Note: I'm not talking about aggregated time over an extended period. Rather, I'm talking about the time spent each day (e.g., 1 hour vs. 3 hours per day).
I'll be sharing some things that I've been experiencing recently. and I'm wondering if anyone else has experienced the same.
I've noticed that while I'm engaging in my TL, after a certain amount of time that I spend that day engaging with the language (primarily doing listening only right now), I can feel that my brain, after a while, will start to struggle in picking up new vocabulary / with parsing. In the first hour or two, things are fine, but after then, it starts to get pretty difficult. It's not like I'm tired or particularly losing focus, but it just starts to feel more challenging, almost as if the language part of my brain met a quota for the day or something. I've experienced something similar in reading too. This is only for my TL, and when I experience this spell, I don't experience this when switching to other cognitive tasks.
Another thing I've noticed is that on days where I do relatively little (e.g., only 30 minutes to 1 hour), I find that any new words / structures likely stick more. If I go for several hours, I won't remember anything specific. Of course, I may recognize the word the next time or I may hear it / see it multiple times in that session, but it doesn't "feel" stronger in my head, if anyone gets what I'm saying.
As such, I'm curious about a couple of things here:
(1) Is there a realistic limit (may vary person to person) that one may have on a daily basis with regards to quantity of TL engagement? And, once beyond that limit, one is actually not spending time wisely / efficiently, and that it would be better to push out / spread that time across other days?
(2) Can sometimes doing less be doing more? Doing doing less per day could mean there is less for your brain to think about / process, and thus your brain may have an easier time digesting + processing what it consumed that day. Obviously, doing too little will mean little progress will be made.
Not sure if this is a meaningful post, but just some food for thought / discussion here, as it is a well-known fact that one of the main determining factors of making progress in language learning is the amount of (meaningful) time spent with the TL.
Thank you all!
(For context, I'm somewhere between B1 and B2 in my TL for both reading and listening. I'm probably closer to B2 than I am to B1. I'm only doing engagement and doing very little grammar)
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