Learning a New Language With Spaced Repetition

In every major language, roughly the most common 1,000 to 2,000 words cover 80 to 90 percent of everyday conversation. Start there. Learn those thoroughly before you branch into specialised vocabulary.

A frequency list, split into short weekly batches and reviewed with spaced flashcards, will get most learners through the first thousand words in three to four months of daily practice.

Do not make cards that pair a foreign word with its English equivalent and nothing else. Include a short example sentence in the target language on the same card. The sentence anchors the word in real usage and stops you from learning a translation that does not survive contact with a real speaker.

For verbs, include a common conjugated form. For nouns, include the gender if the language has one.

Grammar is best learned in short focused sessions, then reinforced through reading, listening, and speaking. Long grammar drills produce short-term recognition and long-term boredom.

Make flashcards only for grammar patterns you keep getting wrong in real sentences. Do not try to flashcard the entire grammar book — most of it will absorb through exposure once you have enough vocabulary.

Passive listening to real audio in the target language — even material well above your level — trains the ear for the sound patterns, rhythm, and prosody of the language. Do it daily, even for 15 minutes.

As your vocabulary grows, comprehension will jump suddenly rather than gradually. The listening practice is what makes those jumps possible.

You can have a large vocabulary and still be unable to produce a sentence in real time. Speaking has to be practised as its own skill, ideally with a real conversation partner or tutor, from as early as you can tolerate it.

Shadowing — listening to a short clip and repeating it out loud — is a cheap and effective bridge between listening and speaking.

20 minutes a day of spaced-repetition vocabulary and grammar cards. 15 minutes a day of listening. Two or three 30-minute speaking sessions a week. One deliberate reading session per week — a short article, a page of a graded reader, subtitles on a show.

Kept up for a year, this rhythm gets most motivated learners into comfortable conversational range in most major languages.