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1. Form goals
Knowing what you want to achieve is crucial to developing successful, good habits. A common practice in business development is to set “S.M.A.R.T.” goals. A SMART goal is: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. Achieving “fluency” is vague and hardly measurable. Instead, a better goal would be “Study basic greetings and vocabulary every morning, at 10am, for 30 minutes, until I can have an everyday conversation with native speakers.” Once you have such a specific goal, developing habits and getting into a routine will be much easier and might even come naturally.
2. Physically assign a place for studying
It may help you to associate a certain room or place with your language. Benny Lewis, from Fluent In 3 Months, keeps a room in his home as an Arabic-only room, saying “It’s a small step, but very helpful to physically assign a place to help us compartmentalize the language mentally.” Don’t limit yourself to a room (not all of us might have the luxury of having an extra room only for study purposes). It can be the subway/bus, the library, the park, or when going to a café (my personal favorite). However, make sure to choose a place that will allow you to focus and avoid major distractions.
3. Pace yourself
Once you have a place to study, you need to decide how much time to put into studying. Go slowly, especially in the early stages of learning a language. I’d suggest studying no more than 30 minutes a day to avoid burning yourself out. Figure out what pace works for you, and stick with it. Soon studying in 30 minute chunks will become second nature.
4. Make use of dead time
There may be days when you just don’t have 30 minutes to study. To continue your habit, look for periods of “dead time” in your day and take advantage of them. Last year, while living in Korea, I spent about 25 minutes commuting to and from work. Instead of staring into the air, I got into the habit of listening to Korean podcasts. Throughout my time in Korea, there were periods of a few weeks or months when I just did not feel like studying. Fortunately, by that time my habit of listening to podcasts on the subway was ingrained and required no effort, so I still managed to engage with the language daily, which helped me retain and improve my language skills.
5. Take on a 30-day challenge
Commit to building a small positive habit when learning a language and do it every day for 30 days. After, either stick with it or change to another habit. Examples could include simple changes like reading the news in your target language instead of your native language or listening to podcasts while commuting/walking/shopping.
6. Improve your self-control
You can train yourself to have better self-control and stop procrastinating. Hedy Kober, a psychologist and cognitive-neuroscientist at Yale University, uses the metaphor of self-control as a mental muscle that can be trained and reinforced with exercises. Remind yourself of all the negative consequences that your loss of self-control might incur. If you start procrastinating on your studies of a foreign language and you deviate from your habits, make a conscious effort to remind yourself of all the beautiful opportunities you will miss by not speaking the language fluently in X amount of time. Write down a list so you have a physical reminder that you can refer to every time you falter.
7. Know yourself
We all learn differently. Get to know your learning style by trying different approaches to language learning. Books, grammar, online programs, movies, music, language exchange partners, the list is endless. Find out what works for you and what doesn’t. You wouldn’t want to build a routine around something that’s not meant for you, right? Get into the habit of trying different approaches, especially at different stages of your learning journey, and you’ll most likely save yourself a lot of frustration and avoid getting stuck in a rut.
Posted by Transparent Language
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