What to expect when learning with Phrasing

Write expectations when starting a new project. For learning a new language, it's also very helpful to have an idea of what you can expect. In this page, we'll go over what you can expect after using phrasing for one week, one month, one season, and one year.

After one week

The first week is definitely the hardest with Phrasing. Everything is going to be new and challenging in your reviews, but as the week progresses, you'll notice it getting substantially easier. By the end of the first week, you'll be well past the worst of the learning phase.

One thing users will often notice when they get started is they will immediately start memorizing full expressions, which doesn't seem ideal. As your library grows, this gets substantially less prominent. Out of the 1000 or so Expressions I've built up over a year, I would say I've memorized less than 2%.

In the meantime, think of this as evidence of the efficacy of the reviews!

After one month

After a month, Phrasing should have a very good idea of your recall. You'll notice the review sessions are getting more interesting, less stressful, and more fun.

This is about when you'll start to see your first second-wave reviews. These are reviews you haven't seen for a few weeks, and I always find these very exciting; both if I remember them, and if I forget them!

If you were brand new to the language, especially if it's a language very different from your native language, you should start to get comfortable with a lot of the sounds after about a month. Of course, your accent is not going to be perfect, it will likely still be difficult to make the sounds at all. However, when I start learning a new language, it can be very hard to even identify word boundaries or distinguish between different sounds or syllables. I noticed that after a couple weeks with Phrasing, I quickly get used to distinguishing, parsing, recognizing, and remembering these sounds.

If the language you're learning is written in a different script, you should get extremely confident using this script within about a month (with the exception of Chinese Characters). There is no dedicated script study in phrasing, but you'll notice that if you try to type words in the script with clozewords, you will very quickly start to pick up a majority of the script. Some scripts are complicated and can have hundreds of different ligatures, these it might take you longer to fully master the script, but at least the basics you should be very comfortable with after a month.

After a month with a set of Expressions, you should also be able to recite at least a few of them on your own, unprompted. This is extremely good practice. Any time you're cleaning, driving, walking the dog, etc you can be practicing something called free recall. It's as simple as it sounds, just try to remember Expressions you've added. Go through every word in your head: the meaning, the phonetics, the spelling, the grammar, what have you. Free recall is the most effective practice that exists for recall.

After one season

After a few months with phrasing, your library will have grown to a point where you're no longer memorizing every expression you see. You will still memorize them, however, at a much slower rate.

Around this time, you can also expect third-wave reviews. These are reviews that you haven't seen for a few months, and these always feel like a blast from the past. And it's fun because some of them you remember perfectly, and other ones you completely forgot about.

After a couple months, you will also start to notice that you recognize a lot of words in the language that you're learning, especially if it's a phonetically written language. Any language besides Japanese or Chinese would really work for this. You won't understand everything being said, of course, but you'll recognize a lot of words. This is because while using phrasing, you are acclimating yourself to language acquisition, and while you don't consciously know the words or understand the meanings yet, you recognize a lot of patterns that you've been exposed to on phrasing.

After one year

It's really hard to set expectations without knowing how much you put into it. If you use Phrasing every day for a year, completing about 50 reviews per day, you should learn roughly the amount of words that you technically need to know to be considered fluent.

Personally, I believe fluency to be a terrible metric by which to measure your language learning. However, conventional fluency can be attained within one to two years with dedicated study. If you've been using phrasing diligently and you've been supplementing it with consuming native content, then after a year, it's very possible to get to a very low level of fluency. If you're familiar with the CEFR, this would be roughly a B1. If you're very familiar with the language and you've taken your studies very seriously and you already speak a related language, it's possible to get to B2 within a year and with the amount of vocabulary you would learn by Phrasing.

However, it should be noted that phrasing itself is not a one-stop solution to fluency. There are always going to be two aspects to learning a language, and that's going to be the study that phrasing supports and the practical usage of the language, which you can get just by listening to music, watching movies, reading books, etc.

What you can expect after one year is really whatever you put into it. The words that you have learned through Phrasing you will remember for life. Many of the Expressions that you're studying with phrasing, especially if you continue using the app, you will also be able to remember for life. This means you can practice free recall, you can practice pronunciation, you can practice intonation, etc anywhere you go.

You will have encoded large swaths of the language in just a few expressions, which will be permanently stored in your head, available to be reviewed whenever you'd like.

You will likely be able to have conversations in specific topics or understand specific material that you have studied. So long as you have been working towards a goal this entire time, it's likely that you will be able to engage with this topic.

Unprompted subjects or native material in other domains, you're likely to be able to recognize a lot of patterns, understand a few of the words, and if you were to stop and think and reread, you would probably understand the gist of what's going on.

True fluency, for most people, is going to take several years. The best thing you can do for your language is just stick with it. That sounds trite, but there is no substitute for time. Concepts that you struggle and grapple with today, you might remember in a month or two. But in a year or two, they will be so normalized in your brain that you won't understand how you ever struggled with them. Keep it up for a couple more years, and these patterns become second nature, to the point where they go in your ears and come out your mouth without a conscious thought