Yes, 15 minutes a day is enough to keep a language moving, as long as you spend those minutes making your own sentences, not just reading or tapping. It will not take you from zero to fluent by some date, and anyone who gives you that date is guessing. Thirty minutes is better than fifteen if you really do thirty. The right number is the one you still manage on a tired Thursday.
That is the short version. The long one has a bit of research, one embarrassing story, and a sum worth doing with your own numbers.
How many minutes a day do you need to learn a language?
There is no magic number. Sorry.
It depends on where you start and what you want. If you are starting from nothing, 15 minutes a day is slow going, and you will want a course or a tutor to give you some structure. If you already speak the language, even a rusty version of it, 15 minutes a day is a lot more than it sounds.
Do the maths. 15 minutes a day is 7.5 hours a month, so about 90 hours over twelve months. Thirty minutes a day is about 180. That is real time, the kind most of us only imagine having.
What the research does say clearly is that how you spread the time matters. A big review by Cepeda and colleagues pulled together hundreds of memory experiments and found the same pattern: the same amount of study, split across separate sessions, is usually remembered better than the same amount crammed into one. That work is about words and facts, not conversation, so I will not stretch it. But it does mean fifteen minutes on seven days is not the same thing as an hour and three quarters on Sunday, even though the total is identical.
And what you do with the minutes matters more than the number. Pulling a word out of your own head is what keeps it there; seeing it on a screen and recognising it asks much less of you. I wrote more about that, with the studies, in why you forget a language.
Is 30 minutes a day enough to learn a language?
Same answer, twice as much. More is more, and 30 minutes of real conversation will move you along faster than 15.
But the problem is rarely 15 against 30. It is something against nothing.
I'm the cautionary tale here. Four years of French classes, and by the end I could hold my own. Then I stopped practising. Not fewer minutes a day. Zero.
You can guess how that went. Most of it went.
The four years of classes were not the problem. Stopping was.
So if 30 minutes is what you can keep up, good, do 30. If 30 turns into "I'll do a proper hour at the weekend" and then into nothing, take the 15. A small slot you actually keep does more than a big one you skip.
What to do with your 15 minutes
Spend most of them producing. Writing or saying your own sentences, about your own life, to someone who answers. That is what fades first when you stop, and reading and listening do not train it.
A few ways to fill the slot:
- Tell someone what you did today, in the language. Three or four sentences is plenty.
- Answer a question you did not see coming. That is where the gaps show up.
- When a word is missing, say it another way before you look it up. Then look it up.
- Keep some listening on the side, like a podcast on the commute or a series in the language, because typing does nothing for your ear or your accent.
Writing trains finding words and building sentences. It does not train pronunciation or keeping up with someone who talks fast, so maybe pair the two.
What 15 minutes a day would cost by the hour
Right, the sum.
15 min a day × 30 days = 450 min a month = 7.5 hours a month
7.5 hours with a tutor at €50 an hour
€375 a month
€4,500 a year
Parla
€12.42 a month
€149 a year
or €20 month to month. All of Parla's prices include VAT.
A worked example: use your own tutor's rate, which varies a lot from one tutor to the next. It compares the price of an hour of conversation, not what each hour gives you.
Now, before anybody writes to me: I know that is not a fair comparison.
Nobody books a tutor in 15-minute slices every day, and nobody should. An hour with a person buys something a companion cannot give you: someone who hears which confusion you are actually in and explains it so it stays explained. That is worth a person's time, and it is priced like a person's time. I went through what each one is good for in Parla or a tutor.
What the sum does show is what daily conversation would cost if you could only buy it by the hour, from a person. Which goes a long way to explaining why most of us do not have it. Not laziness. Price and calendars.
Why does a language app cost so much?
Fair question.
It depends on what you put it next to. Next to a free app, any subscription looks expensive. Next to an hour with a person, most apps look cheap. Neither tells you much.
The number I would look at is what you pay for each minute you actually spend using the language. A subscription you open twice a month is expensive at any price.
So run it on Parla. €149 a year is about 41 cents a day. If you use all 7.5 hours every month for a year, that is roughly €1.66 for each hour of conversation. Use it half as often and it is about €3.32. Your call whether that is a lot.
As for why it is not free: every reply a companion writes comes from an AI model that we pay for, message by message. Every conversation costs us something to run. A flat subscription is how that gets paid while leaving you no message count to watch, so a long evening costs the same as a short one.
If you want to see how other kinds of language app shape their bills, I went through that in what language apps cost.
For a lot of people, the answer is both
If you have a tutor or a class, keep them. One way to split it: the tutor every week or two for the explanations, and 15 minutes most days in between for the talking. Then bring what kept going wrong during the week to the tutor, and take their explanation into the next day's conversation.
If you do not have a tutor and you can already chat about simple things, the 15 minutes on their own will do a lot to stop the language slipping. What they will not do is explain why a tense works the way it does. If you need that right now, keep a person in the mix.
Where Parla fits in the 15 minutes
You choose a companion. Her week goes on in her own city, around her own job, and you message her on Telegram whenever your 15 minutes turn up: on the bus, after dinner, in a queue at the post office. When something comes out wrong, she says it back correctly inside her reply, so the conversation keeps going instead of turning into a test. Now and then she writes first, which helps on the days you forget. And every Sunday there is a letter, PDF included, with the week's numbers and the two things to work on.
The honest bits. She is an AI, and her opening message says so. What she corrects is a suggestion, and she is sometimes wrong, so ask if something looks odd. And you need roughly an A2 level to get much out of it, which means you can already manage a simple conversation. If you are starting from zero, begin with a course or a tutor.
€149 a year, which is €12.42 a month and about 41 cents a day, for as many 15-minute slots as your week has room for. Or €20 month to month, or €99 every six months. All three prices include VAT.
The first week is free, with no card needed to begin. Seven days is enough to find out what actually decides it: whether you use your 15 minutes.
Sources: Cepeda, Pashler, Vul, Wixted and Rohrer, Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: A review and quantitative synthesis, Psychological Bulletin 132(3), 2006. Roediger and Karpicke, Test-Enhanced Learning, Psychological Science 17(3), 2006.
