How long does it take to learn a language?

Lingvist’s Data Scientist, Mikk Tõnissoo, looks at our learning data for insight on how quickly we learn.

Lingvist
Lingvist
Jul 28, 2017 · 3 min read

Learning 2000 words in another language can get us pretty far, but how long does it take?

When starting to learn a language, setting goals is one of the biggest keys to success. How can we set a goal that’s useful, achievable, and realistic for how we can spend our time learning?

Learning a new language can seem like an overwhelming task; it requires time, focus, and persistence. We all have a variety of reasons for learning a new language, but the struggles we face getting started are surprisingly similar.

Often, the hardest part is simply getting started. Before we start, many of us want to know how much time we need to put into learning before we actually start to see the benefits. When exactly will we begin to really understand our chosen new language?

According to research, we can understand about 80% of a text after learning 2000 words. Of course, this will vary a little depending on which language you’re studying and how common the words are which you study. Overall, though, it’s quite a motivating rule of thumb.

But how long does it actually take to learn 2000 words?

Using our data, we tried to figure out an average time estimate and found that over the last year it has taken most people 17 hours for to reach 2000 words.

That’s the same amount of time that it takes to watch 3 seasons of Game of Thrones.

Still, we’re all a bit different in some ways — we might prefer short learning sessions to longer ones, many sessions per week or just a few ones over the weekend. We tried to capture and visualise these differences in learning styles to see how they stack up.

Here’s our graph showing the journeys of 3 people learning English or Spanish with different learning habits. Click to enlarge the graph:

Learning times for 2000 words across 3 language pairs and learning styles.

Our first user (Orange) is learning English from Spanish and prefers a relaxed approach, learning on weekends or successive days with longer pauses in between. The second user (Blue) is learning English from Russian and prefers long daily sessions with no days off, achieving 2000 words in almost a week. The third user learning Spanish from English (Green) prefers short daily sessions over a longer period and manages to achieve this goal over a few months.

All three users have unique learning styles but they have one thing in common — they all achieved this goal in 17 hours of active learning time.

This goes a long way towards showing that how long we can spend learning a language shouldn’t be a source of discouragement.

In fact, these learning styles should encourage us to take that first step towards learning a new language. Sure, the time needed to complete 17 hours of study varies from person to person, but it’s a lot easier to start with a clear goal and break it into manageable daily or weekly doses.

This piece originally appears on the Lingvist blog.

About the Author

Mikk Tõnissoo is a Data Scientist at Lingvist. He combines a background in mathematics, an interest in software, and a passion for solving problems to provide tools for researching, prototyping and designing solutions for education and data science. In addition to his native Estonian, he is fluent in English, speaks Russian, and is pursuing French on the Lingvist language learning app.

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