How I Learned 5 Languages in One Year

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In 2015, my life was incredibly busy, but productive and fun.

At the time, my little daughter had just turned two. She was enrolled in early development programmes that followed a “Kindergarten is Too Late” approach. We had no nannies or grannies to help clean our apartment or feed my husband, all part of the usual mix of responsibilities in my Russian household while I was on maternity leave.

Even with all those responsibilities, I was determined to learn new languages. Five languages, to be exact.

Sound impossible?

And why would I want to learn five languages?

It all started with Michael Erard’s book Babel No More. If you love learning languages but hesitate to study more than one or two, it’s worth a read.

Babel No More discusses neuroplasticity and polyglots, and it made me think about how little I asked my memory to do. With so much information within arm’s reach, why memorise anything?

As an adult, language study gave me a practical reason to exercise my memory. I already made time to train my body, and I wanted to keep my brain active too, so learning another language became my way to stay sharp.

So, I opened my laptop and made a simple list of the languages I wanted to learn:

• Monday – German
• Tuesday – Spanish
• Wednesday – French
• Thursday – Chinese
• Friday was free until August. Then I wrote Czech in the blank.

I thought about learning Japanese, but I decided I wanted to learn it in a calmer, quieter setting.

By the end of that year, I described my levels as:

• German (B2)
• Spanish (A1)
• French (A2)
• Chinese (B2)
• Czech (A2)

In the process, I improved my memorisation skills and learned how to make the most of my free time. Alongside all that, I gave my little Varvara, who was two at the time, English lessons.

The thing that made the whole plan work was time management for a polyglot!

Here’s the schedule that worked for me:

A note from the Fluent in 3 Months team before we get started: You can chat away with a native speaker for at least 15 minutes with the “Fluent in 3 Months” method. All it takes is 90 days. Tap this link to find out more.

Step 1: Uncover Your Wasted Time

When you have at most three hours per day outside work and family responsibilities, as I did, you start to value your time. You don’t, however, have to study for three hours straight. It can be 20 minutes in the morning, 90 minutes at lunchtime and another hour in the evening. I wrote this article from 4 am to 6 am.

Count how much time you spend on social networks. Multiply it by seven, then by 52, and you may be surprised by how much time it adds up to over a year.

If you want to do something, start today. Finish the article, then take one small step.

First, remove the social-network apps that keep interrupting you, or at least turn off their notifications. Most messages can wait. Then set a 25-minute Pomodoro timer, put your phone on Do Not Disturb and concentrate on one task until the timer ends.

Even one focused block gives your language project somewhere concrete to start.

Step 2: Optimise Your Routines (Or: Don’t Let Your Interests Annoy Your Family)

Frankly speaking, I have always felt held back by cleaning, cooking, and other household tasks. It is frustrating how much time we spend cooking one dinner or doing the daily washing when we could devote it to something interesting. Add a crawling baby to your home, and you have to radically change your approach to doing housework. To give myself more free time, I invested in a dishwasher, a steamer, a multi-cooker, and a vacuum-cleaning robot.

If I did the cleaning when my daughter was awake, she could play on her own or join me (in the latter case, I just needed to be patient and encourage her initiative and involvement).

That meant I could organise my life and manage my household duties without sacrificing my precious personal time.

Whatever routines and chores you have, chances are there’s a way to make them more time-efficient. If you can save just 10 minutes for every hour you’re awake, that’s nearly 3 hours of extra free time.

Step 3: Make Personal Time Your Most Precious Thing

Decide that your private time is really important to you. It’s much harder to create anything worthwhile or learn multiple languages if you never have time to sit and think in peace. My private time was my daughter’s sleeping time. Some days I got lucky, and she slept 3 hours in the afternoon and went to bed at 9 pm. Other days I would have just 40 minutes during the day, and she would be up until 11 pm.

No matter what, as soon as she fell asleep, I went to study. I didn’t use that time for anything else.

Your personal time is precious. Use it wisely.

Step 4: Make a Plan for the Next 12 Weeks

This is the idea behind Brian P. Moran and Michael Lennington’s book The 12 Week Year: treat each 12-week block as its own year, with one clear deadline at the end. Over a calendar year, that gives you four full cycles instead of one big December deadline.

Deadlines can turn a vague intention into work you can schedule. Give each 12-week cycle a specific finish line, then decide what you’ll do each week to reach it.

Treat each week like a month in that compressed year, and keep doing something every day. For me, it was the most effective time-management principle I’d tried.

Step 5: Stay Focused on the Goals You Set

If you’re deciding whether to divide your time, Benny talks through the trade-offs in this video:

I followed my list of five languages and focused on one language per day. The languages occasionally mixed, but I found it funny rather than worrying about it. Once, my French teacher said something in Chinese. It was difficult, but it made my brain work!

I had several goals: take my Chinese and German level up to upper-intermediate; refresh my French and Spanish; and start with a new language (Czech). I met all three of those goals.

I still wouldn’t recommend starting with five languages, or even three, especially if you don’t already have a strong language-learning background. If you do want to learn two languages at once, this fuller guide explains the trade-offs. The schedule that worked for me was:

• Self-study with good resources (2 hours per day)
• One 30-minute session with a native speaker over video call each day

Back then, I used Skype for those conversations. They reinforced the material I learned on my own and made my lessons with teachers more productive.

What I Discovered Learning 5 Languages in One Year

Living on that schedule for a year was a challenge. Without self-discipline, it wouldn’t have worked, and sometimes I cancelled lessons because I needed to sleep.

A language dream still takes work, but for me the results were worth the effort.

If you’d like to study several languages but don’t know where to begin, this is the planning process I’d use:

• Make a list of all the languages you want to learn.
• Evaluate them based on the following criteria:
  • interest in a language (are you passionate or just curious?)
  • practical use (do you want to work with this language or travel to a country where it is spoken?)
  • availability of resources (is it a widely taught or less commonly taught language?)
• Give each language a score from 0 to 5 for each criterion, then add the three scores. Start with the language that has the highest total.
• Create a 12-week plan that covers pronunciation, basic grammar and basic vocabulary. Start practising your writing and speaking as soon as possible. Benny’s free Speak in a Week course gives you a seven-day plan for getting started with speaking.
• Set a daily target you can sustain. I studied for at least one hour a day, but your own schedule may be different. After 12 weeks, check what you can actually do: introduce yourself, ask basic questions, follow simple replies, or whatever your plan targeted.

After 12 weeks, decide whether to continue, pause or take another language from your list. Keep regular conversation sessions in the previous language if you want to maintain it.

If your goal is breadth, four 12-week blocks give you room to explore up to four languages in a year, although the level you reach will vary by language, starting point and practice.

Good luck with your language studies!