How To Learn Any Language

In 1941, a Hungarian woman named Kató Lomb walked into a secondhand bookshop in Budapest and found an old Russian dictionary. She was in her early thirties.

As a child she had struggled with German, and nothing in her life so far suggested she had any gift for languages. But she bought the dictionary, took it home, and decided she was going to learn Russian.

It was a dangerous time to do it. Lomb was Jewish, and as the war went on she was forced into hiding. During the war, a friend who was a bookbinder sewed the pages of a Russian novel, Gogol's Dead Souls, into a thick Hungarian encyclopedia so she could read it without anyone noticing.

She read it in bomb shelters, working out the grammar from the story itself, writing what she understood in the margins, and coming back later to the parts she didn't.

When the Soviet army reached Budapest in 1945, Lomb presented herself as a Russian interpreter and was hired on the spot. She went on to become one of the first simultaneous interpreters in the world, the kind who translate a speaker's words in real time through a headset at international conferences.

Over her life, she worked professionally in 16 languages and could read many more. Almost all of them she learned as an adult, mostly by herself, mostly by reading books she found interesting. When she was in her nineties, she was still learning new ones.

In 1970 she wrote a book about how she did it, called Polyglot: How I Learn Languages. In it she offered a simple formula: the time you put in, multiplied by your motivation, divided by your inhibition, equals your result.

By inhibition, she meant the fear of starting to speak, of sounding awkward, of being laughed at. The stronger your motivation and the less you let fear stop you, she believed, the faster you would learn.

Most people who want to learn a language never get started, or they start and quit, and the reasons are almost always the same. Maybe you took Spanish or French in high school and remember almost nothing.

Maybe you've downloaded an app, kept a streak going for a few weeks, and then realized you still couldn't follow a real conversation. Maybe you've heard that adults just can't learn languages the way children do, and you believe you've missed your chance.

Or you simply don't know where to begin, because there are a hundred methods and apps and programs, and everyone online swears theirs is the one that works.

Kató Lomb didn't have an app, a teacher, or a gift. She had a dictionary, a novel, a lot of hours, and a strong reason to keep going.

This article is about how people actually learn languages, what the research says works and what doesn't, every major method people use and what each one is good for, and a step-by-step plan to go from zero to holding real conversations.

Along the way, we'll follow one person, a 32-year-old named Andre, who wants to learn Spanish so he can talk with his wife's family.

Before you can plan how to learn a language, it helps to be clear about what you're trying to learn.

"Knowing" a language is really four different skills: listening, reading, speaking, and writing.

The first two are called receptive skills, because you take language in. The last two are productive skills, because you produce it. They don't grow at the same speed. Most learners can understand much more than they can say, and someone who reads well can still freeze in a conversation.

To describe how good someone is, most of the world uses the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, usually called the CEFR. It divides ability into six levels:

For most people who want to "speak a language," the real goal is somewhere around B1 or B2.

That's the point where you can hold real conversations with real people about real things, which is very different from reaching perfection.

Andre's goal is B1: to sit at his in-laws' dinner table and follow the conversation, tell a story about his week, and laugh at the right jokes. He doesn't need to sound like a native speaker. He needs to be understood and to understand.

Many adults believe children are natural language learners and adults aren't. There's a grain of truth in it, but the full picture is much more encouraging.

In the 1970s, the researchers Catherine Snow and Marian Hoefnagel-Höhle studied English speakers of different ages who had moved to the Netherlands and were learning Dutch by living there.

They tested children, teenagers, and adults several times during their first year. In the first few months, the teenagers did best, the adults came second, and the young children came last. By the end of the year, the children were catching up on several measures and had passed the adults on some of them.

In a related study, the older learners started out with better pronunciation, and the age differences in pronunciation had disappeared after about four or five months. The researchers concluded that their results didn't fit the idea that only children can learn languages well.

Adults actually have real advantages. They already know how language works in general, they can understand grammar explanations, they can choose effective methods, and they can plan and push themselves. Where children have an edge is over the long run, especially in ending up with an accent that sounds exactly like a native speaker's.

For most adult learners, though, a native accent isn't the goal, and it doesn't need to be. In a well-known 1995 study, Murray Munro and Tracey Derwing showed that how strong someone's accent sounds and how easy they are to understand are partly separate things. Speech that listeners rated as heavily accented was often still fully understood. What matters for real conversations is being understood, and adults can absolutely get there.

When Andre started, he told his wife it was probably too late for him, since he hadn't learned anything in two years of high school Spanish. What changed his mind was realizing that his high school classes had given him maybe a few hours a week of grammar drills for two school years, with almost no real listening or speaking. He had never actually tried the way people learn best.

Researchers have been arguing for decades about exactly how people pick up a second language. You don't need to know all the theory, but three ideas explain almost every method in this article, and knowing them will help you understand why the plan in section 10 is built the way it is.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the linguist Stephen Krashen argued that people acquire a language mainly by understanding messages in it, by hearing and reading language they can mostly follow.

He called this comprehensible input. His idea was that the best input is just a little above your current level: you understand most of it from context and what you already know, and the small part you don't understand is where you grow. He also argued that stress and anxiety get in the way, acting like a filter that blocks input from sinking in.

Krashen's ideas have been hugely influential, and they match how many successful self-taught learners describe their own path. Krashen himself wrote about Kató Lomb, whose method of learning by reading interesting books fits his theory closely. But other researchers have criticized the theory as hard to test, and have argued that input alone isn't enough.

The most famous challenge came from the linguist Merrill Swain, who studied Canadian students in French immersion programs, where children are taught most of their school subjects in French.

After years of rich, understandable French input, these students understood French very well. But their speaking and writing still had many grammar mistakes.

Swain argued that producing language, which she called output, does something input can't: when you try to say something and can't, you notice exactly what you don't know, and you're pushed to figure it out.

The linguist Michael Long added a related idea, often called the interaction hypothesis: a lot of learning happens in conversation, when you and the other person have to work out what each of you means, ask for clarification, and correct misunderstandings. Those moments make the gaps in your language obvious and give you immediate feedback.

Finally, there's the question of whether adults should study grammar directly or just absorb it.

In 2000, John Norris and Lourdes Ortega combined the results of dozens of studies on language teaching. They found that instruction that drew learners' attention to how the language works led to substantial gains, and that explicit instruction, where the rule is pointed out and explained, tended to work better than leaving learners to figure it out on their own. Later reviews have generally found the same.

These ideas are often presented as rivals, but for a learner, they fit together.

You need a large amount of input you can understand, because that's where most of the language comes from.

You need to speak and get feedback, because that's how you find and fix your gaps and learn to produce the language under pressure.

And some direct study of grammar and vocabulary speeds up the process for adults.

Lomb did all three: she read huge amounts, she studied grammar from her books and dictionaries, and she jumped into speaking the moment she had the chance.

There's no single best method for learning a language. Each of the common methods trains a different part of the skill, and the people who succeed usually combine several. Here's what each one is, what the evidence says, and where it fits.

What it is: Listening to and reading large amounts of the language at a level where you understand most of what's going on.

For beginners, that means material made for learners: videos where a speaker uses simple words, gestures, and pictures; podcasts in slow, clear speech; and graded readers, which are books written with limited vocabulary for each level.

As you improve, you move to content made for native speakers, like TV shows, YouTube channels, and novels.

Why it works: It's Krashen's input idea in practice, and it's how Lomb learned, through books she wanted to read.

It builds listening and reading, and it fills your head with real examples of how the language is used, including vocabulary and grammar you never studied directly.

Whole learning programs are now built around it. Dreaming Spanish, for example, is a library of videos for Spanish learners sorted by difficulty, starting from complete beginners.

Its limits: On its own, it builds understanding much faster than speaking, as Swain's immersion students showed. It also takes a lot of hours, so it works best as the base of your learning, with other methods added on top.

For Andre, comprehensible input became the biggest part of his routine. In his first month he watched beginner videos made for Spanish learners for 20 minutes a day, understanding almost nothing on the first day and more each week.

What it is: Taking a short clip, about 30 seconds of real speech, and working through it closely until you catch every word. Listen several times.

Write down exactly what you hear, word for word, which is called dictation. Then check it against a transcript or subtitles, and listen again to the parts you missed until you can hear them.

Why it works: One of the biggest problems learners have with listening is that real speech doesn't have spaces between the words.

In a 2000 study of language learners' listening problems, the researcher Christine Goh found that half of the ten most common difficulties learners reported happened at the earliest stage of listening, in recognizing words and keeping up with the speech.

Other researchers have found a related pattern: learners often know words by sight but fail to recognize them by sound, or can't separate a fast, connected phrase into its separate words. Close listening and dictation train exactly that skill.

Its limits: It's tiring. Five to ten minutes a day is enough. And it's most useful once you're past the beginner stage, when you know a good number of words but still can't catch them at normal speed.

Andre added this in his fifth month, when he noticed he could follow his learner videos easily but understood almost nothing when his in-laws talked among themselves. Five minutes a day with a short clip from a Spanish podcast, writing it out and checking it, slowly made fast speech less of a blur.

What it is: Flashcards managed by an app that shows you each card right before you're likely to forget it. Cards you know well come back less and less often. Cards you miss come back sooner. The most widely used free app for this is Anki.

Why it works: It combines two of the best-supported findings in all of learning research, spacing your practice out over time and testing yourself instead of rereading, both of which have been tested directly with foreign language vocabulary. Section 06 explains the research and how to set it up.

Its limits: Flashcards teach you words, and words alone don't make you able to listen or speak. They work best as a support for input and speaking, not a replacement.

What it is: Learning whole phrases as single units, instead of building every sentence from separate words and grammar rules.

Every language has thousands of these ready-made phrases. In English, they're things like "I was going to say," "it depends on," "what I mean is," "the thing is," and "do you mind if." In Spanish, they're things like "lo que pasa es que" (the thing is that) or "a lo mejor" (maybe).

Why it works: In 1983, the linguists Andrew Pawley and Frances Syder argued that native speakers can talk so quickly and naturally because they rely on a large memory of these prefabricated chunks, so they aren't building every sentence from scratch.

When you learn chunks, you get the same advantage: whole, correct pieces of language you can pull out instantly. In a 2006 study by Frank Boers and his colleagues, students who were trained to notice chunks in the material they studied were judged by examiners to sound more fluent and proficient in speaking tests than students who weren't.

It was a small study, and researchers have called for it to be repeated, but it fits what linguists have long observed about fluent speech.

How to use it: When you hear or read a useful phrase, put the whole phrase on a flashcard, not just the separate words. Learn it as a single unit, with its sound and meaning together.

Andre's first 50 flashcards were almost all chunks: "¿cómo se dice...?" (how do you say...?), "no entendí" (I didn't understand), "¿me lo puede repetir?" (can you repeat that?), "creo que" (I think that), "lo que quiero decir es" (what I mean is). They got him through his first conversations long before he understood the grammar behind them.

What it is: Actually talking in the language with another person.

The main options are paid tutors on websites like italki or preply, where you can book one-on-one video lessons with native speakers at many price points; free language exchanges through apps like Tandem or HelloTalk, where you help someone with your language in return for help with theirs; and in-person conversation groups.

Why it works: This is Swain's output and Long's interaction in practice. Speaking forces you to find the words, shows you exactly what you can't yet say, and gives you feedback when the other person doesn't understand or corrects you.

Its limits: It's the method that brings up the most fear. Paid tutors are usually the best place to start, because their job is to be patient with beginners and adjust their speech to your level. Language exchanges are free but work better once you can hold a basic conversation.

Some of the best speaking practice doesn't happen in a lesson at all. It happens with people you meet where you live, and often they become friends.

Practicing with friends has advantages a lesson can't match: you talk about real things in your real life, you hear how people actually speak with each other, and you keep coming back because you enjoy their company. Here's where to look:

• Language meetups. Search Meetup or Facebook for "[language] conversation group" or "language exchange" plus your city. Many cities have regular events where learners and native speakers meet to talk.
• Cultural centers. Many languages have organizations that promote them abroad, like the Alliance Française for French, the Goethe-Institut for German, and the Instituto Cervantes for Spanish. Where they have centers or local chapters, they often host conversation nights, film screenings, and events.
• Libraries and universities. Many host free language exchange tables, international student events, or conversation clubs open to the public.
• Communities where the language is spoken. Churches, community organizations, markets, restaurants, and cultural festivals run by people who speak the language are natural places to use it, even if it's only ordering food at first.
• Volunteering. Helping with English classes or community programs for immigrants is a way to meet native speakers who are often glad to help you with their language in return.
• Shared interests. A sports team, cooking class, dance class, or hobby group where the language is spoken. When you're there to do something together, the conversation comes more naturally than when you're there only to practice.

It can feel awkward to walk into a room of strangers and speak a language you're still learning.

It helps to remember that most native speakers are glad when someone is learning their language, and that conversation groups exist precisely for people at your stage.

Go with a few chunks ready, like how to introduce yourself and how to ask someone to slow down, and aim for one real conversation per visit.

In his eighth month, Andre found a monthly Spanish conversation night at a library across town. The first time, he mostly listened. By the third visit, he was trading stories with a retired man from Colombia who now meets him for coffee every other week, and those coffees became some of his best practice.

What it is: Learning the rules of the language directly, from a textbook, a grammar guide, or a class.

Why it works: Norris and Ortega's research showed that explicit attention to grammar helps adults. A clear explanation of a pattern helps you notice it in the input you hear, which speeds up learning.

Its limits: This is the method most school classes overused. Knowing a rule isn't the same as being able to use it in a fast conversation. The best approach is to treat grammar study as a reference: learn a pattern briefly, then go find it in your listening and reading, and practice using it when you speak.

What it is: Playing a short audio clip and repeating it out loud right along with the speaker, trying to match their sounds, rhythm, and speed as closely as you can.

Why it works: Researchers, many of them working with Japanese learners of English, have studied shadowing as a way to improve the early stages of listening.

Several studies have found it improved learners' ability to perceive and recognize sounds, and some found improvements in listening comprehension and speaking rate. It trains your ear and your mouth at the same time.

Its limits: Most of the studies are small, and most were done with specific groups of learners, so the evidence is promising more than definitive. Like intensive listening, it's tiring, so a few minutes a day is plenty.

What it is: Living somewhere the language is spoken, whether through a study abroad program, a move, or an extended trip.

Why it can work: It surrounds you with input and gives you endless chances to speak.

Its limits: Researchers have found that language gains from study abroad vary enormously, and some students gain very little. In one study of American students in France, the students reported using more English than French in their daily interactions.

Being in the country helps only as much as you actually use the language there. People who spend their time abroad with other English speakers often come home with little more than they left with.

If you do get the chance to live abroad, plan how you'll spend your time in the language, like living with a local family, joining local activities, and avoiding the expat bubble.

What it is: Game-like apps with short lessons, streaks, and points.

What the evidence says: In a study published in 2021, researchers tested 225 adults in the United States who had used Duolingo as their only learning tool and finished its beginner Spanish or French course. Their reading and listening scores were comparable to university students at the end of their fourth semester of study.

But the study was carried out by Duolingo's own research team, it only tested reading and listening, not speaking or writing, and the learners in it were people who had stuck with the app long enough to finish the course. Independent reviewers have pointed out that most of them were also highly educated.

Where it fits: Apps like this can be a decent way to get started and build a daily habit, and they're better than nothing on busy days. They aren't a complete method. If an app is the only thing you do, you'll likely end up able to read some and understand slow speech, but not hold a real conversation.

Paul Nation, one of the leading researchers on vocabulary, set out to answer how many words you need to understand English without help.

Researchers generally agree you need to know about 98 percent of the words in a text to understand it well on your own.

Nation calculated that reaching that level takes about 8,000 to 9,000 word families for reading and about 6,000 to 7,000 for listening. A word family is a base word plus its related forms, like "help," "helps," "helped," and "helpful."

That sounds like a lot, but there's good news on both ends. First, a later study by Anna van Zeeland and Norbert Schmitt suggested that 95 percent coverage may be enough to follow everyday spoken English, and that this can be reached with only about 2,000 to 3,000 word families.

Second, words are used very unevenly. In English, the most frequent 1,000 word families alone make up about 78 percent of the words in typical texts. Other languages show the same pattern: a small number of very common words do most of the work.

The practical lesson is to learn the most frequent words first. Frequency lists are available for every major language. Start with the top 1,000 or so, as words and as chunks, and you'll understand a surprising amount of everyday speech much sooner than you'd expect.

In a nine-year experiment published in 1993, the psychologist Harry Bahrick and three members of his family each learned 300 foreign-language words.

They practiced in either 13 or 26 sessions, spaced 14, 28, or 56 days apart, and then tested themselves up to five years after training ended. The longer gaps slowed learning down a little at first, but they led to much better long-term memory.

Thirteen sessions spaced 56 days apart produced about the same long-term retention as 26 sessions spaced 14 days apart. In other words, spreading practice out let them do half the work for the same result.

In a 2008 study published in Science, Jeffrey Karpicke and Henry Roediger had students learn 40 Swahili words with their English translations.

Some students kept being tested on the words after they'd learned them, and others stopped being tested but kept studying them. A week later, the students who kept testing themselves recalled about 80 percent of the words.

The students who only kept studying recalled about 36 percent. More studying after the words were learned made no difference. More testing made a huge one.

Spaced repetition apps like Anki do both of these things automatically: they test you, and they space out your reviews. To get the most out of them:

• Put the language on the front. Show the word or phrase in the language you're learning, with audio if you can, and make yourself recall the meaning before you flip the card. Later, add some cards the other way, from English to the new language, to practice producing words.
• Use chunks and short sentences. A card that says "a lo mejor (maybe)" or a short example sentence teaches more than a single isolated word.
• Add words you've actually met. Words that came up in something you watched or read stick better, because you remember where they came from.
• Keep the daily number small and steady. Ten to twenty new cards a day is plenty for most people. Doing your reviews every day matters more than adding lots of new cards.

Andre started with a pre-made deck of the most common Spanish words and added his own chunks and sentences from his videos. His reviews took about ten minutes each morning on the bus to work.

Many adults assume their accent is fixed. Research says pronunciation improves a lot with practice and instruction.

In a 2015 review combining 86 studies, Junkyu Lee, Juhyun Jang, and Luke Plonsky found that pronunciation instruction had a large effect on learners' pronunciation.

The effects were bigger when the training lasted longer and when learners got feedback on how they sounded.

The practical steps are simple. Early on, learn how the sounds of the language work, especially the ones that don't exist in English.

Use a pronunciation dictionary website like Forvo, where native speakers record how words are said.

Record yourself and compare it to the original. And ask your tutor to correct your pronunciation, not just your grammar.

Remember that the goal is being understood, which, as Munro and Derwing showed, you can reach with an accent.

For many adults, the hardest part of speaking isn't the language. It's the fear. In 1986, Elaine Horwitz, Michael Horwitz, and Joann Cope described what they called foreign language anxiety: the particular nervousness people feel when trying to communicate in a language they don't speak well.

Adults who are confident and capable in their own language can suddenly feel unable to express themselves, and many of them avoid speaking altogether.

That anxiety matters. In 2019, Yasser Teimouri, Julia Goetze, and Luke Plonsky combined 97 studies with nearly 20,000 learners from 23 countries and found a clear negative relationship between language anxiety and how well people did in the language.

Some newer research suggests the relationship also runs the other way: as people get better, their anxiety goes down. That's encouraging, because it means the fear doesn't have to disappear before you start. It shrinks as you make progress.

This is exactly what Lomb meant by inhibition, the bottom half of her formula. A few things help:

• Start with a tutor, not a crowd. A paid tutor's job is to be patient with your mistakes. Your first conversations will be much easier with one kind person than with a group.
• Prepare chunks for your first conversations. Phrases like "can you repeat that?" and "how do you say...?" give you a way to keep going when you get stuck.
• Talk to yourself. Lomb recommended practicing in your head and out loud when you're alone, describing what you're doing or planning what you'll say. It's speaking practice with no one listening.
• Expect to sound worse than you feel inside. Every adult learner goes through a stage where they understand far more than they can say. That stage is normal, and it passes the more you speak.

Andre booked his first tutor lesson in his third month. He froze in the first five minutes and couldn't remember how to say where he worked. His tutor waited, gave him the words, and had him repeat them.

By the end of the half hour he had told her about his job, his wife, and his dog, in short, broken sentences. By his tenth lesson, he was looking forward to them.

Learning a language takes hundreds of hours, so you'll almost certainly lose motivation at some point. What matters is what keeps you going when you do.

Lomb's formula put motivation right next to time in the top half of the fraction. She believed that with real motivation, even someone with the busiest job could find ten minutes a day.

The psychologist Zoltán Dörnyei developed one of the most studied theories of language learning motivation, which he called the L2 Motivational Self System.

Its central idea is the "ideal L2 self": a clear, vivid picture of the person you want to become in the new language. The idea is that the gap between who you are now and that picture pulls you forward.

In 2018, Ali Al-Hoorie combined 32 studies with more than 32,000 language learners and found that the ideal L2 self was strongly linked to how much effort people said they intended to put in. Its link to their actual test results was much weaker.

That's a useful finding. A strong picture of your future self gives you a reason to show up, and the practice you do once you show up is what makes you better. So use the picture to get yourself to practice, and let the practice do the rest.

The more specific the picture, the better. "I want to speak Spanish" is vague. Andre's picture was concrete: sitting at his in-laws' table at Christmas, telling his mother-in-law a story about his week, and making her laugh, in Spanish, without his wife translating.

In his fourth month, when progress felt slow and he skipped three days in a row, he wrote that picture on a sticky note and put it on his bathroom mirror. He hasn't missed more than a day since.

Two other things help keep motivation alive. First, choose input you actually enjoy, the way Lomb chose novels she wanted to read. If you like cooking, watch cooking videos in the language. If you like soccer, listen to soccer commentary.

Second, track your progress in hours, not just days. Seeing that you've put in 100 hours, then 200, then 300 shows you how far you've come on the days it feels like you're not moving.

Motivation gets you started, but it comes and goes. What carries people through a year of daily practice is habit, and our article "How to Stay Disciplined and Consistent" covers the research on how habits form.

Here's how it applies to language learning. Tie your practice to a fixed time and place, like flashcards on the morning commute and input right after dinner, so the situation itself becomes the cue. Decide on a minimum version for bad days, such as five minutes of flashcards and one short video, so even your worst day keeps the habit going. And when you miss a day, start again the very next day at your normal routine or your minimum, without trying to make up for lost time. A single missed day doesn't erase your progress, but a week off can easily stretch into a month.

Andre's minimum was ten minutes: his flashcards and one learner video. On nights when his kid was sick or work ran late, that's all he did. Some weeks the minimum was most of what he managed, but he didn't let it drop to zero, and that's why he was still going at Christmas.

Cambridge English, which runs some of the world's most widely used English exams, publishes estimates of how many guided learning hours it typically takes to reach each CEFR level from scratch.

Guided learning hours include time in lessons as well as study tasks. Their estimates are roughly

• 180 to 200 hours to reach A2,
• 350 to 400 hours for B1,
• 500 to 600 for B2,
• 700 to 800 for C1,
• and 1,000 to 1,200 for C2.

These figures are for learners of English, and they're averages, but they give a useful sense of scale. How long it takes you also depends on how different the language is from English.

The U.S. Foreign Service Institute, which trains American diplomats, groups languages by how long its English-speaking students usually need to reach professional working proficiency, the level where someone could do a diplomat's job in the language.

That's well beyond B1. Its students also study full time, with about 25 hours of class a week plus several hours of homework a day, so its numbers are best read as a comparison between languages rather than a schedule for someone studying an hour a day.

Here's what that means in practice. At 30 minutes a day, you'll put in about 180 hours a year. At an hour a day, about 365. So for a language like Spanish, an hour a day of focused practice can get you to a basic conversational level, around B1, in about a year, and to the Foreign Service Institute's professional level in about two.

At 30 minutes a day, double those times. For a language like Japanese or Arabic, expect the whole timeline to stretch, by as much as three or four times for the professional level. These are rough numbers, and how you spend the hours matters as much as how many you put in.

Knowing this ahead of time protects you from a common reason people quit. Many learners expect to be fluent in a few months, and when month three arrives and they still can't follow a fast conversation, they decide something is wrong with them or their method.

In most cases nothing is wrong, and they're right where the numbers say they should be. Andre went in knowing his Christmas goal was about a year away, so when month four felt slow, he could see on his hours log that he was where he should be, and kept going.

Here's how to combine the methods into a plan. It assumes about an hour a day. If you only have 30 minutes, keep the same balance and expect it to take about twice as long. Each phase shows what Andre did, too.

Before Phase 1, take one evening, or a few over the first week, to set everything up, so that on day one all you have to do is start.

• Choose your language and write down your picture. Write one or two sentences describing a specific moment you want to reach, like Andre's Christmas dinner, and put it somewhere you'll see it every day.
• Install a flashcard app and get a frequency deck. Install Anki, which is free on computers and Android, and download a shared deck of the most common words in your language from AnkiWeb's shared decks. Shared decks are made by other users and their quality varies, so pick one with good reviews and fix or delete any card that looks wrong.
• Find two or three sources of beginner input. Use the search tips below, and pick ones you actually enjoy watching or listening to.
• Pick your daily time and place. Decide exactly when and where each part of your routine will happen, and your minimum for bad days.
• Start an hours log. A note on your phone or a simple spreadsheet is enough. Write down the date and how many minutes you practiced.
• Put your first tutor lesson on the calendar. Pick a date in your second or third month and write it down now, so speaking is part of the plan from the start, even if it feels far away.

Most of the examples in this article are for Spanish, but every widely studied language has the same kinds of resources. Here's how to find them:

• Beginner input: search YouTube and podcast apps for "comprehensible input" plus the name of your language, and for "[language] for beginners" or "slow [language]." Look for videos where the speaker uses pictures, gestures, and simple words, and talks entirely in the language you're learning.
• Graded readers: search for "[language] graded readers." Many publishers sell books written for each level, often labeled with CEFR levels like A1 or A2.
• Frequency lists and decks: search AnkiWeb's shared decks for your language plus "frequency" or "most common words."
• Pronunciation: use Forvo to hear native speakers say individual words, and search for a pronunciation guide for your language to learn its sounds in the first weeks.
• Grammar reference: a single, well-reviewed beginner grammar book or website for your language is enough. Use it to look things up, not to study cover to cover.
• Tutors: on italki, you'll see two kinds of teachers. Community tutors are native speakers or advanced speakers who focus on conversation practice and usually charge less. Professional teachers have teaching qualifications and can give more structured lessons. For your first months, either can work. What matters most is someone patient who speaks slowly, corrects you, and makes it easy for you to make mistakes without feeling embarrassed. Try a short trial lesson with two or three before choosing.
• Language exchange: apps like Tandem and HelloTalk connect you with native speakers who want to practice English.

• 15 minutes of flashcards. Start a spaced repetition deck with the most frequent words in the language, and add 10 to 20 new cards a day. Make many of them chunks: "how do you say...?", "I don't understand," "can you repeat that?", "I think that."
• 30 minutes of beginner input. Watch videos or listen to podcasts made for complete beginners, where the speaker uses simple words, gestures, and pictures. Don't worry about understanding everything.
• 15 minutes on sounds. Learn how the sounds of the language work, especially the ones that don't exist in English. Listen to native speakers say common words and repeat them.

Andre's first month: Anki on the bus every morning, beginner videos for 30 minutes after dinner, and a pronunciation guide on Spanish vowels and the rolled "r." By the end of the month he knew about 300 words and 50 chunks, and could follow the slowest beginner videos.

• 10 to 15 minutes of flashcards every day. Keep adding new cards, mostly from words and phrases you meet in your input.
• 30 minutes of input. Move up to slightly harder learner videos and podcasts, and start reading graded readers for your level.
• A tutor session once a week, 30 to 60 minutes, starting in month two or three. Tell your tutor your goal, ask them to speak slowly, and ask them to correct you.
• 5 minutes of shadowing a few times a week with a short clip you already understand
• A little grammar, about 15 minutes a week. Look up the patterns you keep running into, then watch for them in your input.

Andre's months two to four: graded readers on weekends, a weekly tutor on italki starting in month three, and grammar looked up only when something confused him. By month four he could hold a slow, simple conversation about himself with his tutor.

• 10 minutes of flashcards every day, keeping up reviews and adding your own cards.
• 30 to 40 minutes of input, more each month. Move from learner material to native content made for regular audiences, like YouTube channels, podcasts, and TV shows, using subtitles in the language you're learning, not in English.
• 5 to 10 minutes of intensive listening most days. Take a 30-second clip of native speech, write out what you hear, check it, and replay the parts you missed until you can hear them.
• Speaking twice a week, with a tutor, a language exchange partner, or both. Add a local conversation group or a friend who speaks the language when you can.
• Writing once a week. Write a short paragraph about your week and ask your tutor or exchange partner to correct it.

Andre's months five to twelve: Spanish podcasts on his commute, a Spanish-language TV series with Spanish subtitles on weekends, five minutes of dictation each morning, a tutor on Tuesdays, and a language exchange partner from Mexico on Saturdays.

At his in-laws' Christmas dinner, eleven months after he started, he followed most of the conversation, told his mother-in-law about a mix-up at work, and got the laugh he'd been picturing on his bathroom mirror.

• Shift most of your input to native content you enjoy, including books, the way Lomb did.
• Keep speaking regularly, and push into harder topics, like your work, the news, and your opinions.
• Keep a smaller flashcard habit for new words and chunks you want to use.
• If you travel or spend time where the language is spoken, plan to use it: stay with locals, join activities, and spend your time in the language rather than around other English speakers.

Keep a simple log of your hours, so you can see them add up. Every three months, check yourself against the CEFR's self-assessment descriptions for each skill, which are free on the Council of Europe's website.

And record yourself talking for two minutes about your week once a month. Listening back to your first recording a few months later is one of the clearest ways to see how far you've come.