How to study languages consistently: a step-by-step guide to making habits

good learning habits give us the structure consistency and momentum needed to master a new language but stick it with a habit can be hard and confusing how do you choose the Habit how do you stay consistent how do you not give up when motivation starts to disappear I don't have the answers to that but luckily James clear the author of what is probably the most famous book on habit formation does in addition to his book he has recently come up with an email course that teaches you how to establish a habit step by step and as someone who has had on and off success with my language learning I found it incredibly useful and that's why I wanted to share it with all of you today what I suggest you do is grab a pen and a piece of paper or maybe your note taking app of choice and try to go through all of the steps with me oh and don't forget to let me know in the comments what habit you are going to be working on James Clear himself suggests that we work on establishing a new habit for at least four weeks before we can advance further but feel free to adjust it to your own situation and same for pretty much any piece of advice you will hear in that video just take what works and leave out the rest often when we think about the habits that we want to build we think about them in terms of the results that we want to get for example I want to become fluent in Greek or I want to pass and for in Japanese the alternative to that would be to build what James Clear calls identity based habits and to start by focusing on the kind of person we wish to become instead of the results that we want to achieve so an identity based habit would be I want to become a polyglot or maybe even something like I want to become a person who watches kdrama in Korean without subtitles but since we often hear about how goals should be very specific saying something general like I want to become a person who's good at languages sounds a little weird but in reality studies show that the way we perceive ourselves has a huge impact on our behavior and we see that a lot for example with people who throughout their grade school career we're told by their teachers that they were bad at languages and so that would discourage them from even trying let alone succeed in in language learning so the first step is to have an idea of the Habit that reinforces your desired identity and in order to do this try asking yourself these two questions who is the type of person I want to become and what is one habit that will help me become that type of person let's say I want to become a polyglot and there's a lot of ways to do that but let's say I want to study all of my languages at least twice a week each that would be my habit or maybe I want to become a person who's really knowledgeable about Latin American literature and I want to be able to read it in Spanish then my habit would be to read in Spanish every single day or maybe on most days now that we have chosen our desired identity let's think of the actual habits that we want to implement the problem is that when you're trying to build a habit when you're just starting out it's very easy to get too ambitious too soon the biggest mistake that we can make here is to think that in the very beginning our habit should look exactly the same as our desired behavior for example as someone who wants to consistently write in Greek be journal entries essays or maybe social media posts or video scripts I might think that I need to start writing longer texts on complicated topics from day one without looking up words or grammar right of course not let's look at two strategies that might be helpful when we are just starting out the first one is choosing a habit that's as easy to do as possible and the way we do it is by following the so-called two-minute rule which basically means that in the beginning our habit should take no longer than a couple of minutes to accomplish publish think of your desired Behavior or that actual habit that you want to implement and now think about the very first step of that habit that is going to be your two minute habit or also something that will become your gateway habit right to your desired Behavior and the logic behind this is that before improving a habit you have to establish it if you cannot do a small thing consistently chances are mastering the actual habit is going to be even harder if I want to become a person who's really good at writing in Greek in the beginning all I have to do is just write maybe a sentence or two every single day of course I will not be able to achieve my results by just doing that but in the beginning what matters is that I actually established the habit and I start reinforcing that identity of a person who writes a lot in my own head so at this point your task is to think what the first step of your desired habit looks like again going back to that example with reading books in Spanish if that's something that you want to do in the beginning you don't have to read a whole book all you have to do is just read a couple of sentences or a couple of pages depending on your level and after that you stop and you're done for the day now let's move on to the next step When we struggle to establish a habit we often blame it on our lack of motivation but in reality what we are lacking is Clarity or the idea of where and when the Habit is going to be carried out this is where setting an implementation intention comes in handy to make your own intention just fill out the sentence I will Behavior at time in location I will go through my flashcards when I'm on the Metro on my way to work or maybe I will sit at my desk and describe how my day went in one sentence in Greek every single day before bed also another thing that you want to do is to be intentional with where exactly you're placing your habit for example in my case my mornings tend to be pretty much the same because I have an established morning routine compared to my evenings that tend to be a little unpredictable sometimes I want to go out sometimes I want to stay home woman read on other days they go to the gym and so schedule a new habit for evening time would be much much hotter for me but you of course should look at your situation in your life and think about what would work best for you now let's discuss some strategies that will make it easier for us to stay consistent with our habit what we want to do right now is create an environment that works for us not against us so there's three ways to do it and the first step is to design your environment here we're trying to make sure that the best choice is also the most obvious one for example let's say I started learning a new language and I'm using Duolingo or any other language learning app for that a smart thing to do would be to place a widget of the app on my home screen so that every time I go on my phone I am reminded of the fact that I want to commit to learning that language the next step is reducing friction and I honestly have found this extremely extremely helpful for me so basically what we are doing here is we're making the action itself easier to perform for example something that I found that was true for me is that I wanted to write in Greek every single all day and I did have the motivation but every time I would sit down I wouldn't know what to write about and so what I did is I came up with a list of topics and now every single time I open my notebook all I have to do is just choose one of the topics that are on my list and basically start writing and now that we're done with that another thing you want to do is to prime your environment to increase the odds that your habit will be performed for example I'm still a beginner in Greek but I'm trying to read as much as I can and currently I am going through the graded readers that I have but the thing is every time I try to read something even as simple as a graded reader there's probably 5 to 15 words on every page that I do not know so I have to look things up so for me to be able to read this book I also have to have a dictionary app on my phone or maybe something like this paper dictionary right here but if I also want to remember the new words that I encounter in the book it would probably be a good idea to have a pen and something like a notebook ready to be able to write them down and then return to them later so for me to start my little reading session I would have to have all of those things with me or alternatively I could use something like link which is an app co-founded by Steve Kaufman who himself has learned 20 languages with link who's sponsoring today's video but also happens to be one of my favorite language learning apps allows you to do is look up words or phrases while you're reading watching or listening to content plus the words that you looked up will be automatically saved to your collection so that you can later practice them with different types of questions links library is the ideal environment for language learning here you'll find thousands of hours of content including transcripts and audio in over 40 different languages but what what happens if you can't find content that you're interested in for that just use Link's import feature this feature basically lets you create lessons out of your favorite content such as podcasts YouTube videos articles ebooks and so on so for example with Italian my goal this year was to start reading books and I worked on this goal by importing dozens of Articles from websites like wired or vice Italy and then I would practice with them until I was finally able to start my first novel which I also read on link and now I have just finished my second novel also on link link is available on desktop and mobile and if you would like to try for yourself there's going to be a link in the description that will give you a 35 discount and now back to habits you might not realize that but we are now in week three and at this point you should have performed your habit at least five to ten times and to be honest if you find that this strategy is working for you and you have no problem sticking with your habit then just let it be there's no need to make it more complicated but usually what happens is that you start noticing that in the beginning you were really really motivated and now the motivation is starting to disappear the good news is that this decline of motivation is Not Unusual at all that's because instead of having a linear relationship with achievement habits tend to have more of a compound growth curve so in the beginning it's very common that you put a lot of work every single day but you're not really seeing results so this can be very very frustrating and you will probably need some kind of a strategy or a trick to help you stick with your habit while you're waiting for those long-term results to arrive so one strategy that you can try is called Temptation bundling the way Temptation bundling works is by linking an action that you want to do with an action that you need to do let's say a new season of your favorite show has just been really and you want to watch that or maybe you just want to procrastinate a little bit and watch some YouTube do it but either watch videos in your target language or choose dubbin for your favorite show that is in the language that you're learning or maybe you want to treat yourself to a fancy drink at your favorite coffee shop go ahead but bring your notes or your textbooks and study there basically to utilize the strategy you can use this formula I will only habit that I want to do when I habit that I need to do and then the second strategy you can use to boost your motivation is by using a commitment device what does that look like for example instead of booking just one Spanish class you can book a package of five and this way you will have to attend those classes or an alternative to that would be losing the money that you have paid and there are many other ways to create commitment devices for example you can use an app like Forest to not get distracted by your phone while you study or maybe you can sign up for a language exam and then you will have no choice but to study and so on another important thing that will help us be more consistent is feeling successful even if we are talking about very small successes but of course that's easier said than done because in the very beginning of your journey it's just like all sacrifice you study hard you feel like your brain is literally melting but you're not really seeing any results you're not really able to do anything meaningful in your language it's only months later once you learn enough grammar and vocabulary and spend enough time with the language that you will finally start understanding things here and there and this is why planning immediate rewards for yourself is also so important they kind of keep you excited while those long-term results are accumulating in the background so here you want the ending of your Habit to be satisfying whatever that means for you finish going through your flashcards for today reward yourself with 10 minutes of browsing Instagram or Tick Tock wrote your journal and for today put a check mark in your planner but there's a crucial detail that should not be overlooked basically we shouldn't try to rely on external motivation too much because sometimes and I have noticed it with myself with applications like Duolingo it's really easy to just kind of become super dependent on that streak for your motivation and at some point it's hard to tell whether you were in it for the streak or for the sake of language learning The Next Step which is not very difficult but it's really really helpful is basically to join a community where your desired behavior is normal behavior if you are surrounded by people who are passionate about languages you are also more likely to be consistent with your own language learning for me joining language Twitter has been really really helpful I think I did that almost two years ago and ever since I've been much more consistent with my languages than I ever have another thing that I have been doing for the last couple of months is having regular calls with my accountability partner we have a Google doc where we track our progress and then every couple of weeks we actually have calls where we discuss our challenges and our wins too congratulations you have now reached the final step to form a habit called habit graduation so now our job is to graduate and advance from that small initial Habit to larger and more impressive habits over time how do we know when it's time to actually scale up in the beginning when you start building new habit it's exciting because it's new but over time habits become routine and sometimes they even become boring let's be honest so boredom actually is one of the first things that tells you that something needs to be changed and maybe it's time to scale up and there's actually several ways to do it let's say you've been writing 100 words per day and you've done that for three months and now it's no longer interesting so what you can do is you can find a new detail to obsess over that is still related to writing perhaps before you would just journal in about your day and what you can try doing now is let's say writing book or movie review and the second thing you can do is to stick with the same habit but just scale it up make it a little bit bigger and therefore hotter let's say you've been reading graded readers or children's literature in your target language and now it's become easy and maybe even boring so now you want to try to read something that is a little bit more challenging but be careful here because just because you mastered the art of showing up doesn't mean that you should jump straight to the finish line so let's say after you start feeling comfortable with children's literature you can try to move on to literature for young adults instead of let's say Classics that could be a little bit too hard still be prepared that your journey will look something like this you first Master is simple habit then you scale up make it a little hotter and then you repeat until that hotter version becomes the new normal and after that you scale up again and so on and eventually you will end up with The Habit that you originally were hoping to build despite starting so small to make sure you are not biting off more than you can chew choose a new level that is excited enough that you are no longer bored but at the same time easy enough so you're able to complete it 98 of the time and if at any point you start feeling like the Habit is too much just go back to that simplified two minute version of it and this is how you build the habit of course it's easier said than done but I hope that after watching this step-by-step tutorial things are a little bit more clear to you if you want to refer to the original James Clear course by the way it was completely free I will leave a link to it in the description also don't forget to tell me what habits you're working on in the comments down below and if you need some ideas of habits or language learning projects that you can pick up you can watch this video of mine and as always thank you so much for watching this video and I will see you in my next one bye bye foreign

Channel: Tanya Benavente

Views: 49,411

Keywords: atomic habits, language habits, language learning, language learning advice, how to learn a language, how to study consistently, how to be consistent, polyglot tips, language tips, study habits, how to stay motivated to study, motivation to study, motivation to learn english, motivation to learn a language, study korean, study greek, study polish, study italian, lingq, study spanish, polyglot habits, learning habits, james clear atomic habits, james clear, lingq review

Id: SaaLufZfDDA

Length: 18min 40sec (1120 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 18 2023