This is probably the biggest mistake people make when trying to learn a new language. Instead of trying to study a bit every day, many people study a lot for a day, or a week, usually right before they leave for their holiday destination. While this can give you a lot of confidence and an instant illusion of fluency, this isn’t the way to achieve real fluency. Studying a little bit every day is totally different from studying a lot at once. Your brain processes language better in little doses rather than large ones, and you’re more likely to incorporate the new language into your everyday thought rather than as something you have to study.
This is particularly noticeable when it comes to retention. When you push yourself hard for a long time, a lot of that new data is going to fall right back out as soon as you stop applying the force. When you come into contact with something every day, you’re hitting the same connections every day, and after a while that stuff becomes part of the automatic machinery of your mind. When you practice a simple phrase or a greeting or a small chunk of small talk every day, you’re going to master it way faster than when you practice a bunch of grammar rules once a month. One day stacked upon the next stacked upon the next has a kind of compound interest; things that are hard today will be easy in a few weeks, and things that seem impossible today will become routine in a few months.
The other benefit to the daily method is that it’s so much gentler on one’s motivation. That’s because immersion is often exhausting, typically leading to feelings of guilt when you miss a day and a failure to maintain it. The daily method, by contrast, is designed to last. It can easily fit into your daily morning coffee routine, or in the lunch breaks, on the way back from work, or in the hours leading up to bedtime. It won’t leave you feeling overwhelmed often, and so you are more likely to continue it during busy days and turbulent months. It also leads to immense progress over the months and years that are often astounding, even to the most pessimistic of students.
A final psychological benefit is that daily practice can alter the way the learner views the act of practicing the language. Once practice is viewed as something done daily, like brushing one’s teeth or checking one’s phone, it ceases to feel like something “special” or different. For many, this reduces feelings of nervousness and awkwardness when speaking. Those who practice daily often tell me that eventually, speaking the language starts to feel “normal” and like something they do simply to communicate, rather than “perform.” Mistakes feel less terrifying when they occur in the relative safety of a one-on-one conversation with oneself, rather than in front of an audience.
In the end, it’s not so much about whether to study hard or to practice a little every day, but about whether you want to feel like you’re improving or whether you actually want to get better. With those tiny steps, you will have to wait a while to feel like you’re making progress, but eventually you will be carrying the language around inside of you, not just on your shoulder. It won’t just be something you can do, but something you are: when you do it, you won’t think “I’m learning French,” you’ll just think “I speak French.” And that feeling, achieved through a thousand small daily wins, is the difference between language learning as a chore and language learning as a joy.