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?
Dude, don’t compare yourself to others and just enjoy learning a new language at a pace that works for you. The goal isn’t to learn Chinese the fastest, it’s to learn Chinese well enough that it sticks.
🙏 Absolutely
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.
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.
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.
He/she’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 would say deep thinking work, I average around 3-4 hours, but range between 0-8 hours. Like if I really feel in zone, it’s easy to go hard, but if I didn’t sleep well, or had too much caffeine, or didn’t eat enough, it’s just joever. I think months of grinding is possible with the right motivation, but I find that trying to force that motivation is pretty hard; I think that’s often more environment-based, rather than solely individual effort (ala being in a class of very motivated individuals)
The important part for me is trying to start every day (or whatever your schedule is), because it can be hard to know how well I’ll concentrate until I try for 30 minutes or so. And consistency over a long period of time is key.
edit: oh, fwiw, specifically for Chinese, I have been building this recently… although it’s not done yet. https://hanzi.bpev.me/
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.
I don’t have ADHD and it still sounds insane to me!
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.
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.
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.
About 4 hours but not in one go. Everyone is different but I can’t imagine 8 hours straight at anything.
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.
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.
I’ve read that humans can only sustain maximum focus about an hour. I used to think “I can focus for longer than that!”, but I think a more correct interpretation is that “after more than an hour, you start to see diminishing returns on your effort.”
Upon more careful reflection, that sounds about right. I do engineering work that involves deep focus and complex mental manipulation, and I can say that you really can’t do that for more than 1-2 hours at a time without a break. Try to force it longer than that, and you won’t be able to go back for a second round of that in the same day.
The reason why students seem to be able to do it is because of the staggered classes and the variation in complexity for their course load and, you guessed it, taking short breaks in their sessions. Common advice for engineering students is to pair their engineering courses with lower-stress liberal arts courses or courses that use different parts of the brain in a given semester so they don’t burn out, and to rest between classes and study sessions.
And lastly, as an ADHD adult, I’ll offer this insight on the nature of motivation: everyone’s threshold for how much motivation they need to perform a task with sustained focus is different. Sometimes, you just don’t have it in you, because you’ve used the energy on other things. Willpower is not some magical force that you can limitlessly tap into to achieve the impossible; it is very much a finite resource. So if you’re struggling to bring yourself to do more towards a specific goal, consider where you can shave off some energy elsewhere. Or, perhaps after thinking about it, you realize you are already putting in exactly the amount of energy you are willing to. In that case, there’s no need to feel guilty, because you’re already doing what you can and want to.
I can happily deep focus almost indefinitely, including putting off eating but only if I’m really interested in doing something. I can also doggedly persevere with something I feel like I ought to do but become progressively more depressed doing it. I’m starting to think I may have something like ADHD but need to look into it a bit more.
My advice to you is to listen to yourself. If you’re reaching a limit of how much time you want to spend on something take a break from it. You’ll get more done that way and your learning will probably be more effective. Or it may even be worth reassessing whether you really want to do it at all. It’s fine (and very important IMHO) to refine & update your goals to ones that suit you better. You might be tempted to beat yourself up about being a ‘quitter’ but it will be better.
Sail forth and find your dopamine :)
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!
There is no general answer to that. Some people can’t focus on a job from 12 to midday, others can stay hyperfocused in the zone until they drop or someone gets them out of it. As a student, I did a highly concentrated programming job from Thursday to Saturday in one go with only short breaks for food and bathroom, and three hours of sleep in total.
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.
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.
