Most people asking this question have already started at least once and stopped. So the useful place to begin is not "how to start" but why people stop.
The three most common reasons: starting at the wrong level, failing to build a daily habit, and being unable to see progress. All three are planning problems, not talent problems.
Are you actually starting from zero?
Very few adults are. Most have had years of school English, forgotten a lot, but not lost all of it. This matters, because you may not need to start at A1 — and starting there unnecessarily makes the first month boring, which is how people quit.
Do not guess this, measure it: the free level test takes ten minutes, needs no account, and gives a CEFR result.
Week 1: sound and the most frequent words
Do not study grammar in week one. This is the opposite of the most common advice, and the reason is simple: grammar is something you apply to words, and you do not have the words yet.
What to do: learn the 100 most frequent words as sounds, not as spellings. English spelling and pronunciation diverge more than in almost any other major language, and a pronunciation you invent from the page is much harder to unlearn later than to learn correctly now.
So listen to every new word in a dictionary and say it aloud once. It takes three seconds and saves months.
Week 2: phrases, not isolated words
Memorise sentences rather than words. Learn "Can I have some water?" instead of "water". For the same effort you get the word, the structure, and something you can actually say.
Twenty phrases are worth more than two hundred words, because a phrase can be used immediately. A word needs a sentence built around it, and at this stage you cannot build that sentence.
Week 3: first grammar, but very little
Now grammar — but only three things: to be (am/is/are), the present simple (I work / he works) and the present continuous (I am working).
Those three cover a large share of everyday speech. Present perfect, conditionals, the passive — all can wait, and should. Someone trying to learn twelve tenses in the first month learns none of them.
Week 4: start producing
The first three weeks were about understanding. In week four, start producing: write five sentences a day about your own life, using the words you have learned.
This is the most skipped and most decisive step. A word you recognise and a word you can use are two different things, and only use moves a word between them. Our article on practising speaking alone goes into why.
How much per day?
Twenty to thirty minutes a day, six days a week. One day off.
One three-hour session a week is far weaker than thirty minutes daily. The reason is not willpower but how memory works: vocabulary holds through spaced repetition, not through volume.
And be clear about this: a missed day does not break the plan. What breaks the plan is deciding, after one missed day, that the week is ruined.
Where you should be after a month
A realistic target: introduce yourself, ask and answer simple questions, produce a few sentences on familiar topics. That is the middle of A1.
If that sounds like very little, the comparison is wrong. Someone expecting fluency in a month quits in month two. Someone expecting mid-A1 in a month is exactly on schedule.
What comes next
From month two, move to a course structure. The English A1 page shows exactly what the level covers, and you can continue from there at your own pace.
We wrote separately about how many hours a language actually takes and what shortens it — setting the expectation correctly is the most valuable thing you can take from month one.