Time is the one thing that we have a limited amount of, something that spends itself until spent. Although the quantity of time is fixed, its quality doesn’t have to be.

To make the most out of your time in language learning, you will need to (1) stay focused on a single language for a long time (2) enjoy the journey (3) keep improving and fighting off stagnation.

Maintain Focus

To leverage your language abilities for maximum gain, you must stay focused on a single language for a long time. Doing so provides you with far more utility in communication, a wider variety of native material for consumption, and an unbreakable foundation that can withstand neglect for longer periods of time.

Assuming that you picked a language with a sufficient amount of resources, you can reach the top 5% in a reasonable amount of time, even if the language is vastly different from your known languages, either in vocabulary or grammar.

Suppose it takes you 2 years, where you spend 2-3 hours per day, to learn a new language from beginner to advanced. After you reach advanced level, it takes 30 minutes a day to maintain the language at your current level.

Time Spent Learning: 3 hrs/day * 365 days/year * 3 years = 3285 hours

Time Spent Maintaining: 0.5 hrs/day * 365 days/year = 182.5 hrs/year

Learning a language to an advanced level requires at least 3000 hours and an additional 180 hours to maintain. Once you’re advanced, you aren’t going to stop and move on. Since we want to enjoy using the language as much as possible, let’s suppose we want to maintain the language for at least 3 years. It will take at least 540+ hours of maintenance.

Knowing that this is a major time investment, you must enjoy the process itself and be willing to invest this much time for the next few years. The above calculation is for a single language, which fits in your schedule reasonably well. If you extrapolate it to 2-3 foreign languages, it would take even more time to learn and then maintain (at least 1-1.5 hours per day). The upper limit for the best polyglots is around 5-6 languages, since maintenance alone costs 2.5-3 hours per day.

Every time you switch languages, you add more hours of learning and maintenance time to your schedule, while receiving little in return. The amount of time required accumulates extremely fast to the point where it becomes a huge burden. You probably don’t think about this because when you switch languages, you think in the moment, seeking excitement and avoiding boredom. Your decision is most likely influenced by emotions or fatigue but almost never based on rational thought.

The long term effects of wanderlust are easily observed in any internet polyglot who is conversational or beginner level in 10+ languages (bottom 20%). No matter how many hacks or shortcuts the beginner polyglot uses, he is forever condemned to the beginner phase in each language. Year after year, he has satisfied his wanderlust but achieved nothing useful. In that same time, he could have learned 2-3 languages extremely well (top 5%) and escaped mediocrity.

Enjoy The Journey

The best way to enjoy the journey is to constantly engage the brain with new and useful information.

When you think of time, you generally think of it as a still river. However it can also be described like a snowball rolling down a hill, the more it travels, the faster it rolls. Picture this.

When you travel to a new destination, you have never been on this path before. You constantly scan your surroundings, looking out for any possible danger.

However were you to repeatedly travel along this road, you would stop paying attention because there is no danger. Your mind takes a back seat to save energy, letting time simply flow, the days becoming a blur.

While a day will have only 24 hours, we can stretch it out psychologically by learning a foreign language, since you can engage the brain with new and useful information from the comfort of your home, the only limiting factor being your motivation and desire to learn.

As you absorb bits and pieces and gradually build up a working understanding of the language, time will seem to slow down. Every day, your brain will be flooded with new stimuli, working extra hard to process the incoming input whether it be text or audio.

The mind is in the moment, trying to absorb new knowledge, uncertain of what lies ahead. Every sound, every word, every grammar pattern is novel. Until you get fluent, you can only catch one or two words and then it becomes a blurry mess of sounds. Accents, slurred speech, abbreviations, etc. only make it even harder to decipher what is being said. Regardless, you still need to focus on every detail to make sure that you’re understanding everything correctly. Foreign language as an adult doesn’t get absorbed naturally; you have to work for it.

Giving yourself exposure to new experiences and paying attention to the little details is still worthwhile, even if you never have to speak a foreign language with anyone. Each day, your confidence will radiate outward and affect other areas of your life. Learning a new language is said to give you a new life.

Always Improve

As you get closer to an advanced level, you reach a certain level in your language learning where you start to become content, just living your life in the language but not really improving. Your communication ability begins to stagnate as you coast by.

Most people experience this with their native language, they cease to improve after a certain age. If you’re reading this text, you may be prone to skimming for keywords instead of focusing on each and every word. You skip out all the little details. It is highly likely that if I put an unknown word in this text, you would have missed it and never even knew.

To avoid the plateau, you must constantly seek out a wide variety of challenging material. At first, you may want to focus on what you can understand since that’s all you have. As you get better, you should focus on what you don’t understand, otherwise your mind will block it out as noise.

If you wish to build a great understanding of the language, you must pursue the difficult and relish the pain of challenge. Every year, you should look back at yourself and ask whether you’ve improved. If you didn’t improve significantly, you will only stagnate, although you may find joy in your comfortable monotony.

Conclusion

Always keep improving by paying attention to new details, for the edge of skill can only be sharpened through deliberate practice. It’s easier said than done because your brain wants to save energy when possible. However by taking a back seat you end up becoming the person who dies at 25 and is buried at 75.