Most casual language learners underestimate the time and effort required to get anywhere close to fluent in a language.
"Casual" will never get you there.
If you're seeking functional fluency, expect to spend 2-3 hours a day for 1-3 years at least. Most of those hours should be spent consuming content in the target language.
Check out a system like Refold for an idea of the effort required and how to plan your study https://refold.la/roadmap
I've only learned one foreign language so far, Spanish, and I started 10 years ago in highschool.
I made the greatest leaps in my ability when I spent 2-3 months at a time spending time like this:
- living in Spanish-speaking country
- reading and watching YouTube (10-20 hours/week)
- taking private lessons (1-3 hours/week)
- using spaced repetition systems (3-4 hours/week)
Living in a country where your target language is spoken makes learning opportunities more accessible, but without focused effort you won't just "pick up the language" unless it's already very close to a language you speak.
All that said, anyone can learn a language if they put the effort in. It's mostly "hard" only in the sense that it takes a lot of time. Most of your study time could be watching TV, reading books, talking to friends, or playing video games as long as they're in your target language and near your limit of comprehension. It should be as much as 80% fun stuff/20% studying to keep yourself motivated.
There are categories for the level of difficulty for each language according to the State dept, the fifth level for example is for the most difficult ones: Arabic (Levantine, Iraqi), Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Pashto- you will need 64 weeks, while for French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish 26 weeks will do.
Yes. First bootstrap yourself with enough vocab and grammar that you understand the majority of the words (due to Zipf's law that will be a relatively small number of words).
Then talk to native speakers, for hours a day, so that you internalize it all and can consume and produce sentences without thinking.
"Casual" will never get you there.
If you're seeking functional fluency, expect to spend 2-3 hours a day for 1-3 years at least. Most of those hours should be spent consuming content in the target language.
Check out a system like Refold for an idea of the effort required and how to plan your study https://refold.la/roadmap
I've only learned one foreign language so far, Spanish, and I started 10 years ago in highschool.
I made the greatest leaps in my ability when I spent 2-3 months at a time spending time like this:
- living in Spanish-speaking country
- reading and watching YouTube (10-20 hours/week)
- taking private lessons (1-3 hours/week)
- using spaced repetition systems (3-4 hours/week)
Living in a country where your target language is spoken makes learning opportunities more accessible, but without focused effort you won't just "pick up the language" unless it's already very close to a language you speak.
All that said, anyone can learn a language if they put the effort in. It's mostly "hard" only in the sense that it takes a lot of time. Most of your study time could be watching TV, reading books, talking to friends, or playing video games as long as they're in your target language and near your limit of comprehension. It should be as much as 80% fun stuff/20% studying to keep yourself motivated.