Language learning is an art we have to learn and acquire.
Table of Contents
1. Change your viewpoint about language learning:
Language learning is not a knowledge you have to acquire, instead it’s a medium of sharing knowledge, thoughts, and feelings to others. The purpose of language learning is to use it in daily conversation and communication. Thus, you don’t need to gulp grammatical knowledge in your brain to speak, which is quite absurd if your purpose is communication and conversation because Grammar is used for analyzing a language consciously and language is used for expressing things subconsciously. One is studying a language and the other is using a language.
2. Involve in language learning for life-long, rather than temporary use:
Many of us start language learning without having any specific direction and intention in mind, mostly caused by the institution’s approach toward learning a language. They don’t give us a vision about the use of a language in real world scenarios, maybe due to not knowing how language learning works or lack of awareness of their teaching approaches; are they effective and impactful?. Anyway, learning a language is not a temporary engagement or pursuit, but it’s a life-long involvement which through you’ll explore your endless potential pathways of learning and growing. So, take language learning wholeheartedly and devote yourself to the process diligently.
3. Invest your Time and Money in quality, not in quantity:
Our limited beliefs toward everything leveraging us to become extravagant and waste our valuable time in invaluable things and sufficient money in insufficient objects. We blindlessly spend hours upon hours in the classroom where everything is performed by a teacher not a student. Especially, in language learning classes students should engage in a bulk amount of time in activities like listening, reading, and watching by themselves . Furthermore, we should approach learning English 100 in 100 mindset (I mean full time commitment) because class hours are not enough to impact your learning due to lack of quality time and materials. Thus, I personally suggest showing dedication and responsibility toward your learning a language. When you do that, you’ll be independent to learn, research and spend hours on your language learning that will make you serious in your learning process and progress.
4. Follow the system of learning a language, not the concrete Goals:
Our contemporary world constantly programs us to crave for results, rather than how it comes and why it should come for you. Forget saying I want to learn a language in 3/6 months, and focus on creating a process, then go through it, experience and reflect on your learning. The system of learning a language is more psychological and neurological than physical. Such as, having a strong reason for learning a language will push you forward and lack of clarity can cause a cease in your learning progress. From a neurological point of view, language develops through the repetitions of the encoding process of the brain by distributing information from the hippocampus to all over the brain functions. For this reason, sensory input through sensory immersion to the environment matters most in language learning. So, let the process do the rest.
5. Do the mistakes and be the fearless:
Being an independent learner is fascinating because of freedom to live in my own world of learning and growing. The world where every moment is grace and each action is appreciation and recognition. If anyone suggests reducing the mistakes because of fear, then I will double my mistakes intentionally because it’s a graceful and breakdown for future growth. In language learning and life, you have to boast ZFG mindset (Zero Fucks Given mindset) to break the shackle of self-dought, and timidity to explore everything realistically and intimately. We don’t need to interpret a language by analyzing and scrutinizing it, we want to use it in a real-world context like in communication and conversation where the subconscious mind responds faster than the conscious mind.
6. Make the language learning Fun and enjoyable:
If you don’t enjoy your learning, you might’ve been forced by unpleasant things like illogical reasons behind a language learning or vague expectations from you. Get rid of these bugs from your mind and start to make things exciting and pleasurable. To do this, use your physiology like dancing, laughing, screaming, saying the power phrase “Yeah, Buddy” like Ronnie Coleman to feel energetic and enthusiastic about your learning. Because when our body and mind gets involved together in an activity, it becomes invincible. So, get excited before starting your listening, reading, watching, and speaking, and then you can listen to podcasts while walking in the park, and reading books while sitting on the bench in front of a lake/pond. More deeply, listen to podcasts or reading books you are interested in as a consideration of topics and podcaster/authors itself.
7. Focus on Listening, not in Speaking:
We used to think that speaking is the way to learn a language because apparently language is performed through mouth by making sounds. Though, this misconception will blow away if you understand the concept that the language develops and forms in the brain through sensory input, then exhibits through sounds and mouth later when it is perfectly encoded and embedded. Thus, speaking is the outcome of the investment of listening because our brain is instinctively designed for language learning. So, your job is to input language in the brain through listening, then let the brain process to function and form (verbs, structures, sentences, etc) itself. If you don’t want to believe me, you can experiment yourself to see the impact by listening to 400 hours of anything from podcasts to audiobooks without understanding much of the meanings of words, phrases, and even ideas, but with repetitions of the same materials.
8. The More you Read, the more you can Write:
Reading often comes with various benefits for a language learner. Especially, pleasurable reading increases the fluency of your thinking for speaking and writing. And also a great source of vocabulary and expressions. Most of all, reading is the input pathway for developing writing skill. Furthermore, you can develop specific writing skills by choosing your reading types. Such as, if you want to write fiction in a specific genre, read plenty of novels in this particular genre to become habituated to this type of writing by acquiring patterns, vocabularies, expressions, way of thinking and organizing plots, automatically and subconsciously. You can also follow a technique called Imitation to improve your writing fluency, but the fundamental is you have to read plenty to develop writing and creative thinking skills.
9. Build accent and pronunciation through shadowing:
Building pronunciation is a passive process that has to be determined in the beginning of a language learning to create a direction to go. However, you should first spend 50 to 100 hours in language learning randomly anything that you find intriguing, listen, read, and watch. Then, you can decide your accent (American, British, Irish, Scottish, etc) you want to build and go through by narrowing down your options of listening, reading, and watching in a peculiar accent. Your inputs from everywhere silently builds pronunciation in your mind and manifests through your speaking and shadowing or copying the sentences or phrases loudly while listening to podcasts, and stories will boost your oral sophistication practically.
10. Look for fluency over accuracy:
What is fluency? Well, fluency is a flowing of a language intuitively through your mind resembling a flowing water in the river. On the other hand, accuracy with fluency is flowing strictly through your mind. Now, here is the paradox of sacrifice: if you want fluency, you need to practice fluency to become fluent by not interrupting in your speaking and writing through corrections and if you want accuracy, you have to restrict your freedom of flowing by correcting and frequent interrupting in your learning. So, you have options to either become fluent or accurate, but the advantage of choosing fluency is that over time through repetitions it becomes accurate by reducing mistakes automatically. The reason for this fact is that when you don’t pressurize yourself for accuracy, your brain’s cognitive load becomes lighter and functions smoothly. Thus, don’t manipulate accuracy rather let it come through practicing fluency.
11. Track and customize your learning:
Tracking is an essential part of language learning, most importantly when you’re the teacher and learner of your learning. Tracking means reflecting in your learning constantly to make it better by applying innovative ideas and effective methods & techniques. The benefits of tracking is you will learn and experience valuable lessons which are necessary for growth and advancement. Such as, you may find yourself stuck and bored in the process and tracking will revive you again through finding enjoyable materials and strategies. And tracking also makes your learning qualitative by customizing and replacing old content into new effective one according to your level of learning a language. End of all, it makes you mindful of your learning.
12. Make the Language learning easy and simple:
Culturally, we used to think about things as a whole and big, when it comes to accomplishing something, rather than seeing it in a single portion and tiny action which encourages us to chase the accomplishment, not the process and experience of the accomplishment. Thus, we don’t need to think about language learning as a whole/complete to acquire or engulf fully, rather we’ll take it small and simple. Such as, start listening, reading, and watching that contains easy words and sentences with simple structures that are comprehensible and stick to it till the level is accomplished and acquired.
13. Create a habits of language learning:
Habits are the engine of our daily life and the environment is the fuel of this engine. We need to create habits of listening, reading and watching everyday by setting the environment. Otherwise, we will be distracted in our progress of language learning because motivation and will power are the short-term force and habits are the long-run path that makes you consistent. And creating habits becomes easier in a new environment. In terms of language learning, you can use it creatively by creating a habit of talking with foreign visitors in the beach area, or you can transform our social media to set a new environment for our language learning by changing the content of YouTube, Facebook, etc into targeted language. For example, the habits of watching the videos, posts are in English or Spanish.
14. Take advantage of the internet for language learning:
Language learning becomes easy and effective from the inception of the internet and the broad utility of social media. Before then, the traditional learning system had to rely vastly on textbooks, radio and classroom materials to learn a language that caused lack of resources and freedom. Now, we have both equipment and resources at once to utilize them in our language learning. Most importantly, the freedom of learning from anyplace to any age with a little bit of responsibility and creativity. For instance, accessing resources you’re interested in like listening to podcasts, stories, audiobooks and reading blogs, news, books.
15. Stride slowly, but consistently and take care of things you mostly care:
You are not about to learn anything overnight, but the process you can follow to learn anything by itself. And invest your time and energy in the process to make progress, not in the thinking of gaining. Though, the steady nature of the process can make you frustrated by thinking that you are not going or being stuck in the point. So, don’t panic because everything starts to flourish after reaching its potential. Such as, to break a rock, you need forces of blows before it’s stretched and breaks. Here the tensile strength is the potential zone or circumstance to start breaking a rock or anything hard. For this you may require 50 to 100 blows to see the fractures and then one or two require to break. Correspondingly, we have to be patient to see the breakthrough moment in our language learning by investing time consistently and attentively.
