Is An Hour A Day Enough Time To Learn French?

Knowing how long you should study French for can be a difficult thing to work out. You need to balance your studies with the rest of your life, while also making sure you can commit to the amount of studying you want to do.

So, is one hour a day enough time to learn French? Well, yes. It’s not ideal and you should aim for more, but if you could only spend an hour a day, you would actually be able to achieve a lot.

It may take a while, but doing this consistently will get you results and you will be able to learn French.   

How Long Will It Take To Learn French When Studying For 1 Hour A Day?

Asking how long it will take you to learn French is not an easy question to answer as there is so many ways to go about it.

However, it is generally accepted that if you are a native English speaker and you put a solid 600 hours into learning French, you should be quite comfortable. You are not going to be fluent, but you will feel like you know what is going on.

This then means if you take an hour a day, it will be 600 days …so about a year and half

I’ve said many times before on this site that if you study French for 18 months you should see plenty of progress and actually feel quite confident in the language.

I do think you should be doing more than hour, but I will cover immersion below. However, as you can see an hour a day for a year and a half is a reasonable goal to aim for and you should get reasonable results from this effort.

It Depends How You Use Your Hour

An hour day is not that long and how you use that hour is going to be vital. If you use it wisely, you can make lots of progress in French. However, it is far too easy to waste your own time.

I have been guilty of this on many occasions. I can easily waste an hour “being productive” with my French studies but in reality I’ve probably only learnt one or two words. While that is great, it’s going to be a really long time before I get anywhere at this rate.

I think this is natural though. Not every hour you spend learning is going to be the same. Some days it may take you a full hour just to understand a concept and even then you haven’t learned anything, you now just understand something. While on other days you may make a lot of progress and master a lot of things in that one hour lesson.

If you have a good plan and you work efficiently, you will over the long term, make most of your hours very useful and make progress. Putting in the effort and trying to push what you can achieve will pay off in the long term with French.       

Do More French Throughout Your Day

While this article is answering if you can learn French in only an hour a day, I think if you are learning French, you need to put more time in.

I certainly think you can do a lot in an hour, but you should be doing extra. I would use the hour for active learning and actual lesson. I would then spend as much time as possible doing anything else you can.  I would mostly be focusing on trying to do some sort of immersion, which can actually be quite passive. You should be listening to podcasts, reading the news, talking to friends and really anything else you do in your life, but in French.

If you are learning French it’s clearly as you want French to be a part of your life, so start doing that already, it will actually help your studies.

Immersion Is Important To learn French

I think that no matter how long you study French for each day, you should see your immersion activities as a different thing. If you have an hour to study that is great, you should do that, but then you should also try and do some immersion on top of that.

Immersion is doing things like watching TV shows or listening to things or just reading in French. The idea is to take in material that is just above your current level. You won’t understand everything, but the majority is comprehensible. 

I think doing immersion on its own for an hour is not enough. You should really class immersion as you subconscious passive study time and then the more normal study as your conscious active study time.

If you can squeeze both of these elements into your life, you will make a lot more progress in your French than doing one or the other.  

If You Can Only Do An Hour, Then That’s Fine

If an hour is all can commit to, then that is fine. As I said at the start, if you do this for a year and a half, you should see some good results.  An hour every day will add up over time and you will be able to hit that rough 600 hours of French exposure, where you should start seeing results.

Just be consistent with your studies. If some days you can do more that’s great, but the consistency is key. An hour every day really will add up over time and you will be surprised how far you can get by only committing to this small amount of time every day.

Conclusion

Learning French is a long journey and while an hour a day is not a lot, over the long term it can be enough to learn the language.

The more time you can put in to your French studies, the faster you will see results, however, for many of us just pacing ourselves and doing an hour a day can make sure we stay consistent and actually put the work in without getting overworked.

An hour a day is a good target to aim for. I would suggest you try it for a while and see how it works for you; maybe you will be able to do a little more, maybe a little less, so long as you as putting the effort in, you will get there.   

(If you are wanting to learn French you can check out my unofficial French Course and get a grasp of the basic structure of the language)