How many hours a week do I need to actually make progress?

Twenty minutes a day is genuinely enough, and it will beat three hours every Sunday. You are not fooling yourself. Some honest arithmetic. The rough consensus is that moving up one CEFR level takes somewhere around 100 to 200 hours of study, and the levels get longer as you climb. Twenty minutes a day is a little over two hours a week, so roughly 100 hours a year — call it about one level a year at the lower levels, slower later. That may sound slow. But consider the alternative: most people who declare they will do an hour a day stop within a month, and end the year on approximately zero. Consistency is not a consolation prize, it is the entire mechanism. Two things multiply what that twenty minutes buys you: **Make some of it speaking.** Input alone builds comprehension and leaves you unable to talk. Even one conversation a week changes the trajectory, because it forces retrieval rather than recognition. **Protect it from becoming passive.** Twenty minutes of active recall, speaking, or listening you have to concentrate on is worth an hour of half-watching a film with subtitles. So: twenty minutes daily, with one real conversation a week, and you will be genuinely conversational in a year or two. That is not a shortcut, but it is a real path — and it is the one that actually gets walked.

Stuart

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