Try studying English once an hour!

When and how often do you study English? Do you do it once a week? Every day? What about every hour?

There's a blog that I'm a big fan of called All Japanese All the Time (AJATT). The author, Khatzumoto, discusses theories about how to learn a foreign language quickly and well. Yesterday he wrote a blog post that I thought was really helpful for language learners like me, called "Critical Frequency: A Brand New Way of Looking at Language Exposure".

Khatzumoto writes really long posts with lots of jokes and little stories. It's a good challenge to try to read them, if you have the time. But I'll summarize the idea behind his post for you. He says that, instead of trying to spend a long time studying a language, you should try to study it really often. He suggests that you try to study once every hour, even if it's only for two minutes each time.

I think this is a really interesting idea for two reasons:

1. It makes it easier to remember things in your foreign language. It's easy to forget things if you only think about them once a day, or once a week. But if you remind yourself every hour, it's a lot easier to remember.
2. It also makes it easier to motivate yourself. If you try to study for two straight hours whenever you study English, you'll get burnt out. You might start to procrastinate and find reasons not to start studying. But if you know that you only have to do 2 minutes of practice, it's easy to get started.

I'm going to give the "Critical Frequency" method a try for a few weeks. Does anyone want to join me?

Read Khatzumoto's original blog post here.