You have to answer one main question: what is my goal for learning English?
It can be passing an international exam, moving to another country, a new position in a company or any other change in your life connected directly with English. When people say: «I want to learn English because everybody does it or for just myself», actually it’s not a real goal. That’s why we can’t use it for creating the right motivation for learning and can’t assess the result correctly. How can you assess whether your level of English is good enough for what? For yourself? Or for everybody? Or for what? You see what I mean.

After that you have the following questions to think about:
How can I achieve this goal? What steps can I do now?

1. _______________
2. _______________
3. _______________
4. _______________

And finally, how much time do I have?
How much time can I spend on English every day?

Each learning programm for English has 4 main skills to develop:

• Reading
• Listening
• Writing
• Speaking

The first two you can develop on your own, practicing them while you read books, articles or posts and listen to the radio, podcasts or watch TV shows.
But the last two require another person to give you a feedback. There is a technique like shadowing but you will need to practice spontaneous speech anyway. As almost any speech in our everyday life is spontaneous and a complex task for the brain.
Another language is a system of letters, rules, constructions and words. To learn it you need to create a new neuronet in your brain. That is a process wich requires time, effort and discipline.
We created the Formula of the Result in learning English (or any other language).

It looks like (time x effort)^discipline = result.

The more time and effort to dedicate to learning languages, the higher result you’ll have. And it works even of you didn’t have enough discipline at some periods.

For example, once you started reading The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien. At that time you had English on A1 level, for example, so you couldn’t understand all the words. But you got so interested in the plot that decided not to google every new word. Thus you finished reading the book in a week and developed new skills: understanding the information in English from the context + fluency in reading texts in English. These skills will stay with you even if stop learning English for a while, because a new neuronet has been created already. After a break you’ll spend some time to get these skills to the previous level. But it will take much less effort, time and discipline than to obtain these skills from the scratch.

What happens when (time x effort) < 1 (the minimal essential amount)?
Then the result strives to 0, even if the discipline is high.

How can it happen?

That is the answer why after learning English for 10 years in average Russian schools (not specialised in languages or having strong English teachers) or universities people still do not speak English fluently or are just afraid of speaking it.
Thus they are not able to use English in everyday life or for work.

It happens due to the mechanisms with help of which the brain operates.

(Time x effort)^discipline = result

High discipline here means that you do your studying on the permanent basis without long breaks and spontaneous stops. At school we have such a discipline, so we go there and have subjects 5 days per week. But the lessons are short and last for 40-45 min. This time is enough only for warming up the brain. It means that the brain gets ready for the real learning and equision process. It doesn’t absorb the neccessary information nor gets essential skills during this time.
To get them you have to contintue exercising in English. Instead at school the lesson finishes and another subject starts (ex. Math or Biology). And again the brain needs time to switch to another activity and another subject.

As brain is a very conservative structure, you need to overcome the resistance in order to create a new neuronet. This process requires the minimal essential amount of time and effort. For different people these numbers may vary, but there are studies saying that 1100 hours during a year are enough to learn English from A1 level to C1 (but only if you have already studied some other Roman language).
This is a physical mechanism designed to protect our brain from the fast deterioration.

That is why if the amount of the workload (time x effort) is not enough, then the result of studying is getting worse and worse.
This is the reason why learning English everyday for 10-15 min doesn’t help you. On the contrary it is useless and bad for the brain. Because when you learn information by small bites you have only the illusion of leaning process.
What happens in reality is that you clog your RAM and cache with all these teany tiny bites of useless information.
And in order to clean it up, your brain has to put this information into a drawer on the hard drive and send it to the furthest possibly shelf. So you’ll never be able to use it again.

To sum up I can say that learning languages is a hard and lasting process. Not only the discipline helps you here, but the right amount of time and effort. If you want fast reasults like becoming fluent in English in a year, then be ready to spend on English not less than 2 hours per day during this year. But the faster you learn the better result may be for you.