Do you need 1100 hours to learn Russian? (My experience)

Two weeks ago, I was speaking to a student of mine who was comparing his own progress of Russian to the 1100 hours guidelines from the Foreign Service Institute. And in this video, I want to share with you some of the conclusions we got during that chat. Because if you don't know the right way to look at these 1100 hours, those hours will just be dooming over you. And that's just not a very helpful thing for most learners. So in this video, I want to share the biggest issue that I personally have with the 1100 hours, then explain my progress, how much time it took me and then plot it along the 1100 hours. And I want to give you a simple strategy you can use to 10x the amount of classroom hours you can have in any given week, even if you're a busy person. So let's get started. The biggest issue I have with the 1100 hours rule from the FSI is that it's so demotivating. If you think about it, 1100 classroom hours for every 25 hours that they spend in classroom each week, they spend another 15 hours doing homework for 44 weeks long after each other. So that's a total of 1760 hours, if you think about it. But let's just take the classroom hours, one hour a day of classrooms, so seven hours a week, you would need to do three years of that in order to get to 1100 hours. If you would have told me when I started learning Russian, that we need to spend one hour in a classroom for three years, I would think twice if I would actually want to do that. And that's the biggest issue with this. And I want to give you a different way of looking at these 1100 hours to make sure that it is actually something that motivates you. Because see, you got this 1100 hours, there are three models that you can have to look at it. The first one is the binary model. And that's something that most smart people understand that that's not the case. But for some people, some reason, some people still have in their mind, maybe just a little bit that, okay, I'm going to be not speaking at all. And then suddenly, if I reach a magic level, which in this case might be 1100 hours, and suddenly I'm going to be fluent. Well, smart people understand that this is not the case, but I still want to mention it. But another mistake that people then make is that they assume that it's a linear model, linear model, meaning that, okay, so 1100 hours means fluency, and 550 hours means 50% fluency. 110 hours means 10% fluency. And this is also not the case, because the reality is that learning almost any skill, really, and especially learning a language, you're going to get the most benefits from the first block of time that you spent in it. It's a nonlinear model. Let me explain. If you're a complete beginner, you have zero fluency. If you were to learn, let's say, the 100 most common phrases, you learn how to say, спасибо, здрасте, you learn how to say, меня зовут, я из, or stuff like, я работаю в, я еще учусь, я студент, or, you know, lots of simple phrases like that. And then you add, let's say, 100 most common phrases, and then 50 that are relevant specifically to you. Now you go from zero fluency, zero percent fluency, to, let's say, 20% fluency, just by learning 150 phrases. And if I were to do the same thing at my stage of learning Russian, if I were to learn another 100 common phrases, and 50 phrases that are specifically relevant to me, I'm not sure if I would improve my fluency level by 1%. If we go back to this 1100 hours, the first 100 hours will do much more for your fluency than our 1000 to 1100. Now, I do want to mention that I think these 1100 hours in general is a good estimate for how much it takes for people to learn Russian in terms of classroom hours. It's not going to be orders of magnitude different. There's no one who's going to learn to speak Russian well with just 100 classroom hours unless they spend 1000s of hours immersing themselves in Russian. Or it's also not going to take someone 5000 classroom hours. I just wanted to explain a little bit about this graph and kind of show my experiences that I have with this graph. So when I went to Moscow the first time, I had spent a couple months seriously learning Russian. And before that, just getting to know the language a little bit, just seeing whether I liked it. But when I got there, I was able to have basic conversations. And I was able to speak about plenty of stuff, like where I was from, my hobbies, what I had been studying, where I was going to do my internship, whether I like specific types of food, or whether I enjoyed the place that we went to, and just ask basic questions about how people were doing, where they were living, etc. My grammar was still bad at that time. But then again, in the beginning stages, in order to have a conversation, it doesn't really matter because people understand that you're a foreigner. But I was able to have these conversations with maybe spent like 100 of those classroom hours. I never took classes. But later on, I'll show you what I did instead that counts as classroom hours with Mexico makes you spend much more time effectively learning. So if I was at I spent 100 hours, but I was maybe at a let's say 20-25% fluency level for spending much less time. And the second big defining moment that I want to share with you was when I had spent, let's say a total of like 300 classroom hours. And we were picking up friends from the airport in the Netherlands, Russian speaking friends. And when they arrived, we sat in the train to go back home. And I just asked him some questions like, how did you get here? What do you want to do in Holland? And I just noticed that after 10 minutes, suddenly it came down on me, I looked outside, I was like, wait, we are having, I am having a conversation in Russian. And it didn't even feel like it was having a conversation in a foreign language. It felt like just I was having it in Dutch or in English. Now, sure, I was far from fluent by that time. But it still meant that I started feeling comfortable at that point in time with speaking Russian. And I realized back then that, hey, if I'm comfortable now, with my Russian, it means that everything else that I learn, every single extra hour that I spend is going to be bonus. It's just going to make me feel more comfortable and more fluent. And that's kind of when I stopped putting in, that's kind of when I stopped taking or doing any type of lessons or learning much vocabulary. And I just switched most of my learning to watching series, reading books, and actually speaking to people. So I want to see that as basically my goal to help you get to this point where you feel comfortable with speaking Russian as well. And for me, I assume that would be around 300 classroom hours or so. And now, I just told you, I never took classes. What did I do instead? For some reason, like my experience with classes in high school was not very efficient. And I didn't really like the idea of going somewhere and having someone else decide what I was going to wear. So I took matters in my own hands. And what I did, and this is a simple hack that you can do to spend instead of having a couple hours of classroom hours every week, you can do have like 10 to 20 classroom hours each week. And that is that you've got to listen to audio lessons. The reasons why I absolutely adore audio lessons is because first of all, you can spend as much time on them as you want. And well, actually, the main reason is because audio lessons are what they are, are just recorded, recorded classroom hours, but then one on one. And the great thing about audio lessons is also that there's lots of different courses available. So you can pick the one that works best for you. And that means that I value speaking a lot. So that meant that I wanted audio lessons that really focused on actual conversational ability that prompt you to speak Russian. So how would you say this in Russian, and then you pause it and then you reply to it. And so I highly recommend you use, if you're taking classroom hours, at least supplement them by doing audio lessons, because you can listen to them while taking a walk or while commuting to work. And all those dead time, all those hours that you're not really doing anything productive anyway, they really add up quickly. The audio course I recommend the most is my own course conversations unlocked simply because it focuses on you learn vocabulary, you learn grammar, you learn listening. And most of all, there are speaking prompts in which I prompt you to speak things to create your own sentence. So you develop your own sentence creation ability, which is the most important part of actually having conversations in Russian. Lots of students like it. So if you want to try it, check out the link in the description below.