7 Ways to Master a New Language Effortlessly While Juggling a Busy Life

So you want to learn a foreign language. Great! It can be one of the most rewarding adventures you ever take.

But before you set out, you first need to set some realistic expectations...

Contrary to what the marketing messages say, you won't "learn French in a week!" or "get fluent in Japanese in just five minutes a day!"

According to the U.S. Foreign Service Institute (FSI), it takes roughly 600 to 2,200 hours to reach a functional level of fluency (with the hour estimate depending on the target language; more on this below).

The good news is that these hours needn't be consecutive. And they don't have to take place in a classroom.

With a little creativity and discipline, you can squeeze in an hour or two of language immersion each day, even with a demanding work or family schedule. And you don't have to give up your other hobbies or sacrifice your work, health, or family to get fluent.

The key is intentional scheduling, habit stacking, and leveraging "hidden moments" between your other personal and professional commitments.

In this post, I share seven ways to integrate more language immersion into your daily life and build a personalized language immersion schedule that fits your unique lifestyle.

✍🏼 Take Action: Before we get started, take a quick moment to grab a pen a paper (you will need to write a few things down). Or better yet, download my free Immersion Time Worksheet which walks you through all 7 steps below.

Step 1: Confirm the FSI Classification for Your Target Language

The FSI groups languages into four categories based on their difficulty for native English speakers, and how many hours it takes learners to reach "Professional Working Proficiency" in speaking and reading.

The classification system is not without limitations or controversy, but it can at least provide a rough estimate for how many hours you need to commit to reach a decent level of fluency in your target language.

✍🏼 Take Action: Find your target language below and note the "hours of study" number. Write this down on your piece of paper or in the Total Hours of Study box on page 2 of the Immersion Time Worksheet.

Category I Languages

• Difficulty Level: Easiest for English speakers

• Estimated Time: 600-750 hours of study

• Example Languages: Danish, Dutch, French, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish

Category II Languages

• Difficulty Level: Slightly more difficult for English speakers

• Estimated time: 900 hours of study

• Example Languages: German, Haitian Creole, Indonesian, Malay, Swahili

Category III Languages

• Difficulty Level: Moderate difficulty for English speakers

• Estimated time: 1,100 hours of study

• Example Languages: Albanian, Amharic, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Bengali, Bulgarian, Burmese, Czech, Dari, Estonian, Farsi, Finnish, Georgian, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Kazakh, Khmer, Kurdish, Kyrgyz, Lao, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Mongolian, Nepali, Polish, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Sinhala, Slovak, Slovenian, Somali, Tagalog, Tajiki, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Tibetan, Turkish, Turkmen, Ukrainian, Urdu, Uzbek, Vietnamese

Category IV Languages

• Difficulty Level: Most difficult for English speakers

• Estimated time: 2,200 hours of study

• Example Languages: Arabic, Chinese (Cantonese and Mandarin), Japanese, Korean

⚠️ Note: These times can vary significantly depending on a learner's motivation, experience, environment, and study methods. But they are directionally correct in my experience and act as a useful—albeit rough—reference point.

💡 Pro Tip: If you have not yet chosen a foreign language to learn (or have never learned a language), I suggest starting with a Category I language to build confidence and learn how to learn.

👨🏽‍💻 Learn More: For more about the Foreign Service Institute's language classifications, see their Foreign Language Training page.

Step 2: Set Clear Learning Goals

Now that you know (roughly) how many hours it will take to reach functional fluency, do a little math to figure out your daily time goals:

1. Choose a specific date you want to reach your fluency goal by. Specificity and time urgency are both required to create effective goals.

2. Use this Days Calculator tool to automatically calculate how many days there are between now and your goal date (put today's date in the Start Date fields, your goal in the End Date fields, and click Calculate Duration).

3. Divide the FSI "hours of study" number from above by the number of days you just calculated (e.g. 900 hours for a Category II language divided by 365 days = ≈2 ½ hours / day).

💡 Pro Tip: If this total is significantly more than 2 hours per day, I highly recommend pushing back your goal date to reduce your average daily study volume.

✍🏼 Take Action: Once you've confirmed the daily hour goal, write this down on your piece of paper or in the Daily Hour Goal box on page 3 of the Immersion Time Worksheet.

And while you're at it, take a moment to define your skill objectives, too:

• What do you want to be able to do in the language? Do you plan to travel? Live or work abroad? Connect with relatives? Let this why guide your how (more on recommended methods below).

• Do you want to focus on just listening and speaking skills? This can shave some time off your journey, but also inhibits travel experiences and cuts you off from useful written immersion resources.

• Do you want to learn to read and write, too? This is easy-peasy in Romance languages, but entails significantly more time for languages like Chinese and Japanese.

✍🏼 Take Action: Write these goals down on your piece of paper or in the blanks provided on page 3 of the Immersion Time Worksheet.

Step 3: Complete a Schedule Audit

You now have a clear idea of how many hours to throw at language immersion and study each day to reach your fluency goal by a specific date. But you might be thinking to yourself:

"There is NO WAY I can fit these hours into my already bloated schedule! I barely have enough time to breathe as it is!"

I have no doubt that you are busy. And the last thing I want to do is add even more onto your overloaded plate. But if you follow the study and immersion tips below, much of the time you throw at language learning won't entail adding extra time to your schedule, but rather repurposing existing activities you already do each day.

First, let's take a moment to identify some low hanging fruit in your schedule that can be easily reallocated for language learning.

In general, you want to make more efficient use of time when your mind is not otherwise needed for work, deep thinking, or communication with others. For most people, this means commutes, errands, chores, and exercise. Take a moment now to tally up average daily totals for the following:

1. On average, how much time do you spend commuting or running errands each day?

2. On average, how much time do you spend on chores and yard work each day?

3. On average, how much time do you spend walking or exercising each day?

💡 Pro Tip: If you only do some of these activities once or twice a week, calculate the average weekly total and then divide by 7 to get an average daily total.

✍🏼 Take Action: Add up these numbers to get an daily total of potential language immersion time, and write down this number on your paper or in the Potential Immersion Time box on page 4 of the Immersion Time Worksheet.

This represents an extremely valuable time resource you can leverage for language learning. In the following steps, I will show you how to get the most out this time, as well as tips to unlock even more time throughout your day.

Step 4: Learn on the Go

One of the best ways to integrate more language immersion into your daily schedule is learning on the go. With the advent of smartphones, podcasting, streaming video, blogs, ebooks, Wikipedia, etc., you now have a near infinite supply of potential language-learning resources right in your pocket. All of which can be consumed away from your computer for convenient study anywhere, anytime.

Here are some tips for effective mobile language learning:

• In cases when you need to focus your eyes and hands on other activities (e.g. driving or chores), use audio-only resources like podcasts, audiobooks, and audio courses like Pimsleur or Michel Thomas.

• When you have your eyes and hands free, mix in some reading activities using the Kindle app, LingQ, Wikipedia articles in your target language, etc., as well as flashcard study using Anki.

• Download content to your device so you always have something on hand and don't have to worry about connectivity or using up your data.

Step 5: Leverage "Habit Stacking"

"Habit stacking" is a powerful technique that pairs a new habit with an existing one. By anchoring the new habit to something you already do consistently, you can leverage an entrenched contextual cue that automatically triggers the desired behavior. Since the approach leverages such "automaticity," it significantly reduces the time, effort, and decision fatigue normally involved in habit formation.

For example, let's say that you are in the habit of brewing coffee every morning. You can simply stack a new desired habit (e.g. studying Anki flashcards) on top of this "anchor habit." Instead of just zoning out or scrolling social media while the water percolates through the grounds, you can instead spend that time reviewing any flashcards due for review today.

✍🏼 Take Action: Think about your typical daily routine and identify a few habits or activities you never miss and don't even have to think about. Then decide which language-learning activities you want to attach to each. The formula is simple:

When/After I [do current habit], I will [do new habit].

Write down these conditional statements on your paper or in the table provided on page 5 of the Immersion Time Worksheet.

Step 6: Leverage "Hidden Moments"

As the late polyglot Barry Farber put it in his book How to Learn Any Language:

“Harnessing your hidden moments, those otherwise meaningless scraps of time you’d never normally think of putting to practical use, and using them for language study―even if it’s no more than fifteen, ten, or five seconds at a time―can turn you into a triumphant tortoise.”

In addition to the larger swaths of time you already earmarked for language learning above, you can also leverage lots of little chunks of time throughout your day to squeeze in tiny bursts of study or immersion.

For example:

• Waiting in line

• Waiting for the elevator

• Waiting for a call to connect

• Waiting on hold

• Waiting for meetings to start

While you’re waiting for your meal to arrive at lunch, you could use the time to read an article in your target language. Then while waiting for the elevator back at the office, you look up a few new words you encountered while reading. While on hold with customer service later in the day, you quickly create new flashcards in Anki for these terms.

Such brief bursts may not seem like much at the time, but they can add up to quite a few hours toward your FSI target when you add them up over weeks and months.

Step 7: Repurpose Your Entertainment Time

I saved the best for last...

One of my favorite ways to mix more language immersion into my life is watching foreign films and TV shows. Not only is video one of the most context- and culture-rich forms of immersion, but it also models authentic language usage in a way usually lacking in other forms of language input.

And it's already something most of us do anyway. According to Statista, the average American adult spends more than 3 hours per day consuming streaming video! So like we saw with habit stacking above, leveraging video for learning reduces the time and effort required to create new habits from scratch.

You can choose from a number of streaming services today, but I recommend starting with just two: Netflix and YouTube. Not only do these two services have a wide range of foreign-language content, but both can also be used with the Language Reactor extension for Chrome (a nifty tool that adds interactive subtitles).

In addition to streaming video, I should also point out that social media can easily be leveraged for language immersion, too, if used correctly. Here are a few suggestions on how to learn as you scroll:

• Create new dedicated accounts for each target language to better train the algorithms.

• Only follow accounts that publish content in your target language.

• Change the interface language of the app so you get additional reading practice.

Even the busiest person can integrate more language learning into their life with intelligent scheduling, mobile learning, and repurposing existing habits. Use the tips and strategies above to make language immersion a seamless, automatic, and enjoyable part of your life. Then do your best to get at least one hour of language exposure and practice each day (ideally two).

But also cut yourself some slack on especially hectic days. Having a few 5-minute days here and there won't completely derail your progress. Just make sure that these meager learning days stay the exception, not the rule. Learning a language is marathon, not a sprint, and what truly matters is that you generally stick to your habits over the months and years it takes to reach your fluency goals.

Happy learning!