Which study pattern do you think will work best?
- Weekend Course (every weekend): 12 hours
- 1-day Intensive (every week): 8 hours
- Daily Practice: 20 mins every day
If you chose “Daily Practice” you are right.
Learning anything well takes patience, motivation and most importantly time. Most learners think that going to a class or taking a course once a week will improve their skills over a certain period of time. But actually, studying something once a week will only help you retain the use of it but will not help you improve.
In order to improve, you need to do it daily. That is with sports, saving money and of course, learning languages. More exposure, more often will help you improve and takes less time during the day.
Our brains cannot develop or retain information without consistent activity. Studying long hours only once a week or less, will not improve your skills. In an article from the site “How Stuff Works”, they mention that “Cramming” (meaning studying for a long time right before a test) is worse than studying over short periods of time.
https://people.howstuffworks.com/why-cramming-is-worst-way-to-study.htm
Of course, not everyone has the same study habits and some study habits work better for some people but in general, you cannot actually improve or retain information if you cram everything into large amounts.
The best thing to do is study for shorter amounts of time and manage your time effectively. 20-30 minutes per day will increase your exposure to language and skills.
Also you should now study too many things at once. For example, you should not study 7 different topics over 7 days. Instead, you should focus on 1 or 2 topics and reinforce them over the 7 day period. For example, if you want to learn new vocabulary, choose 3-4 words to learn and create variations of the words (nouns, adjectives, adverbs, synonyms, etc.) and situations to use them (like writing sentences, making questions, etc.).
So next time you are planning your study schedule, consider studying daily in small amounts and using variations to improve.