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In short
Short, regular lessons beat long, rare ones. You forget less between lessons, you arrive with energy instead of after a full day, and an hour fits into a working day where an evening often doesn't.
When we designed the format for Ja Wohl!, we started with one question: what does the week of someone with a demanding job actually look like? The answer shaped everything else. Our courses meet three times a week for sixty minutes, early in the morning, in the lunch break or after work. Here is why.
You forget less between lessons
Anything new you learn starts to fade within a day unless you use it again. That is not a personal weakness; it is how memory works, and it is one of the most robust findings in learning research. What slows the forgetting is meeting the same material again, at intervals.
With one long lesson a week, there are seven days between the moment you learn a phrase and the moment you use it again. With three lessons, there are two. Each lesson starts by bringing back what the previous one introduced, so new words come back before they are gone.
You arrive with energy
A three-hour evening class across town asks for concentration for longer than anyone has left after a full working day, and the commute there costs another hour. Sixty minutes is different: the early-bird slot catches you fresh, before the inbox; the lunchtime slot is a genuine break from your other work; and the evening slot starts at 19:00 at home, with no traffic, no parking and no babysitter to organise.
Sixty minutes is also long enough to get warm and speak a lot, and short enough to stay focused all the way through.
You speak more
In language learning, speaking time is what counts. In a cohort of ten to twenty people, a teacher who keeps lessons short and active (pair work, short role plays, quick rounds of questions) gets everyone talking in every lesson. Three such lessons a week add up to far more speaking than one long session where attention fades after the first hour.
It survives your calendar
The most practical argument is the simplest: an hour fits where a whole evening doesn’t. A late meeting doesn’t cancel a 07:30 lesson, and it rarely runs past 19:00. A business trip doesn’t cancel a lesson you can join from a hotel room. Courses fail less often because people lose interest than because life gets in the way, and short lessons leave life less room to do that.
What it asks of you
The format works if you keep the rhythm. Block the three slots in your calendar like any other meeting, and spend a few minutes a day on the small tasks between lessons. That adds up to about an hour a week, and it is the hour that makes the lessons stick.
How to keep learning German on a business trip
Summary
Three lessons of sixty minutes a week give you more speaking, less forgetting and fewer cancelled evenings than one long class. That is why every Ja Wohl! course is built that way.