My 7 Worst Language Study Habits

Nobody is perfect…

Especially not me.

If I followed my own language learning advice 100% of the time I’d be a lot further along on my own language projects. Alas, I have fallen into the same traps and pitfalls and experienced the same failures as everyone else – and I still frequently do!

This isn’t going to be another one of those “make lots of mistakes!” posts, because lets face it – those kind of suck. We all know that making mistakes helps us grow, that we shouldn’t be as afraid of our shortcomings as we are, and that it’s just another part of life and essential to the acquisition of any new skill. Does hearing that repeated really make you feel better about your mistakes though?

So rather than regale you with “motivational” banter about embracing your mistakes, I’ve decided to tell you all about the ones I still make all the time in the hope that you can take heart in the fact that you’re not alone and maybe we can learn a thing or two together about what we could probably afford to be doing better.

1. A huge lack of motivation

You might think that someone as devoted as I am to writing about languages would spend a similar amount of time actually studying them.
Unfortunately, I’m lazy af.

I procrastinate and put everything off until the last second. I love learning languages but I have as hard a time as any schoolboy when it comes to actually buckling down and working on things.

My motivation comes and goes. Sometimes I’m able to spend days at a time working regularly on a project only to then spend a week accomplishing very little – and not usually for any good reasons.

It’s certainly not a lack of time – I have plenty of that, and I usually spend it working at the job that pays me actual money, doing things like gaming, Facebooking and making unnecessary tweaks to this site, which generates Monopoly money.

It’s not that I don’t want to learn languages, so then what gives? Read on:

2. I’m terrible at routines

I attribute a lot of my motivational issues to not having much of a routine. Not only for language study, but for life in general.

It is said that forming a habit takes about 21 days – a common myth, actually.

The truth is that habit formation – according to researchers at University College London – is based on something called “context-dependent repetition” and the length of time it can take to develop a routine varies dramatically from person to person. For me, it’s roughly on par with a geological epoch or the half-life of plutonium.

I’m sure some of you are better at routines than I am, but even three weeks to me seems like an awfully long time within which to pre-plan my life. And despite my better judgement, I’m not sure I even want to.

A well established routine can help make learning a habit. I don’t want to sound discouraging to those of you who also struggle with habit formation, but we all know it isn’t a cakewalk. I think this is the first step to getting back on track and making language study a regular thing once more. Will I commit to it? We’ll see.

One language learning tool that could help with this is The Pimsleur Approach. By calling you back every day for half an hour it really does try to set you up for success. Other spaced repetition programs, including Memrise are also great for this, but I find that they’re not always as demanding as Pimsleur and the results less immediately obvious.

There’s also Duolingo. That bird stalks my nightmares. I have mixed feelings about Duolingo in general. But if anything could be said for it, that manipulative, radioactively-pigmented raptor of doom and dismay keeps you coming back for more.

3. Speaking to strangers is scary

This is huge for me, and I live in a foreign freakin’ country! Most of us aren’t exactly thrilled with the prospect of wielding our new, ungainly, awkward language skills with another learner, let alone a native speaker.

It doesn’t matter that we know most of them aren’t out to judge us, that most people are happy to hear others learning their language, and many of us also know that despite our fears things usually turn out just fine.

But that doesn’t stop it from being horrifying every single time! The burning cheeks as you walk away after failing to properly explain something, the stressing and kicking yourself in the head for the next 20 minutes after ordering your sandwich using the wrong article.

Believe me, I’m still just as shy as I ever was, despite having having to do this almost every single day, everywhere I go. I get nervous as heck every single time I’m preparing for a Skype convo or even just text chat on Facebook, or standing on the train hoping like Hell the lost-looking old lady doesn’t ask me for directions to that one place I can’t pronounce.

It does get a little bit easier, but it’s a slow, grueling, gradual process that will take time, effort, and no small amount agony and embarrassment.

The best policy, I find, is just to bite the bullet and take the plunge. It does get easier after a few minutes of conversing, struggling and laughing, but for me it’s the super short conversations that are the hardest, and they’re usually the ones that catch me off guard.

4. I bite off way more than I can chew

Unsurprisingly, I am one of those people who starts learning one language, then sees that Memrise has a course for Uzbek then my Spanish gets relegated to a dusty bookshelf in the basement of my cerebral cortex.

I never really got into this for “practical” reasons such as employment or mental health, I just like studying culture and meeting people from around the world.1I met my wife this way. So I’m always finding new languages to experiment with – most of which never really go anywhere.

While I strongly believe it’s perfectly possible to learn more than one, or more than even two or three languages at once, the more you add to your work load, the rougher your life is going to get, and I fall into this pit time and time again.

My Memrise dashboard at one point had about twelve different languages that I was attempting to work on at once. Like I said, studying multiple languages is fine, but there does eventually come a tipping point at which you’re really just overdoing it and it becomes virtually impossible to balance your time well enough to attend to each at any significant level.

Lately I’ve been making a push to remove all of my Memrise courses that are not German and Spanish, but it’s hard because just as soon as I’ve cleaned Kyrgyz, Quechua, Ukrainian, Japanese, and Esperanto from my list of projects, suddenly I see Mongolian, Indonesian and French and the trend continues. Furthermore, just the other week I got into a discussion with my Danish colleagues about pronunciation – and yeah, you guessed it. Now I’m learning Danish too.

On the one hand it’s a lot of fun to study languages like this – especially if you don’t have any particular long term goals other than “learn lots of languages!”  But it can get confusing after a while, and I would likely be more advanced in my primary projects if I stopped messing around so much.

5. Sometimes it’s hard for me not to view language learning as a competition

I get jealous on occasion when friends or acquaintances who are studying the same languages blast past me in a storm of righteous language acquisition fury, out striping my capabilities by one hundred-fold in half the time.

This is pretty bad because language learning is absolutely not a race! It isn’t a competition, and it’s so incredibly important to remember that it doesn’t matter at all how fast others are learning. The only thing that matters is that you’re making progress.

Unless you’re crunched for time – for instance you’re anticipating a trip abroad, or there’s a job opportunity for which you need to increase your language proficiency, there’s never a good reason to overwork yourself to reach someone else’s study standard.

Doing so can make it hard to stay focused on what matters and the feeling of ineptitude can contribute to a potential loss of motivation. Which as we all know by now is what really kills a language project.

6. I frequently overlook the little things

Certain programs, such as Memrise and Duolingo give you the ability to “skip” over content you feel you’ve mastered. This can be a nice feature if you took a year of Spanish in school and already know how to introduce yourself and order vino, and don’t want to have to slog through that crap for the umpteenth time.

However, overall I’ve discovered that I have to be more careful with these features than I have been.

Especially when I’m learning more than one language I do forget easy things from time to time. And I’m willing to bet you do too.

There’s really no such thing as too much reinforcement and even the tiny linking words “and”, “but”, “or” or simple nouns such as “cat”, “dog”, “house” that we think we’ve got, and can’t possibly forget, can occasionally slip away. At the very least, we want to commit these simple words and phrases to instant memory so that we can reproduce them without having to think about them. This is one place in which rote study of even the most elementary words you think you know can help.

But it’s so booooring.

Just what I get for my infidelity.

I always kick myself after forget a word that I thought I knew inside and out, then look it up and remember that I stuck it in my “ignore” pile months ago having thought I had it memorized beyond all shadow of a doubt.

Be cautious with your confidence. It never hurts to go over “easy” stuff again every once in a while for old time’s sake.

7.  I don’t manage my time very well.

This is very similar to the routine thing.

I have, in the past outlined ways in which language learners can make time for language study, despite keeping a busy work/school/life schedule.

Despite knowing how, I’m not always very good about managing my own time myself. Do as I say, not as I do, you know….

By all accounts I should be using this time for languages – and I do – but not as much as I could be.

I find that it’s best not to let language learning consume you. You don’t want to burn out, and most of us have other hobbies, interests and responsibilities (not to mention day jobs…), but there does come a point where we’re just being straight up lazy.

I am straight up lazy.

Gotta work on that, now more than ever.

Conclusion

I’ve made New Year’s resolutions in past years. The last couple years I resolved to significantly improve one language or another, or to learn a new one entirely. I’ve never made it past March.

This year (even though it’s already well underway) I’m going to resolve to work on overcoming a few of these issues, rather than committing specifically to learning a fixed language or number of words, or something like that.  I want to improve my ability to learn and refine my technique.

So what about you? Do you have any of these problems too? How do you deal with them?

Brian Powers

Apex-editor of Languages Around the Globe, collector of linguists, regaler of history, accidental emmigrant, serial dork and English language mercenary and solutions fabricator. All typos are my own.