How Many Language Classes Per Week Should You Take As A Beginner Student?

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There are a few guidelines you should consider that are mostly dictated by common sense and method.

As beginners, unbridled enthusiasm leads most learners towards quantity. It's a common trend these days to count success based on the number of hours one puts into the work. So we often hear something like "it takes one thousand hours of study to perfect a craft". Therefore, one better start packing up hours and do at least four classes per week plus 2 hours everyday bent on grammar books doing exercises. By this logic, if quantity really is what does it, why not study seven days six hours a day?

The truth is, you can rake together 10,000 hours of active in-class work at 4 hours per week, and after 45 years--in the surreal hypothesis you still haven't told your language teacher he can take the entire dome of the St. Peter's Basilica and stick it--you won't be fluent. In fact, you'll likely still be unable to deal with intermediate-level conversation scenarios.

As a language coach, here's what I advise beginner students to do.

1) Do not sign up for classes just yet. Get a book and study one or two basic structures by yourself. Memorize some basic vocabulary and start working by yourself. Get a general feel for the sound of the language. Watch subtitled films and listen to music. Sit back and listen to an interview to some famous Italian (or French, or Spanish, or Japanese actor, or director, or artist, or whoever). Familiarize with the culture.

After all this, do you really still want to go on this quest?

If your answer is "yes", then:

2) You have come to a point where you feel you're ready to commit to classes.

As a beginner student, the right amount is 1 (one) class per week.

You must understand that the work that counts (meaning the one that matters) IS NOT your in-class work with your teacher and classmates, but the work you do by yourself. This especially holds true for beginner students.

Classes and teachers are only there to guide you, advise you, and put you back on track if you stray a few degrees off course.

After that one weekly class, you need time to process the information, practice aloud through repetition to a level of comfort and ease, memorize to perfection the vocabulary and conjugations involved, take a 2-day break for your brain to rest, recuperate, and process, and then practice aloud again the same structure from that one class. After that you need another break. This is 7-days work.

Only after all this can you take your next class.

During the mental breaks you can of course--and you should--immerse yourself in other cultural aspects of the language. You can check the news, read recipes, watch scenes from movies, watch a documentary, read a book, etc.

But anything more than that one weekly class is going to overwork your brain's ability to correctly process the information. It also won't leave you with enough time to do the work that really matters. You'll learn approximately at best. Teachers won't have you practice the way you should and you'll lose confidence pretty quickly.

This is what I personally recommend for the first six months to a year of language study, provided of course you apply the appropriate study methodology.

So there's that.