Can I Really Learn a Language in Just 7 Days?
Or is there something I’m missing about the YouTubers who say they can?
You can’t learn a language in 7 days
Well, it’s not impossible, but you can’t, and I can’t.
Contrary to what you might find online from some successful YouTubers — like Xiaoma or Nathaniel Drew — about their claims of rapidly learning a language, it’s practically impossible.
I’m not arguing that these YouTubers are lying about their experience — I don’t doubt their methods or their results, for the most part — and I applaud them for their capacity to sit down for seven days straight and nut out a language.
But you, dear reader, and I dear author, cannot do it.
Why?
Because we’re not successful YouTubers who have seven days in which to sit down nutting out a language and making a video about it.
The impossibility of having the time
If I had six, ten, twelve hours out of the day where I could slog through vocab and stories and podcasts, I would do it. I would do it every other week.
But I don’t have the time.
I love learning languages, I wish knew more, and I make time to learn a language, but it’s at best an hour a day. I have other priorities which I have to invest time into.
If I wasn’t studying, and developing projects, and working freelance to pay the bills, and trying to stay fit and build up a writing portfolio — if I wasn’t writing this essay, perhaps — then sure, I’d have the time to get to a conversational level in a language in seven days.
What these YouTubers are really saying is that you can learn the basics of a language, to a conversational level, within a certain number of very focused hours of study.
The problem is that if you’re not a successful YouTuber who can easily put aside a bunch of hours in the day, you have to put those hours somewhere in the chaos of your weekly schedule.
What you don’t see these YouTubers doing is trying to learn a language in seven days while also holding down a full-time job they have to commute to and raising a kid or working on some other project they hope will free them from that full-time job.
Languages take a lifetime
You also don’t see them learning a different language every seven days, continuously.
That’s because in reality it takes a lot longer.
It even takes longer than seven days to learn a language in seven days if you don’t know where to look.
You have to plan out your strategy and routine, you have to find good resources, you have to set all that stuff up. That alone can take a week. There’s also usually some trial and error if you’re not used to doing this.
And you also need to reinforce that learning regularly, which if you’re learning a different language every seven days, you’d be accumulatively less and less able to do.
If you do French in week 1, then Spanish in week 2, Portuguese in week 3, Welsh in week 4, you need to be reinforcing French in week 2, French and Spanish in week 3, French and Spanish and Portuguese in week 4, etc.
By the time you get two months into your journey, you’d be learning eight or nine languages simultaneously.
By six months you’d be looking at over 25 languages.
Even if you could dedicate 30 minutes to each one, that’s half the day gone, every day.
No one has the time.
To be fair, no one out there seems to be attempting this feat, and none of the learn-a-language-in-seven-days-YouTubers are claiming or implying such a possibility.
But the argument demonstrates my central point:
Learning a language takes time.
Even if you have a spare week to learn enough of a language to have a conversation, if you want that language to stick, and if you want to have deeper conversations in it, you’ll have to maintain a habit of learning and reinforcing it over months to years, depending on the kind of time you have available.
Not all languages are the same
The amount of time it’s going to take also heavily depends on the language you’re trying to learn, and what languages you already know, and whether they use the same script, or the same sounds and tones.
I speak English, which is mostly Germanic, so other Germanic languages, like German, Dutch, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, or Afrikaans are relatively easy for me to learn.
And any language that uses the Latin alphabet at least saves me having to learn a whole new set of symbols.
Mandarin would be a slog.
Arabic, not much easier.
Some languages, like Georgian, have ridiculous numbers of verb tenses. Good luck.
You’re probably not running off to learn Georgian, but even if you wanted to learn the most common languages, you’d still be stuck learning Mandarin, a language with an estimated symbol count of over 50,000.
Sure, you only need around 2,000–3,000 to read a newspaper, but that’s not going to get into your mushy head in seven days while you’re also trying to reinforce how to distinguish between the sounds ت and ط or د and ذ in Arabic.
You are not your iPad
That mushy head is also the other very important reason why you can’t learn a language in seven days.
Your brain is not a hard drive.
There are limitations on the amount of information your brain can absorb over a short amount of time. And even if you can absorb it, you have to retain it, which we’re not always very good at, hence why we write things down, and buy iPads.
Do you think I remember anything from the exams I took in university that I neglected all semester and then crammed for in the seven days leading up to them?
No, but I did reasonably well in the exams.
I “learned” that stuff in the short space of time before my exams, but it’s all gone now.
I didn’t retain it because I didn’t reinforce it.
Good for them
Again, I don’t deny what these YouTubers have been able to accomplish.
And I don’t doubt that most people have the ability to learn a language quickly, I just don’t think they have the time, and I think there are real limitations to how well you can learn something in such a short time.
And while I think it’s inspiring and initially motivating to see these people smash out a language in a week, I also think that it becomes demotivating for, and only adds to the frustration of, people who have tried to learn languages and have made no progress because they’ve been told by some young punk on YouTube that it only takes a week or two to learn Lithuanian.
If you’re going to learn a language, you first have to accept that it is going to take time and that you need to dedicate hours every day to learning and reinforcing it.
To be fair to some YouTubers, they often acknowledge many of the points I’ve argued above, although that doesn’t seem to change the titles of their videos — clickbait is currency after all.
But if you want realistic advice for learning languages, check out Olly Richards, Steve Kaufmann, or Michael Campbell from Glossika.
These people have methods that are effective and are as quick as they can be for people without photographic memories or oodles of time on their hands, like us regular folk.
That’s what you need to learn a language:
time
support
continuous motivation and a good amount of immersion
— not just seven days.
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