How To Make Your Own Study Plan For Learning A Language

When you are making your own study plan or routine there are a few areas you need to look at and consider before you get started.

Even if you are following someone else’s plan, such my Immersion Plan, you should still read through the below points as you will still need to take some of these things into consideration.

To start your own plan you need to go through the below points and this will start to make things clearer for you and give you some direction.

How Much Time Can You Spend Studying A Language?

One of the first things need to work out is how long you can actually spend studying.

Learning a language is something that takes a long time and you will need to consistently put in a lot of time to get decent results.

You need to roughly know how much time you can dedicate to the process as this can affect your actual plan. I would strongly suggest that your plan consists of a lot of immersion, but the problem with is that you need to be able to spend a couple of hours every day studying.

I know not everyone can do this, so you need to look at your life and ask how much time are you able to dedicate to this every day. If you only dedicate a small amount of time, you may want to plan your learning differently, but either way you need to know how much time you can spend on this.

(You can read more about How To Make Time For Studying A Language)

When Can You Sit Down And Study?

While the amount of time is important, so is when you can actually sit down and commit to this time.

This really comes down to you and your life but I would suggest you try and make time every day. Maybe you can only do 3 days a week, but I would try and avoid doing any less than this, or you are going to find there is too much time in between your study sessions.

The “When” can also mean “when will you will study during the day”. Will you do it in the morning or evening? You will find you are better at studying at different times of the day so you should also consider this. 

Doing your study at the same time each day will also start to make it feel more like a habit, which will result in you being more consistent. 

How Long Can You Dedicate To Studying?

How long you study for is also an important consideration and should be linked to when you can study and how much time you have to do it.

It is better to dedicate a couple of 30 minute sessions spaced out throughout a week, rather than just one huge 5 hour session on one day of the week.

You will need to play round with the time you spend as you will find your brain can get tired rather fast. Maybe 15 minutes will be enough or maybe you can focus for an hour. This will depend on your skill level and also what you are practicing in your new language.

You will also find that as you develop your language skills you will be able to focus for longer. You can also say “I will do 30 minutes” and if you go past this and do 90 minutes, that’s totally fine. It’s only really a problem when you say you will do 30 minutes and then give up after 3.

(You can read Is Studying A Language For An Hour A Day Enough)

What Should You Study When You are Learning A New Language?

The next step in building your study plan for your language learning is to work out what to actually do with the time you have set aside.

You could easily follow someone else’s plans, but it is still sensible to look at the following points and make sure the plan is fitting your needs.

Access Your Language Learning Priorities

Learning a language can be broken up into four main skill categories: Reading, Writing, Listening and Speaking.

You need to access which of these you want to prioritise. Everyone always has one skill they are weaker at.

You can focus on trying to improve this weaker skill or just have a nice balance of all four skills. If you really wanted to, you could even totally ignore one skill (but I would really advise against this). 

Now that you have decided When you will be studying and what you want to focus on, you can start to map out what you will be doing in each study session.

You can do this however you want. Maybe you will dedicate 30 minutes on Monday and Wednesdays to Speaking and Listening, and then only focus on Reading and Writing on Tuesday for an hour. You an arrange it however you want.

Working Out How To Study A Language

Now that you have planned what you will focus on and when, you can start to look at how you will study the language.

To do this you need to ask yourself what is your most effective way of learning in general.

Basically, is there a style of learning that you get the most from? Maybe it’s watching videos or maybe you prefer to just listen and repeat things. Knowing what is the most effective way you learn can take a while to discover. If you are a beginner you may not know exactly what technique works best for you. It’s also totally normal if you find a number of techniques are really effective for you, especially across the four main skills categories of a language.

You also need to ask what resources you prefer to use when learning. Hopefully there is some overlap and the ones that are most effective for you, are also the ones you enjoy using the most.

Once you know what works best for you and what you enjoy the most, you can start to assign these methods to the study sessions you have now mapped out.

So as above, we decided to spend 30 minutes on a Monday to listening and speaking. Why don’t we spend 10 minutes listening to a podcast in our language, as we enjoy that, but then spend the last 20 minutes talking to our language partner, only in our new language. This is really tough and we don’t really like it as it is uncomfortable, but we always get so much value from doing it, so we will fight through the uncomfortable feeling as it’s such an effective learning method.

This is how easy it is to start making your own study plan. You can make it however you want. There really are no rules.

Keep Your Language Study Plan Realistic

The only “rule” I would suggest is to just keep it realistic.

Don’t go crazy with your time setting. Be realistic. How many times can you actually study every week and how long can you spend studying.  

Then when you planning your sessions, be realistic with what you are trying to learn and practice. Be realistic with how much you can cover in the time you have given yourself and be realistic with what you are trying to focus on.

If you have to break tasks down and do them over a number of days, this is totally fine. Language learning takes times and you will probably have to repeat things multiple times

Make Language Goals

Another way to keep you study realistic is to set language goals. These will also make sure you are keeping on track and will keep you motivated to keep studying the language.

You can usually interlink your goals and your plan. Basically the goal is the target and the plan should be the steps you need to take to get to that target.

Your goal could be as simple as wanting to know 1000 common words in the language and your plan could be to spend 30 minutes every day learning 10 new words.

So long as you stick to this you will reach your target in 3 months, where you can then reassess what you want to do.

(You can read more about – How To Set A Language Goal)

Write Down Your Language Study Plan

This may sound obvious, but people strangely don’t do this. Once you make your plan, actually write it down. Put it on your calendar, or your diary or where ever you are going to be able to see it.

I have a spreadsheet I look at every day, so I have my plan in there, but basically just write it down somewhere.

Then you can always check what you should be doing and when. This is a long term thing, you are never going to remember it, so write it down and check it often.

If we take the example above, about learning 10 words a day, that might be “easy” to remember, but you may forget and it’s good to double check. You can also easily track this on a spreadsheet to make sure you have completed the plan for that day.

Over time you can see how your progress is going and make any changes if you feel they are needed. 

Put Your Language Learning Plan Into Action and Assess It

Now you have your plan arranged, actually carry it out. There is no point in making a plan if you are going to ignore it.

Give it a few weeks and see how you feel. Hopefully you like what you’re doing, but you may find that you want to study more often, or for longer sessions. If you feel something is not perfect you can adjust as you go along.

You may find you want to focus on a different skill or use a different technique. That’s totally fine. It’s your study plan and your language journey so you can change it to work for you.

You might find at the start you need to tweak a few things, but as you go on, you might find you need to adjust things less.  

How Long To Plan For When Learning A Language?

This really comes down to your personal preference. However, I would probably plan for anything between a week and a month

If you do less than a week you will be planning more often than studying and if you do more than a month, you might find your goals are changing and you end up adjusting the plan too often.

Although I have set goals for as long as 3 months, such as things like trying to learn a set number of words in this time. This can be painful, but sometimes it is necessary, such as learning all the common kanji in Japanese.

You can also repeat your plan. If the plan you did this week worked well, there is nothing stopping you just repeating next week. You can keep doing this until you feel it’s time to change it.

Conclusion

Making a study plan is really easy and is definitely something you should be doing. Having a plan in place is really going to keep you on track and make sure you reach your goals.

If you follow the steps I have outlined above you should be able to easily work out when and how long you will be studying for as well as what you will be doing in each session.

Stick to the plan and you will start see some results

(You might also be interested in reading – Studying Your Own Language To Help With Learning A New Language)