What’s the minimum time required to learn a language?
Ever wondered exactly how much work it is to learn a new language? At Morpheem, we did. And we went on to study it quantitatively.
First, we spent quite a bit of time breaking down the language into individual pieces of knowledge. Here’s a dissection of a simple Russian sentence:
Every red triangle is a piece of knowledge — we call them “facts” — you need to know to understand the sentence.
How many such facts would you need to reach basic fluency in the language?
Well, we’ve made a list. You need
- about 2,000 words of vocabulary
- 600 endings. Yes, Russian is a mess.
- 400 sentence structures that work differently from English, like “at university” above.
That’s a lot of stuff to learn. How long does it take to learn it?
To understand that, let’s look at how memory works. As you probably know, you can’t just be told something and then remember it forever. When you hear something, you have a certain chance of forgetting it again.
There have been many studies into how this works and it basically looks like this:
Immediately after someone tells you something, you’re very likely to remember it. But the more time passes, the less chance there is that you still do. The chance of remembering drops quickly in the beginning, and then slower (“exponentially”, if you’re into maths).
So what you learned today is gone tomorrow. What to do? As you probably also know, there is an easy way out: repeat what you learned.
If you repeat what you learned a few times, the curve looks something like this:
In other words, every time you repeat something, the speed at which you forget it decreases.
But if you let too much time pass between repetitions, they bring no benefit. You completely forget what you learned. It’s as if you learn everything from the beginning again.
This brings us back to the original question: how fast can you learn a language? Well, let’s first look at the optimal strategy. It would be to learn new facts regularly, one by one, and then repeat them in increasing intervals:
This is not how most people learn. If you read a book, you will be exposed to some basic facts that you already know over and over. On the other hand, when you do see a word you don’t know you probably won’t see it again before you’ve already forgotten it.
If your goal is to learn the language quickly, you’re wasting time.
Even textbooks don’t follow this schedule. They tend to present new things all the time, when time would often be better spent on repetition.
Morpheem is an attempt to build a system that comes as close to the optimal strategy as possible. To do this, we have first created a long list of all the facts of the language:
We’ve put these facts in order, from simple to hard. And we’ve written sentences that use these facts. Lots of them.
Importantly, the vocabulary is controlled. You only need the facts we listed to understand the sentences. Textbooks often use difficult words to show how to use simple ones; that is just confusing.
Morpheem keeps track of the facts you know and when you learned them. It knows when you are about to forget something and chooses a sentence that illustrates precisely that fact. And that does not require any knowledge you don’t already have.
This brings you as close as possible to the optimal study schedule.
We’ve measured what our users learn: it turns out you can commit about 10 facts to long term memory in 20 minutes of study a day. In other words, you should be able to learn a language in about one year, studying 20 minutes per day. That’s only 100 hours of study.
Want to give it a try? The study mode of Morpheem is not live yet, but contact me at andreas@morpheem.com if you want a sneak peak. You can also browse through the knowledge base at https://russian.morpheem.com.
