Learning a language as an adult: a realistic plan

Suppose you are 63 and you have just booked three weeks in Portugal next spring. You would like to order lunch without pointing. You did French at school, badly, and suspect the window for languages closed around 1975.

It didn’t. This is the plan.

Differently, not worse

The belief that only children can really learn a language is mostly wrong. Lourdes Ortega, a linguistics professor at Georgetown University, told National Geographic that “adults are better learners at everything because we have self-regulation and intent” — and that there is no ceiling on how far an adult can go. Joshua Hartshorne’s research, reported in the same article, found that people keep improving in a new language for around 30 years, not the four or five older assumptions allowed.

What children have is time, no embarrassment and no translation app. What you have is discipline, a reason, and the ability to pick a method and stick to it. Adults learn by design. So design it.

National Geographic reports estimates that for an English speaker, Spanish or French takes around 24 to 30 weeks of full-time study to reach working proficiency; Greek or Russian around 44; Arabic or Mandarin roughly double that. You are not studying full time, but the ordering is useful: a first language is easier if it shares an alphabet and vocabulary with English.

The 20-minute slot

The most important decision is not the app or the course. It is when. Pick a 20-minute slot you can hold most days — first coffee, after the dog, before the news — and treat it as an appointment.

Twenty minutes daily beats two hours on Sunday, and this is not just a slogan. A 2013 review of learning techniques by John Dunlosky and colleagues found that people “will retain knowledge and skills for a longer period of time when they distribute their practice than when they mass it” — even with identical total study time.

There is a second reason. NIH News in Health reports that sleep after learning is what cements new material into memory. Something you studied at 8am, revisited at 8pm and slept on has been through that process. Something crammed on Sunday has been through it once.

Spaced repetition, explained

Spaced repetition is distributed practice turned into a system. You meet a word today. Remember it tomorrow, and you see it again in three days, then a week, then a month. Forget it at any point and it drops back to tomorrow. You spend your time on the words that are slipping.

You can do this with index cards in a shoebox or with a flashcard app. What matters is the other half of the method: you must try to recall the word before you flip the card. Dunlosky’s review rated practice testing — retrieving the answer rather than rereading it — as the highest-utility technique there is, and rereading and highlighting among the lowest. Looking at a word list is not studying. Covering the column and guessing is.

Ten minutes of your twenty, most days, is flashcards. Not more.

Speak in week one

The other ten minutes are for output. The mistake nearly everyone makes is to postpone speaking until they are “ready”. You will never feel ready, and speaking is what you are learning the language for.

In week one this means saying words aloud to the kettle. By week three, a two-minute recorded monologue about your day. By week six, a real conversation with a real person, however halting. Adults, as Ortega notes, are willing to take risks with a foreign language once they decide to. Decide to.

Where to find help, cheaply

Libraries. UK and US public libraries usually offer free access to a language-learning platform with your card, plus audiobooks and graded readers. Ask at the desk.

u3a. In the UK, u3a is a nationwide network of learning groups for people no longer in full-time work — no exams, no homework, volunteer-led. Age UK notes that membership fees are usually lower than most adult education courses; languages are among the commonest groups, and there is a virtual u3a for people who cannot travel.

Community colleges and adult education. Evening classes give you a teacher, a cohort and a fixed weekly time; US community colleges often run non-credit conversational courses at modest cost.

Apps. Fine for the flashcard half, weak for the speaking half. Use one, do not pay for three.

Conversation exchanges. Many towns have free meet-ups; online, tandem partners pair you with someone learning English.

Radio, podcasts, television. Free and at every level. Children’s programmes are humbling and effective.

A 12-week outline

Weeks	Daily 20 minutes	Weekly milestone
1–2	10 min flashcards (100 most common words); 10 min pronunciation, say everything aloud	Introduce yourself in five sentences, out loud
3–4	Flashcards continue; 10 min listening to a beginner podcast or children’s TV	Record a two-minute monologue about your day
5–6	Flashcards; 10 min writing — a diary entry of five lines, then read it aloud	First conversation with a person: exchange partner, class, or tutor
7–8	Flashcards (now 400+ words); 10 min reading a graded reader	Order, ask directions, tell a short story, from memory
9–10	Flashcards; 10 min speaking practice — describe pictures, narrate the news	Twenty-minute conversation, mostly in the language
11–12	Flashcards; 10 min of whatever you were worst at	Half an hour with a native speaker; plan the next 12 weeks

The flashcard half never changes. The other half rotates through listening, writing, reading and speaking so you never spend a month on one skill. If you would like this structure with the habit-building side handled, our Sharp course is an eight-week version built on the same methods.

This week

• Choose the language and the slot.
• Get your library card working online and see what is free.
• Make or download 50 flashcards of the most common words. Do the first ten minutes.
• Say ten words aloud tonight. Then read Keeping your mind sharp after 50 and Five memory techniques that work at any age.