There’s a idea floating around that in order to become proficient in any skill you need to spend around 10,000 hours practicing it. This figure comes from a study undertaken by Dr. K. Anders Ericsson, a professor of psychology at Florida State University, which found that it takes about 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to become an expert in almost any skill.

This idea was popularized in Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers: The Story of Success, and the original point of the research, which focused on experts in different fields – i.e. virtuoso musicians, Olympic athletes and others who were at the top of their field, became a bit muddied. People came to believe that to learn a new skill well, not just to expert level, you need 10,000 hours of practice.

There’s some discussion of the 10,000 hour ‘rule’ here which quotes Dr Ericsson as saying, “Our research shows that even the most gifted performers need a minimum of ten years (or 10,000 hours) of intense training before they win international competitions.” Another study by Gobet and Campitelli found that some chess grand masters had had at least 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, but some took a lot longer – up to 26 years, and others reached that level in 2 years. Then there were some people who had the 10,000 hours of practice, but only played at an intermediate level. This seems to suggest that practice alone may not be sufficient to become an expert.

According to Josh Kaufman, whose TED talk I found the other day, you don’t need 10,000 hours to learn a new skill, but instead can attain basic proficiency in about 20 hours. He thinks that first you have to make sure you have the materials, tools, books, etc you need to learn. Then you deconstruct the skill, working out exactly what your goals are and the steps you need to take to achieve them. Then you focus on learning and practicing those steps for about 20 hours, minimizing distractions. He did this for the ukulele, and believes that this approach works for any skill, including learning languages.

While this can work for the ukulele, a relatively easy instrument to learn, I somehow doubt it would work very well for more challenging instruments like the violin or piano, or for languages. In 20 hours you might acquire some basic proficiency of a language, or another skill, but it’s unlikely that you would good at it. There are exceptional people who can learn new skills very quickly, but for most of us it takes quite a bit longer.

One important part of Dr Ericsson’s findings was that your practice needs to deliberate. You need to focus on improving your performance and to notice any areas where you find difficult. When learning a language, for example, you might have trouble remembering how to form a particular tense, or with specific words or phrases. If you focus on such things, you can make more progress than if you don’t worry about them.

By the way, this blog has been nominated in the language learning blogs category of the Lexiphiles Top 100 Language Lovers 2013 competition. You can vote by clicking on the button below.