Mindset

Language learning literally makes you healthier, a better decision maker and has countless other benefits, but those are not the reasons why you should do it.

Motivation for doing something shouldn’t come from an external uncontrollable reward but from the actual doing itself.

This is called intrinsic motivation and it is a big deal. Intrinsic motivation produces more high-quality learning and creativity.

If you consider yourself a language enthusiast or language nerd, you already have it. If not, you must develop it.

A good place to start is curiosity. Ask yourself questions about the language you are learning, and everything related to it: culture, history, etc. All questions are valid, from the difference between near-synonyms to grammar rules, word games, etymology, etc.

It doesn’t matter as much that you find satisfactory answers as to let these questions invite you to explore the language and cultivate an interest in it.

You’ll need to focus on the 2 sides of the same coin: joy and the lack thereof.

For one part, try to have fun. Do more of the stuff that you enjoy and less of the stuff you don’t. However keep in mind that what you don’t practice, you don’t improve. If there is any kind of activity that would greatly benefit you but don’t really enjoy, find ways to make it more enjoyable (for instance, practice with someone else instead of alone).

If you still can’t, remember that not everything can be fun and exciting all the time. A marathon runner probably is not having a lot of fun in the middle of a race, yet she will strive to complete it anyway, maybe aiming to improve her best time.

The same goes for elite performers in just about every discipline. The amount of effort that takes to get there goes well beyond “fun”, but there is something that pushes them to keep going.

Since learning a language is going to take you many hundreds (if not thousands) of hours, you can also borrow that attitude from them and learn to accept that some things are just not very fun. As the Arabic proverb goes, “sunshine all the time makes a desert.”

Nevertheless, particularly in the beginning, it’s ok to do things considered “inefficient” if that gets you going and you can get at least some value from it.

You’ll need to be consistent to achieve good results, but if you are not able to, do what you can and try to improve little by little.

That is better than saying “oh, I can’t study every day because my Mondays and Saturdays are fully booked, so I just rather don’t start”.

Don’t be a perfectionist.

Language is the only thing worth knowing even poorly.

―Kató Lomb