I’m constantly feeling guilty about “not doing enough” when it comes to my hobby of learning Chinese. I have been averaging around 3-4hrs every day (I often do 25-minute pomodoro sessions to ensure full focus) for these last 6 months, balancing it with a full-time job, working out and trying to be social. I have no co-dependents and my job is sometimes quite chill which makes this doable. Either way, I still feel guilty of not being able to “obsess” over it every day by studying 8hrs as, apparently, some internet people claim they do. Even while balancing it with other stuff. Or you know, just looking at students studying engineering/law/medical school and also saying they spend 8-10hrs a day studying. Like, I didn’t even spend a fraction of this time studying by myself when I went to uni.
In the end, how many hours of deep focus a day is reasonable? Are the people saying they study 8hrs a day just lying? Or is a lot of unproductive time counted into these 8hrs? Like yes, they sit for 8hrs, but every 10 minute they check their phone for 10 minutes and then resume studying?
About 4 hours but not in one go. Everyone is different but I can’t imagine 8 hours straight at anything.
If you feel guilty about a hobby, it’s not a hobby
It has become a chore.
Hmm I don’t see it as a chore or something I detest tbh. I just try to be disciplined and want to make somewhat fair progress in a good amount of time.
You don’t get points for hobbying the hardest. IMO, you might benefit from focusing on enjoying a hobby and stop making it about efficiency.
“Feeling guilty” about not being the best at a hobby is a bit of a “please consider therapy” flag.
Haha my “guilt” isn’t that overwhelming but it’s in the back of mind. It doesn’t really affect my studying or my day-to-day. I still enjoy the studying. But in terms of language acquisition, I do get rewarded by getting better at a language in a shorter amount of time. Which would be awesome. Even though I realize it’s a marathon, not a sprint.
You don’t get points for hobbying the hardest
Yes you do. In this case, he would have better Chinese.
Point missed, neoliberalismo activated.
He/she/it/ze’s dead, Jim.
It’s only the dogmatic book-worship type of materialism that says absolutely nothing can be accomplished by effort.
The more you study Chinese, the more Chinese you’ll know. Common sense.
Point missed twice, impressive.
I admire the time you have dedicated to whooshing and misinterpretation, you have become highly-skilled.
Right now you’re being a dick to someone, not the other way around. I just wanted to point that out, that he was being polite, explaining his point of view, and you’re basically suggesting he’s just to dumb to understand. That’s mean.
Maybe. Maybe not. If only there was some site-mechanism to check community-sentiment on comments.
Oh well, until someone invents that I guess we’ll never know.
I appreciate your honest feedback.
We’ve both made our points. You have a great day.
Oh man, it’s so disappointing that people would downvote such a classy post. I mean, you found a polite way to say “I don’t want to have an argument”, and someone would down vote that?! Wild.
I study Korean for funsies. I don’t speak kt well but I am very ammusing to Koreans. At the end I had to choose whether this was going to be a new thing to punish myself over… I said 꺼져.
2-4 hours. For teaching you have about 15 mins to reach your students, for reference. Apply this to any presentation you give lol. Anyone that says they’re doing that much, take with a tablespoon of salt.
I would say 4 hours and you can choose to use it at work or for your hobby, depending on what is more important.
Do you work/study full-time as well as this?
Work full-time. But I do have a lot of downtime at work.
So you spend like 11 hours a day being focused?
My job doesn’t require my full focus. As said, I have a lot of downtime on my job too.
My lama always says “There’s no right time to let your mind do what it wants” i.e. be focused 24 hours a day.
But it sounds like you’re guilting yourself, which is not conducive to focus.
As long as you are actually trying everyday, I wouldn’t feel bad about the amount of time spent. If you only feel comfortable doing 25 minutes, you may retain that information better than doing longer but cramming it.
Especially in a language like Chinese where everything is extremely context sensitive like 是 and 时. (Have been doing 30 minutes a day of mandarin for a year and made a ton of progress. Right where you are just keep at it)
Absolutely, I try to avoid having any “zero-day”. There are days where I study a lot less, but it’s never zero. At least I’ll do my Anki cards. 加油 to you too!
Can I ask what resources you are using? I’m mainly using HelloChinese courses and Pleco for stuff in the wild I find. Looking to branch out. 谢谢
Yeah HelloChinese I’ve heard is great though I haven’t used it. I’d recommend you to try Pleco’s graded readers which you can buy in their store. DuChinese is another great option for graded readers (paid subscription) which has helped me a lot.
A more unorthodox suggestion is John DeFrancis’ “Chinese Reader”-series from the 60s and 70s starting with “Beginning Chinese Reader”. Those books, written in traditional Mandarin (but with simplified versions in the appendix) will start you from zero and teach you the most common 1200 characters and 8000+ words. He uses a spaced repetition scheme so every character is repeated in a calculated manner, like 10 times the first lesson it’s introduced, 5 times the next etc… They’re really amazing and available on the web if you search for it, or you can also buy them as they’ve been reprinted. I’ve been going through it steadily and even though I knew a lot of the characters already when I started reading, it has increased my reading speed and comprehension of what I’m reading drastically. It’s just so packed with good reading material, even though it’s a bit dated. It’s really hard to find that much graded reading material that progressively increases your skills.
For listening, I’d recommend podcasts like MaomiChinese, Talk Taiwanese Mandarin, TeaTime Chinese and Chinese Podcast with Shenglan. Hope this helps!
3–4 hours of focus time, and another 3–4 hours of passive time where the brain gets to work on its own. Usually this is what a full time job is, so don’t expect to do more after that. (Mundane purely “mechanical” jobs add a bit of variables, let’s disregard those for now. Work is work and it takes its toll)
Those who say they’re active for 8 hours consistently don’t know how to measure time, or they’re super rare outliers, or outright liars. It’s just not sustainable.
When I was an engineering student, we spent more time on solving problems than just reading the books. The process of solving the problems helped learn the concepts. Didn’t feel like deep focus learning from that perspective.
When learning languages there comes a point where immersion is much more useful than concentrated learning.
While traveling to or living in China for a while might not be an option, are there activities or things you can do in Chinese with native speakers which is not just about learning a language.
It’ll be more fun and require less focus.
Or get a Chinese friend / boyfriend / girlfriend! 😀
I’ve already studied Chinese full-time in a Chinese environment actually, and I’m preparing to do so soon again (which is one of the reasons why I’m extra locked in atm, just so I’m fully prepared). But yeah I try to mix it up with language exchanges and so forth where I am atm anyway :)
I’m lucky to get 4 hrs a day of focus time. I know that for others it can be a lot more. However, ADHD hyperfocus is a thing and may be what these Internet people are referring to
The people who say they work 60+hr weeks for long periods of time are inefficient and are lying to themselves.
3 to 4 hours of focus on anything, every single day is so unthinkable to me I can’t even.
Even when I take my ADHD meds I don’t get those kind of numbers! Jesus. Maybe don’t feel like your existence needs to be justified by constant, sustained effort that can be measured? Sounds really stressful.
Yeah definitely fair enough, I get you. I don’t really care about stressing or putting in the hours for a boss or someone else’s sake, but when it comes to my own personal interests and what I’m doing for myself, I think I tend to pressure myself a bit more.
Depends. I have ADHD. Unmedicated a “reasonable” amount of time could be 20 minutes or 10 hours. Medicated it could range from 2-8 hours depending on my engagement and motivation to stay on task.
Aggregate these data as you will.
Those internet people are lying. It’s the Internet, after all.
It’s better for you to try to be a whole person, who has some social time and gets some exercise and maybe cleans up their living space once in awhile.
4 hours of focused work is generally the maximum, in my opinion. I usually add 4 more hours of low-intensity work on top, to keep up with all the administrative stuff etc.
This is highly dependent on sleeping well and eating healthily, though, and on taking at least one day off per week, if not two.
I’m of the opinion that working hard is foolish, I’m focused on working well. Some days I can do 5 hours, some days I can do 5 minutes. That’s okay, no work is always better than bad work.
