Language Study Time Management, A Case Study: How I Crammed French Into My Schedule For Three Weeks
Tomorrow I’ll be heading up to Montreal to attend LangFest, a three-day conference for polyglots and language enthusiasts from across North America and the world. I bought tickets for the event three weeks ago, and decided I should brush up on my French a bit before attending the event. There was just one little issue: my language-learning schedule was already 100 percent full.
People have often asked me about how I manage my time when attempting to study and/or maintain a large number of different languages at once. I don’t really have a straightforward answer to this question since my language-study schedule is generally quite disorganized and always changing. But every once in a while a clear objective comes along (usually travel-related, like this French situation) which forces me to make definite decisions about how to use my time. So I suppose this latest French-cramming sprint is a good starting point for talking about how I manage my language-study time.
A Language-Learning Timetable?
I have a friend who has a very structured language study schedule — he knows seven languages and assigns one day of the week to each of them. He’s also always made sure to study each new language to an advanced level before moving on to the next one.
I’ve never been that disciplined in my language studies (I want to do all the languages all the time!), but for this French sprint, I seriously considered devising a system to rationalize my language study schedule for maximum efficiency. So I opened up Excel and made this spreadsheet…
…and immediately threw my hands up, closed the document, and didn’t look at it again until I started writing this piece. I don’t remember what the units for the numbers were, or what the colors were supposed to mean (if they were supposed to represent priority levels, well, my priorities must have shifted a lot in just three weeks…). Allocating specific time slots to sixteen different languages was not going to be easy.
The spreadsheet did get one thing right, though — the three columns represent the three main modes of language study/maintenance I use on a daily basis: “study” (e.g. textbooks, grammars, vocabulary lists), listening, and reading.
- Study is what I do during my daily commute — about one hour a day — reading portions of a few different language books on my iPad while I’m on the subway. (And sometimes, the MTA messes up and gives me extra study time! Thanks MTA! You’re the best!)
- Listening is the most flexible mode— I listen to foreign-language music or other audio on the subway, and stream internet radio at work and at home. On a good day I can squeeze in almost six hours of listening, in eight or nine languages.
- Reading (as in reading real-world content, and not textbooks) is more of a luxury — more time consuming, less multi-tasking-friendly, but also the most rewarding. When I have a slow day at work, or when I’m at home with nothing else to do, I might get an hour or two to read the news, Wikipedia, forums, non-fiction, poetry or all sorts of other content in other languages, but when I’m busy and have other stuff to attend to, this is always the first part of my language study time to get cut.
Splitting my study process into these three categories is the easy part. Deciding which specific languages to allocate this time to is much more complicated.
My Language Study Situation, Right Before the French Sprint
Earlier this year, most of my free time was tied up with coursework for my final semester of journalism school, which gave me less time to work on languages. But since I somehow ended up spending the entire semester reporting on the Afghan refugee crisis from various angles, I still had a bit of an excuse to work on a few languages — specifically, Farsi and Urdu, the primary languages of Afghanistan’s neighbors (and main refugee host countries) Iran and Pakistan. (Farsi a.k.a. Persian a.k.a. Dari is also widely spoken in Afghanistan itself, of course.) Since these were both languages that I had already studied in the past, they didn’t require that much of a time commitment and fit in my busy schedule pretty easily.
(I did also try to restart Indonesian while doing a story related to Indonesia, and to review Uzbek while doing a story about ethnic Uzbek refugees, but those attempts didn’t last as long.)
Once I graduated in May, though, the situation changed dramatically as I ended up with a lot more free time on my hands. Still with Farsi and Urdu as my starting point, my language study schedule quickly started spinning out of control as I expanded my interests outwards across Central, South and Southeast Asia to Uzbek, Uighur, Pashto, Punjabi (including a bunch of dialects), Bengali, Telugu, Thai, and Indonesian. And then I also decided to start working on Arabic again. And Japanese. And investigating the Wu dialects. The situation was quickly becoming unsustainable.
When I was catching up with a college friend earlier this summer, he asked me what languages I was working on (as one does). My initial response was: “uhhh, I kind of don’t want to say, because it’ll make me sound completely insane.” And honestly, it was kind of insane.
In a way, this French thing couldn’t have come at a better time. I needed a big shock to the system to clean up this mess and put my language study routine back in order.
The French Sprint, Part 1: Setting Goals
I like to think that I already know French. I can have a decent conversation in French, and get to have a few French conversations per month just by going to language events here in New York. Also, Montreal is a bilingual city, and I’d be fine just going there without any extra preparation. What’s more, I’ve already been there twice recently, in 2013 and 2016.
At the same time, my last trip to Montreal left me a bit dissatisfied in the language department. In the year and a half before that trip, I had also travelled to France, Belgium and Haiti, and managed to get by just fine in French (and a little Flemish and Creole) in all those places. But when I showed up in Montreal, my confidence in my ability to speak French took a real beating — first of all, the accent in Quebec is famously weird, and secondly, because everyone was bilingual anyway, it was harder to get people to keep speaking French with me without myself speaking French to a much higher standard. It would be nice if my next trip to Montreal went a bit better in that regard.
So, these were the goals for my three weeks of French study:
- Improve my grasp of some of the finer points of French grammar
- Brush up on and expand my French vocabulary
- Learn more French colloquial words and expressions
- Learn a few specifically Quebecois words and expressions
I lined up the following materials to help achieve these goals:
- For Goal 1, I got Hachette’s Les difficultés du français
- For Goal 2, I got the University of Edinburgh’s Using French Vocabulary
- For both 1 and 2, I also got Living Language’s Ultimate French Advanced
- For Goal 3, I got McGraw Hill’s Streetwise French
- For Goal 4, I got Assimil’s Le Québécois de Poche
(Some of you already know where I “got” all these books from. No further comment.)
The French Sprint, Part 2: Cleaning House
Just last week, my friend and fellow polyglot Jared Gimbel wrote a piece about “pausing” language studies, and I agree with what he says (after all, when it comes to hobbies, it’s kind of hard to disagree with “stop doing stuff that you aren’t enjoying anymore”). It was particularly relevant for me, since I was in the process of “pausing” a whole bunch of languages to free up more time for French.
When I started the French sprint, several of the languages I was trying to work on were in a good place for a “pause”:
- Punjabi — I had just finished an intermediate Punjabi textbook a few weeks before. I had other books lined up, and random dialect stuff too, but I wasn’t in a hurry to get into them immediately. Paused.
- Indonesian — I’d been trying to improve my Indonesian on and off for several month, and had just found a new intermediate-level book for it and gotten a few lessons in. But still, it wouldn’t be a big loss to restart it again later. Paused.
- Uzbek — the textbook I was using for Uzbek was a bit oddly structured and starting to get unsatisfying to read. I’d already managed to recover my Uzbek knowledge to the point where I could read news again with limited dictionary use. Paused.
- Pashto — I breezed through a German Pashto textbook in a week (skimming most of the exercises) and had a great time getting a general sense of how the language worked and its relationship to Persian and Urdu. However, getting into the details of the language (memorizing declensions, conjugations, genders, etc.) would be more time-consuming and I didn’t have the time to spare. Paused.
- Japanese — I found the NHK’s NEWS WEB EASY site a few months ago and considered using it regularly to help me get back into Japanese, but that was too time consuming as well. Paused.
I’m fine with all of these decisions. I’ll probably try to pick up most of these again at some point later on. No problem.
The French Sprint, Part 3: The Undroppables
At the same time, dropping a language at the wrong time can sometimes be a disaster. For me, he worst case scenario is what happened to me with Hausa a few years ago.
I had gotten through an introductory-level Hausa textbook, identified several other books and a dictionary to help me study further, and found a number of websites where I could read and listen to Hausa later on. I was also getting really into learning about the history of northern Nigeria, Niger and the Sahel, and everything was going great. But then I decided to spend winter break in the Dominican Republic, and because of that, I decided to drop Hausa entirely in order to focus on Spanish (and also Creole, for a side-trip to Haiti).
My Spanish improved a lot, since it was my first trip to a Spanish-speaking country, so it was an absolute success in that regard. But when I tried to get back into Hausa again, I found that I’d forgotten everything I’d learned just a month before! Re-reading the same textbook for the second time in two months seemed like a huge waste of effort, so I just dropped it. I’ll probably take another look at Hausa later on (maybe when I get to the Afro-Asiatic part of my African language series?), but it would have been nice to not put myself in a situation where I had to repeat previous work.
In order to drop a language and be able to pick it up again without a lot of repeated effort, it helps to have a decent level of familiarity with it first. I’m not sure what the exact criteria are yet, but my Hausa had clearly not gotten to that point. It usually helps if the language in question is related to other languages you know or will continue working on (e.g. doing various other Middle Eastern languages is helping keep me from losing my Arabic) — which is probably another reason why my Hausa slipped away so quickly.
Anyway, when I decided to start reviewing French, I knew there were two languages that I really couldn’t drop without regretting it later:
- Telugu, my first Dravidian language, the most widely-spoken Dravidian language, and the native language of two of my coworkers (so I actually get to hear it quite often in real life). Because I’ve never done a Dravidian language before, I’m pretty sure I’d have a bad time picking Telugu back up if I dropped it right now. I’m also about 60% of the way to getting a hang of the Telugu script, and aborting that midway would be a bad idea too.
- Thai (sort of). Grammar- and pronunciation-wise, I actually think dropping Thai right now wouldn’t be too bad, and I’d be able to get right back into it later on. But the Thai script is a whole other issue — it’s one of the most convoluted systems I’ve ever seen — and I think I should at least keep practicing reading Thai until I get more accustomed to it. So maybe this only counts as half undroppable. (Once I get a better grasp of the script, I’m considering dropping Thai and getting back to work on Indonesian ASAP.)
The French Sprint, Part 3: Setting Up the Schedule
Once I figured what I was going to do for French, what other languages I could drop, and also what other languages I needed to keep working on, the next part was pretty straightforward. I just needed to make sure I did a lot of French every day, a bit of the undroppable languages every day, and then any extra leftover time I had could be spent on other languages (after all, I am going to a language conference, so those other languages should be useful too…).
After a few days of trial-and-error, I figured out a daily schedule:
- Morning commute — entirely for French, including some grammar, some colloquialisms, and some general vocabulary
- Evening commute — Telugu for the first half, and then some Thai (every other day) and then various other languages on a rotating basis
- Listening at work and at home — make sure to listen to some French first (preferably something in Canadian French), and then rotate between various other languages as usual
- Reading time at home, if available — more French, primarily
It worked out pretty well — I’ll be in Montreal tomorrow evening, and I managed to finish all the French books I’d picked out at the beginning of this three-week dash just in time (although I only did the “Level 1” vocabulary from Using French Vocabulary, skipping Levels 2 and 3, and I also just skimmed the Québécois de Poche book). I also made sure to review the Wikipedia pages for Quebec French phonology, syntax, lexicon, and profanity, and spent the last two days mostly just listening to Radio Canada online, which regularly features some pretty heavy Quebec accents.
Now I’ll just have to see if all this work actually pays off on the ground.
Hopefully this was an informative look at my language-study schedule and decision-making process. I don’t really know what to expect from this language conference, so I may or may not write something about it next week after I get back. Stay tuned!
