it for less than that. At first, that is. Then they catch on to what the heck is going on and learn languages (however many they are being spoken to, and listened to in) for four or five hours at a time, pretty much as often as they are actually engaged in language, receptively, and given an expectation that they can respond. A seven year old who has learned 13 words a day is not remarkable. Bright, perhaps, but nothing like a prodigy. In multilingual families the child will learn all the words used in the languages spoken and will probably have only slightly fewer words in each language. Perhaps more. And they will also be learning how to find where mom hides the treats, and how to get their siblings blamed for stuff they did.
Tris
Two years you spend teaching your kid to walk and talk. Then you spend 15 years telling them to sit down and shut up.
Lessons that are planned actually give you many more breaks than that. You might still be in the classroom environment but the task has changed to a discussion, group work, Q&A, short test, concept checking questions, peer correction, guided discovery, or any of the other teachisms out there.
Some students can study hard for prolonged periods of time (medical students generally do ime) but most will become tired and bored, so lose motivation - the extra time being forced to do the same type of task is usually counter productive.
If you have the time available you can try to use the app for two hours a day and see how it goes. Also you can mix it up with listening to and reading media in the chosen language. Even watching a show with the subtitles in the chosen language (or a show in the chosen language with English subs) can help.
It depends. It really depends on the person, and other factors.
When I was studying Japanese in the LDS Missionary Training Center, we studied 10 hours or more a day, in a classroom setting, with individual study afterwards.
I teach English to over 200 students right now, ranging from kindergarten to adults. There are kindergarten kids with a longer attention span than some middle school students who don’t like English.
As others have said, it really helps to break up the study into different tasks. Part can be listening to a new lesson, other parts would be memorization of vocabulary words. Watching a video in the target language.
My typical kindergarten classes are 30 to 60 minutes. There is no way that the typical kindergarten student has that kind of concentration or interest, yet we can have effective classes by mixing up singing, games using the vocabular, actions and such.
I took language training at the Foreign Service Institute, which was pretty intense. Most full term language courses were six months, and I spent most of every day either in class or in a lab. It was close to immersion training, as the teachers were native speakers and English was rarely spoken in class. Homework usually consisted of finding a newspaper article and preparing a presentation in the study language. Fluency really depends on your ability to learn a language and the amount of effort you put into it.
As it happens, I recently finished an excellent book on learning, and what we know about what works better with regard to retaining and using what we learn. It was How We Learn, by Benedict Carey, and I do recommend it.
It was not specific to languages, but I see no reason that the practices wouldn’t apply just as much to learning a new language.
Some of the key takeaways were:
We learn better by taking breaks and doing multiple study sessions (typically 2 or 3 for given content), spaced in a certain specific way given the time interval you care about:
If speech/test is in a week, the best interval is a day or two between practice/study sessions.
If in six months, the best interval is three to five weeks
For 3 months, assuming 9 hours total study / practice, three hours each on Day 1, Day 8, and Day 14 is best.
Most intervals end up being one day, two days, or one week for most students.
We learn better by studying in diverse environments, and distractions aren’t necessarily bad. There is also some evidence distractions (varying background music etc) lead to better recall, by meshing with more “hooks” that can pull up that network of memories.
We learn better by interleaving multiple topics and techniques, ie. practice scales, then freestyle, then practice a piece you’ve been working on, or interleave flashcards of two different topics.
We learn better by actively engaging with the material in a roughly 60/40 active/study split - this can be reciting or writing from memory, phrasing the argument being made to yourself or others, taking a test or final, flashcards, and more.
Active reviewing does much better - if you are reviewing what you have learned or have a summary “final” sheet, try to rephrase it all or elucidate each section from memory rather than simply reading / reviewing it.
In terms of 2 hours of learning being better than half an hour per day, I think this is true, but you may want to look into having one or two breaks and varying the types of learning you’re doing (active rather than passive, different techniques, etc) over the two hours to maximize your return.