The Only Study Plan You Need To Learn A Language (For Complete Beginners)

Starting a language from scratch can be confusing as you probably have no idea what to do or where to begin.

I am going to make it very easy for you and give you my study plan. You can follow this and you should see some results.

Once you get comfortable with the language you can change this, or make your own plan. Really all that matters in the beginning is that you stay consistent and put the work in. If you do this you will see success.

Plan Overview

If I could describe this plan in one word it would be “immersion”.  You will be doing a lot of this with some other things to help really speed up your progress.

The goal is to focus on just trying to understand the language through input. We don’t really need to worry about speaking for a while, so this plan is designed for anyone who is not really in a rush and also wants to try and get to a high level of comprehension.

If you just want to learn some basics for your holiday, this is not the plan for you. You might be inputting or a solid year before you even start speaking, which can seem a long time but it’s a small sacrifice to get a really good understanding first.

(You can read more about – What Is Learning A Language By Immersion?)

Step One – Get The Basics

How long this takes will depend on what language you are learning and how much effort you are putting in, but after about 3-6 months you should be able to say you have done this.

Learn The Script

If you are learning a language that has a different script, you need to start here. This is basically learning a new alphabet and pretty fundamental to any language.

If you are learning a language that uses the same alphabet as English, congratulations, you have completed this section already.

For everyone else, this will take a few days. The only acceptation is Japanese kanji, that might take you about 3 months to learn, but I won’t cover that here. 

You need to master the basic alphabet so you can actually read, so you can’t skip this.

Find Out How The Language Works

This section usually trips people up as they get too focused on it. The goal is to just find out how things work, not master it.

This basically means you need to just read over how things work and that will be enough for now. Go through some grammar guides such as textbooks, websites or even YouTube videos. Just go through and get a basic idea of what is going on.

It’s okay if you don’t quite understand and it’s really not important to remember everything at this point. Just being aware of things is enough.

You can even use a course, these can be great, but you need to not really use them properly. I often use Buusu, which can be really helpful to give you some basics.

However it tries to test your knowledge and make you can spell things properly, which isn’t important for our plan. If the course you are using is like this you just have to power through and it doesn’t matter if you are a little lost and can’t remember stuff. We are not using the course for its normal purpose; we just want the basic information so we are aware of it.     

Learn The Most Common 1000 Words On Anki

If you want to start to understand a language you need to know words and the best ones to start with are the most common.

You can easily find premade anki decks that will give you the most common words. While premade decks are not the best, learning the most important words is a good idea.

If they truly are common then you are going to be noticing these words appear constantly in your immersion so it can be good to kick start this knowledge with a premade deck.

It will depend on how comfortable you are, but you should aim to learn 5-10 new words every day. This will allow you to finish the deck in about 6 months.

It’s also means that when this is done, you are going to be understanding a lot of the words in your immersion.

There are various stats that suggest that most conversations only use around 1000 words and basically if you know about 3000 words in a language you will pretty much under 99% of what is being said in most situations. You would only run in to problems if you were exposed to something that was on a very specific topic, but in general day to day interaction you would be well equipped.  

(You can read more about – Should You Learn The Most Common Words Of A Language?)

Start Immersing

So this is the key to it all, you need to start your immersion right from the start and be watching at least an hour a day minimum, with the intention of doing more and more as time goes on.

A hour is fine as you will not actually understand anything anyway initially. However, every day you will understand a little more. You will be learning new words every day and going through the basic grammar guides.

As you do this along with your immersion you will start to notice words or grammar that you have covered and can recognise. If you are not sure about something or feel confused, just look it up. you might say “I am sure I know that word” and you can double check, or you can maybe spot a grammar point and you are not sure if you fully understand it, so again go and look it up.

Double checking things in this way is really effective, you have naturally noticed something in the language through your rough knowledge and now focusing on it will make you remember and understand it more.

You should also focus on simple material at this time too. Stuff made for learners and kids shows can be the best as they will use simple language and you are more likely to see the basics words and grammar that you have already discovered.   

(You can read more about – How To Find Comprehensible Input For Language Learning)

Step 2 – Full Immersion

Now you have some basic knowledge and a handful of words under your belt you will be able to understand a lot of what you are watching, it won’t be everything and it will still be a struggle, but the main thing is that you should be able to see some progress and actually be able to grasp something. Now all we need to do is do more of the same, a lot more. 

More Immersion

Now you really need to ramp up your immersion time. You will find that you can understand some things, so it’s not so painful.

I would be doing 2 hours minimum, but really 3 or 4 hour is going to be a good range and anything more than this is even better.

You really want to just absorb as much material as possible now.

Increase Your Vocabulary

The best way to increase your vocabulary now is to pick words out of your immersion. You are going to understand a lot, but not everything.

The best thing to do is find sentences that you mostly understand; ideally there will be one word that you don’t know.

Of course look up the word and learn it, but the important thing to do is take this sentence and create an Anki card for it. When you are reviewing your cards you will see the whole sentence again and you can hopefully remember the new word that you learned.

The word is also in context now, which should help you recognise and remember it better.

Now all you need to do is repeat this number of times every day. You will probably find at the start you can easily find 10 new words easily, but as you improve and do this more and more, the amount of words you don’t know will get smaller and smaller.    

(You can read more about – How Do We Acquire More Vocabulary?)

Revist Any Grammar Points You Start To Notice

You will start to notice more and more about the language, usually small strange things, which are going to be grammar related.  Although you will have already read through the grammar and maybe even looked up stuff after your immersion, you will either have not remembered it, or not actually understood it as well as you can now.  

Now you have been immersing for a while and you will have actually some good experience with the language and know a lot of words. You will find that when you look up this up grammar point you have noticed, it will make a lot more sense now. You will see why sometimes its X and sometimes its Y, the grammar rule should actually fully click and make sense.

This is the best way to actually learn grammar, rather than trying to learn why its X sometimes and Y other times on day one. At this point it’s meaningless. Just make yourself aware of such rules on day one, and then come back later to actually make sense of them when you have some experience with the language.

Repeat Until You Understand Everything

Now all you have to do is just keep doing this until you feel very comfortable with understanding everything you are immersing with.

It’s hard to say how long this will take, but basically the more hours you put in everyday, the sooner you will find that you are really comfortable with understanding.

You can just sit there and absorb everything and make sense of it. It will seem very natural, as if you where watching in your own language. 

Step 3 – Output

Once you reach the point where you are actually starting to understand everything you are watching, you can then start outputting.

Some people really put this off and maybe wait too long. They want to be 101% comfortable with their understanding. I don’t think you need to wait this long, I think you will reach this point far sooner than you realise and its fine to also have a little overlap.

I think if you work really hard you can reach this point after 1 year, certainly by 2 and even if you are not 100% understanding everything, you will be in the 90% range, and that is more than enough to decide that it’s time to output and start using the language yourself.

Output

Output means talking and writing, so basically you can start making friends and actually trying to use your language. This is going to be hard a first, but you will make quick progress. The fact that you already have a really good understanding will help you.

You will find your memory causes you trouble; you can recognise words, but can’t recall them yourself. This is totally normal, but the more you force yourself to recall words, the stronger your ability will be. This is just the difference in your passive and active vocabulary.

(You can read more about – Active vs Passive Vocabulary, What Is The Difference?)

Carry On With Step 2

When you start outputting, don’t forget to keep inputting. You should still be doing immersion. Maybe you can cut back on how much you are doing, but you can do however much you feel is right.

You will also probably be able to cut back on using Anki too; you will probably find you are coming across less and less new words. However, when you make friends you may find that they teach you new words, so you can always make cards for those if you find that helpful.    

Now Just Use the Language

Really you could call this step 4, but really it’s just go and use the language.

You could also make your own study plan at this point, where you could set time aside to do certain things like practice speaking or whatever, but really now you should be in a position to just use the language.

You are probably using the language in your leisure time, by immersing and you are probably outputting with your new friends, so there is nothing really left to study (although you will always be studying and trying to improve).

At this point you will have a good grasp of the language and can do a lot, so just enjoy it and focus on whatever you feel like you need to improve. You have done all the hard work at this point and now you can just enjoy yourself and the language you have worked so hard to acquire.

(You can read more about – How To Use Your New Language Throughout Your Day)

Conclusion

I have made this sound very easy, which it is. Language learning is simple, it doesn’t need to be complicated …however, it is difficult and it is a long and slow process.

You need to dedicate multiple hours, every day for months, if not years at a time, but if you just keep it simple and repeat the same process every day you will get there.

Put the effort in and learn the words and immerse and you will see results. If you work hard enough at its, it’s impossible to fail.

If you want to do your own thing, you will want to read – How To Make Your Own Study Plan For Learning A Language