They range from to 4, hours. If you were to study a language on your own for 4 hours a day, 5 days a week, for a total of 20 hours a week, these estimates mean it would take you somewhere between 45 weeks and weeks to reach B2 level of your target language. That is between one and four years! So, how do you account for hundreds of people around the world including myself who are able to reach a B2 level in a matter of months?
The schools and organizations that these figures come from are focused on helping students pass a specific test or reach a certain certification or degree.
Of course, there is nothing wrong with those who pursue an academic understanding of languages. Personally I think it is wonderful that there are those who have dedicated themselves to a scholarly pursuit of language theory and pedagogy. My purpose for learning languages is quite different.
I rarely study to meet the requirements of a specific test. My test is real life. In other words, I aim to use the language, as opposed to analyzing the language. If you are working to be able to communicate in the language with native speakers, then find the methods that are best for that specific purpose. Most classroom environments have one person standing in front of several other people, disseminating information in one direction. Is that the best use of your time if your focus is on practising the language as much as possible?
The amount of time you get to speak during most language classes is pretty low. In a classroom with 20 students you might get called on to speak with the teacher just 4 or 5 times for a total of around 5 minutes all together. And, of course, the best way to speak the language is one-on-one with a native speaker. In one hour with a native speaker the entire time would be spent actively using the language.
That is at a 6x increase in the amount of practice you get over a classroom environment. Instead of spending 6 hours in a classroom, you could get the same amount of speaking practice in just 1 hour with a native speaker! That materials you cover with a one-on-one native speaker are different than what you study in a classroom, for one very important reason: it is relevant to you!
In a classroom the teacher tells you what materials you should study and the words you need to learn. For example, you may have an entire week focused on different modes of transportations, when the only method you actually ever use in your own life is a bicycle.
The words you use when speaking are related to you, so not only are you able to speak more quickly with a larger number of useful words, but you have a better chance of remembering words about yourself. Studying in the one-on-one, native speaker method means you are able to use the language much more quickly than when studying in a classroom. Most language teachers are focused on teaching you the language, but they spend very little time teaching you how to learn the language.
This means you are stuck studying with ineffective methods like rote memorization or listen-and-repeat tactics. Here are a few of the most powerful hacks I use myself to help with my language learning efficiency:. Use this time-hacking method to increase your productive sprints.
By alternating 25 minute work sessions with 5 minute rests, you allow your brain to get some breathing room and are able to get in more focused work. Check out my video where I share how I use this technique. Why does this work? Thus, three calendar years are days long; the fourth calendar year is days long.
But since the Julian calendar was 0. Between 46 BC and AD, this accumulated error amounted to a total of: 0. In , Pope Gregory XIII reformed the calendar by specifying that all years divisible by 4 are to be leap years except for century years, which must be divisible by to be leap years. Now, in years:. The Gregorian calendar came into use in Roman Catholic countries in October when the seasons were brought back into step by eliminating 10 days from the calendar then in use.
Thursday, October 4, was followed by Friday, October 15 which caused some consternation among the populace, especially those with birthdays on the eliminated dates! Some British documents from the period before the British reform actually contain two dates, an old and a new. In each century, one out of every four years is divisible by 4. Of the century years, only , , and are divisible by , leaving , , , , , , , , and that are not. A total of years are not divisible by 4, and are therefore regular years.
Twelve century years are possible leap years. But only 3 century years out of the 12 are divisible by i. Calculating the Energy from Sunlight over a 12 hour period. Calculating the Energy from Sunlight over actual full day. Perfect Numbers-A Case Study. Gravitation Inside a Uniform Hollow Sphere. But we see that today those extreme working hours have been roughly cut in half.
Before this revolution in working hours people worked as many hours between January and July as we work today in an entire year. But we do have evidence from other historical records from — that in many of those countries workers also used to work extremely long hours.
For those countries with long-run data in this chart we can see three distinct periods: From — there was a relatively slow decline; then from — the decline in hours steepened in the midst of the powerful sociopolitical, technological, and economic changes that took shape with World War I, the Great Depression, and the lead-up to World War II; and then after an uptick in hours during and just after World War II, the decline in hours continued for many countries, albeit at a slower pace and with large differences between countries.
Zooming in to the last 70 years and looking at other countries beyond those who industrialized early, the data reveals a continued decline in working hours for many countries but also large differences between countries. In the chart here we zoom in to the period since and we change the selection of countries to highlight some of the diversity in trends. For some countries, such as Germany, working hours have continued their steep historical decline; while for other countries, such as the US, the decline has leveled off in recent decades.
In some countries we see an inverted U-shaped pattern. In South Korea, for example, hours rose dramatically between and before falling again since the mid s.
And in other countries we see no recent declines — in China, for example, hours actually rose in the s and early s before leveling off in recent years. The decline in annual working hours described above has come from fewer working hours each day, as well as fewer working days each week and fewer working weeks in the year. In a paper analyzing historical data for the US, the economist Dora Costa summarizes the evidence: 5.
By the typical work schedule was 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. Although further reductions in work time largely took the form of increases in vacations, holidays, sick days, personal leave, and earlier retirement, time diary studies suggest that the work day has continued to trend downward less than 8 hours a day.
As Costa notes, workers had regular days off each week: one day off usually Sunday from at least the s until around the s, when two days off became more typical.
In addition to regular days off each week, workers across early-industrialized countries had days off from work for vacations and national holidays. This is shown in the chart here, which again relies on research from Huberman and Minns.
The chart shows that days of vacation and holidays increased over the period from — The Netherlands is a stark example — workers there saw an increase from four days off for vacations and holidays in to almost 38 days off in The declines in the length of the work day and the number of working days have been driven by several factors, including increases in productivity and the adoption of regulations that limit working hours.
We discuss these and other key drivers behind working hours trends across countries and time in a series of forthcoming posts. The evidence presented here comes from decades of work from economic historians and other researchers. Of course, the data is not perfect — as we explain in a forthcoming post, measuring working hours with accuracy is difficult , and surveys and historical records have limitations, so estimates of working hours spanning centuries necessarily come with a margin of error.
But for any given country, the changes across time are much larger than the error margins at any point in time: The average worker in a rich country today really does work many fewer hours than the average worker years ago. As the economists Diane Coyle and Leonard Nakamura explain, the study of working hours is crucial not only to measure macroeconomic productivity , but also to measure economic well-being beyond economic output.
The available evidence shows that, rather than working more than ever, workers in many countries today work much less than in the past years. There are huge inequalities within and across countries, but substantial progress has been made.
Economic prosperity in different places across our world today is vastly unequal. People in Switzerland, one of the richest countries in the world, have an average income that is more than times higher than that of people in Cambodia. When considering such differences in prosperity, a natural question is: who works more, people in richer countries like Switzerland or in poorer ones like Cambodia? Looking at the available data, the answer is clear: workers in poorer countries actually tend to work more, and sometimes much more.
We see that in the chart here, with GDP per capita on the horizontal axis and annual working hours per worker on the vertical axis. Countries like Cambodia which is the country in the very top-left corner or Myanmar have some of the lowest GDP per capita but highest working hours. In Cambodia the average worker puts in 2, hours each year, nearly more hours than in Switzerland 1, hours at the bottom-right of the chart. The extra hours for Cambodian workers means longer work days and many fewer days off.
There is a link between national income and average working hours, not only across countries at a given point in time — as shown in the chart above — but also for individual countries over time. Since the Industrial Revolution people in many countries have become richer , and working hours have decreased dramatically over these last years. In the chart here we show this association between incomes and working hours over time, country by country.
The four highlighted countries exemplify how working hours have decreased at the same time that average incomes have increased. Productivity refers to the rate at which inputs are turned into outputs.
To understand working hours the key metric is labor productivity: the economic return for one hour of work. At the most concrete level, labor productivity captures things like the number of breads that a baker bakes in an hour, or the number of cars factory workers assemble in an hour. At the most comprehensive level, it relates the total output of the economy GDP to the total labor input total annual hours worked , giving us the aggregate measure of labor productivity, GDP per hour of work.
Higher labor productivity is associated with fewer working hours, as shown in the chart here with labor productivity on the horizontal axis and annual working hours on the vertical axis. The chart currently shows data for the latest available year, but you can explore this relationship over time since by using the blue time slider at the bottom of the chart.
If workers can produce more with each hour of work, it becomes possible for them to work less. Technological innovation — defined broadly here to include physical machines as well as ideas, knowledge, and processes — makes it possible for each worker to become much more productive. And increases in productivity in turn help drive both increases in incomes and decreases in working hours.
A prime example of how tech innovation drives productivity growth is agriculture. As we show in detail in our entry on Crop Yields , innovations like better machinery, crop varieties, fertilizers, and land management have enabled farmers to be much more productive. In the US, for example, farm production per labor hour increased nearly fold from — The chart here shows the growth in labor productivity, not just for agriculture but for the entire economy.
The technological, economic, and social structures in richer countries have enabled workers there to produce more while working less. Besides tech innovation, there is evidence that working fewer hours can itself keep productivity higher, making the link between working hours and productivity self-reinforcing.
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