Five hours crammed into the weekend, and six months later still not a decent sentence. I meet this student constantly.
You work all week, you come home shattered, so you save studying for Saturday and Sunday. At the weekend you genuinely sit down, genuinely open the book, and work for four or five hours straight. Then from Monday to Friday, English vanishes from your life.
The problem is not laziness
Quite the opposite. Sitting down for five straight hours is diligent.
The problem is that brains do not learn that way.
I often compare learning English to learning to drive. Nobody learns by sitting in a car for five hours one day and not touching the wheel again all week. You learn by going out a little each day, until your hands and feet know what to do without thinking.
Language is identical. It is a reflex, and reflexes only form through short, regular repetition.
Five hours packed into Sunday and by Wednesday most of it has gone. Forty minutes a day and by Sunday it is all still there, with far less strain.
The numbers
Seven to ten hours a week, across roughly six months, studied properly, is enough to hold fluent conversation on everyday topics.
But it has to be seven to ten hours spread out, not ten hours compressed into two days.
So what is the weekend for?
Three light things.
One. Twenty minutes rereading the week's notes. No new words, just tidying the old ones.
Two. Read one long English text and take only the main idea. Do not look words up. Understanding around twenty percent of the words gets you about eighty percent of the content.
Three. Talk to yourself for ten minutes about yesterday. Nobody is listening and nobody is marking it, so there is nothing to be self-conscious about.
All three together come to under an hour.