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Can you learn a language in 10 days, 30 days or 90 days?

Whenever you browse for language courses on the Internet you will find grandiose claims of learning a language in 1, 2, 7, 10, 30, or 90 days. Is there some truth behind that? Can you really learn a language that fast or do most advertisers just sell snake oil?

Let’s have a detailed look at it:

What does it mean to learn a language?


Here we present five possible definitions of what it means to learn a language – of course you are free to break it further down. But with these five you can easily see already how ill defined the term “to learn a language” actually is. So, how could you define what “learning a language” really means?

  • Level 1: I bought a language book or listened to a radio or TV program and picked up some words.
  • Level 2: I have invested some time learning some hundred words and I am capable of saying some very easy things like “Hello, how are you doing?”.
  • Level 3: I am learning many more words and am able to hold a decent every day conversation such as “How was your day?” and I am not lost when I go shopping or ordering my lunch in a restaurant.
  • Level 4:I have learned many more words and am able to understand pretty much all the TV shows on general topics and can actively participate in most conversations.
  • Level 5: I have learned many, many, many, many more words and am able to read about pretty much any topic and am able to entertain a reasonable and fluent conversation even about philosophy, science or any other subject. I realize however, that there are still occasionally some words or sentence structures which I do not fully understand and I have to look them up or ask a native person.
  • Level 6: (Bonus) I am a native speaker and can’t really understand what the fuzz about all the language learning is – doesn’t everybody speak or understand (insert your native language here)?

Now, looking at above possible definitions it is rather easy to categorize the language courses and methods, which claim to make you “learn a language” in (pick your number) of days or months.

What are the limits of your brain?

Your brain can learn and remember only so much at the time. Learning a language is a rather huge task. If you intend to *really* learn a language in e.g. 10 days, you will most likely suffer from brain overload, which essentially means you will have invested the time in vain since whatever you have learned is only crammed into your short term memory. Dropping your efforts after these 10 days again, will cause you to forget about 90% of what you have learned within a matter of a few days. In fact, all that is likely to remain, is the unpleasant memory of stressing and overloading your brain and the realization that you will never want to do such a thing again. Learning a language however means that you are able to internalize every learned word to such an extent that you really “know” it – that is: you can use it without mental effort in any condition and any time of day. Thus the words must come from your reliable long term memory. Scientific studies have shown that the transfer from short term to long term memory takes between 30 to 60 days depending on the relative importance of the memory trace. And even if you manage to bring your words from short term to long term memory you will still have to make sure that you repeat them regularly because although the long term memory is much more resilient against forgetting (hence the name) – forgetting occurs nevertheless if not periodically refreshed.

How do you count 2 days and what can you reasonably do in 2 days?

The obvious understanding is that by saying 2 days you mean for example today and tomorrow. And consequently when you say 10 days you mean from to today on, the next 10 days.
Obviously you cannot learn 24 hours a day thus the time when you can actively learn new things is limited by your need for sleep. Most people experience a strong fatigue after learning new things rather quickly. The more unknown the things you’re learning are (i.e. you cannot make any connections to what you know already) the faster the onset of this fatigue, after which you simply will not be able to learn anything new anymore. You have to give yourself a rest for maybe half an hour or an hour until you can continue again. Optimistically you will be able to make 4-5 intensive learning sessions of 1 hour a day which results in
about 8-10 hours in 2 days or 40-50 hours in 10 days.
In 10 such intensive hours you will be able to learn the basic grammatical structures of a language (nothing fancy) and maybe about 100-200 words.
In 50 hours you will be able to get an overview over most of the grammar (excluding special cases) and learn maybe about 800-1000 words.

Notice that this oversimplified back-of-the-envelope calculation assumes that you will not be doing anything else but learning intensively with intermittent breaks for your brain. If you try to do anything else demanding, any serious brain activity other than your learning, you will flush your short term memory and destroy your previous learning efforts.

Looking at about 50 hours of work in 10 days the results don’t seem too bad. However there is a big catch: your brain does not work that way. Learning things intensively like that does not impress the brain very much. As soon as you drop the learning you will forget pretty much everything again unless you repeat what you have learned regularly.

Only because you have it in your short term memory does not mean you are able to apply what you have learned.

Let’s look at it another way. Instead of saying two days means today and tomorrow we will just count 2×24 hours=48 hours. If you space those 48 hours of two days such that you learn every day about 15 minutes, you will achieve the same thing as learning 10 days intensively. With one drastic difference: your brain had time to digest all what you learned with enough breaks and if you kept repeating what you have learned previously you will have made the transitions from short term to long term memory – which means, you actually really know those words.

Why would you want to learn a language in n days?

Before you read any further you maybe want to consider the question why you want to learn a language at all. Obviously learning a language to a certain degree requires quite a commitment and certainly a rather large number of hours of intensive learning investment.
Whatever your reasons are for learning a language make sure that those reasons are more important than what you have to pay for it in terms of hours and effort.
If you are still reading, you have probably made the conscious decision that it is worth it. Maybe because of your boy- or girlfriend maybe because of your work or family or other important circumstances.

Let’s consider then why you possibly would want to have the language learned in 10 days or even 90 days. What’s the rush? Of course it would be really fantastic to invest say 30 days and then be done with it and move on to the next great endeavor. BUT: that’s unfortunately not how your brain works.

Your brain learns only in one possible way. The more you are exposed to the information you want to learn the better the brain remembers it. Notice that more does not mean “intensive” as in 30 days but it means “many times” as in many times over a long period of time – best possibly years.

So if it’s not possible to go there fast what else can be done? Exactly! It should take as little time as possible. And that’s where spaced repetition comes into the game. Because spaced repetition is scientifically proven to be the most time efficient way to learn and retain any kind of information, in particular languages and the many words you have to learn to reach proficiency.
Spaced repetition, such as our product Flashcard Learner, guarantees you that you spend the least possible time learning and repeating and reaping the maximum benefit from it.
Flashcard Learner makes sure you don’t forget any more what you have learned! You can try it out for free here.

What’s good about learning intensively only to forget soon thereafter again? This would not be a smart investment of your time and efforts. By using spaced repetition you will be able to spend as little as possible on learning or conversely to learn much more in the same time as with any other learning method.

What is your goal?

As you have seen so far learning a language is a relative term. Depending on the goal you set you will have to invest a different amount of time to reach it.

Here are some possible goals and some realistic, conservative estimates how long it will take to learn a language up to a certain level:

  1. Get an idea of a language and its grammatical structure: ~5-10 hours
  2. Have very simple conversations such as “Good morning”, “How are you”, “The weather is nice” etc.: 15-25 hours spaced over about 2 months with regular repetitions so that you actually still remember what you have learned.
  3. Have everyday small talk conversations (about 1’500 words) 50-60 hours spaced over 6 months.
  4. Follow and understand TV and radio (about 5000 words): 200-300 hours spaced over about 1 year.
  5. Being fluent so that you are able to talk about what you just have heard on TV or radio (about 6000 words and about 3000 sentences): 400 hours spaced over about 1.5 to 2 years.
  6. Being able to read pretty much any book and to talk about it freely and fluently (about 12000-15000 words, ~8000-10000 sentences): 800 hours.

These are estimates which are still low in comparison to what an ordinary school curriculum estimates (about 1800-2500 hours) for level 3, that is, intermediate language skills. Good students might even achieve level 4 within this time, but only by taking additional classes and working much outside school on their own. However we are assuming that when you decide to learn a language on your own then your motivation is much higher than that of a typical high school student. On the other hand, since you possibly have a job, family or other obligations, your time is also much more limited than that of the high schools students who are obliged to attend school.

By using spaced repetitions you will be able to learn the first 4000 words in about 60-80 hours (to long term memory) spaced over about 4-6 months. Our data suggests that this is true for any language.

The first 3000-4000 words of a language are generally more difficult to learn than the next 10000 because your brain will first have to create a feeling for the words and the language. Also the first 3000-4000 words contain most of the basic and root words, which are then later found in compound words. While the meaning of such compound words still has to be learned, it is much easier to retain, because your brain knows already all the components. For example, if you were an English learner, you might have learned the words: to stand, and under, learning then the word to understand, will be much easier. Or for example if you learn the word to estimate, and the words under and over, then adding the words to overestimate or to underestimate is fairly easy. Thus, in our experience, learning another 4000 words after the first 3000-4000 words will be in the range of only 30-50 hours, nearly half the time needed for the first 4000.

These are estimates, which we have seen by people using our software.

There are several factors which can lower the above figures significantly:

For example, it strongly depends which language you want to learn. Depending on the similarity to your own language it will take you more or less time to correctly remember the words and move them to your long term memory.
For example: if English is your mother tongue it will take you a much shorter time to learn and remember a Germanic Language like German or Swedish, or a related Romance language such as French, Italian, Spanish than a language, where you do not find common words or grammatical structures: such as Russian, Arabic, Chinese or Japanese.

Also it depends how difficult the language is (in absolute terms): Languages such as French, Hungarian, Finnish, Russian, German and Chinese are generally perceived more difficult than languages with simpler grammatical structures or less declension/inflection and conjugation such as Indonesian, Esperanto, Italian, Spanish and many others.

When learning one of the “simpler” languages, or learning another language of the same language group, you can easily reduce above times by a factor of 2 to 3. The time needed to learn another language also depends on your previous experience in acquiring a new language.

Please note that these numbers are averages based on the feedback we have received from active users of Flashcard Learner and cannot be a guarantee that the times are accurate for any language and any particular individual.

How many hours should you put in?

The number of hours invested into learning a language entirely depends on your goal. If you are fine having simple conversations only, then 50 to 60 hours are definitely reasonable.

It is however really important to understand that learning 50 hours as 100x 1/2 hour leads to completely different results than 7×7 hours (+ 1 additional hour).

If you are shooting for near native conversational, reading and writing skills be prepared, however, to invest a large number of hours into your learning. It will take at least several hundred if not thousands of hours to achieve this level of skill. No matter what any language course will make you want to believe, learning a language requires a huge effort, and before you even start you should have good reasons to do so.

So can you learn now a language in (put your number here) days or months?

As we have seen from above discussion, it very much depends on your definition of “learning a language”. Also it depends how you count the number of days: if you count as x consecutive days then most definitely not. The reason being that your brain simply will discard most of what you cram into it unless you don’t actively repeat it many more times.
If however you actually count 10 days as 10×24 hours = 240 hours spaced over a year or two (for example 240×1 hour or 480x 1/2 hour) you will have acquired a tremendous skill and will be very close to proficiency.
So 10 full days of learning will indeed bring you at least to goal 3 if not 4 on the above list. If you invest another 20 days or so, say 30 full days (= 24×30 hours = 720 hours) spaced over about two years you will be – provided you use the right learning methods like spaced repetition and direct conversation practice – completely fluent with a rich vocabulary of 10000-15000 words.

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