How to stop wasting time while learning a foreign language

Almost everybody complains of not having enough time to learn a foreign language “properly”. This has the following effects on many:

·        They stop learning altogether, or postpone it for the indefinite future, for the moment “when I will have enough time”. This moment almost certainly never comes. This is an example of “black and white” thinking. I either learn a language “properly”, with lots of time at my disposal, or it is not worth trying at all.

·        They get very busy in certain periods during the year. They enroll for intensive courses. For some weeks, they try to keep up a learning routine of several hours a day. After that, for a long time, they do almost nothing.

·        They self-sabotage themselves by programming themselves with self-fulfilling prophecies: “Due to the fact that I am not investing enough time, it is impossible that I will ever get good results.”

The, on the surface, surprising fact is that the same people who are complaining of not having enough time to learn a foreign language, are utterly uninterested to hear and learn about strategies for using the little time they have more efficiently.

They say that they just want to start “doing” something quickly. They are not interested in the “philosophical stuff” about productivity and time management.

The reasons for this are deeply psychological. Most of our parents, and most certainly our school system, have conditioned us to believe that there is a fixed amount of time needed to learn something.

Or do you remember something like this from your teachers? “When you will figure out ways to learn the material faster, you can jump over a lot of our courses and graduate some years earlier!” This was a rhetorical question.

What are easy ways to save time while learning a foreign language?

·        Plan the video and audio material you want to consume for one week ahead. A lot of time is lost searching on Youtube for interesting videos.

·        When you want to memorize each day a number of words, find, compile and print out specific word lists, and plan the chunks of five or ten words a day you want to learn during the next week.

·        When practicing conversation with colleagues in class, or in your free time, prepare a bit at home. If you come unprepared to a rehearsal (in music or in acting), you need more rehearsals in total. It took Metallica about eight months to record their classic “Black Album” which contains 62 minutes of music. In the world of classical music, it takes about one to two days to record an album of the same length. And it is not so that Metallica’s music is so much more difficult to play than classical music. The difference is in the degree of preparation before entering the recording studio.

·        Watch videos and read texts in shorter segments, but repeatedly, so you can extract more value from them. Instead of watching a video for 90 minutes, watch one segment of 5 minutes, but watch it five times, while taking notes and listening more attentively.

·        Formulate clear goals about what concrete outcomes you want to achieve in each training session, each week, each month.

·        Focus on your three most important grammar problems and practice them daily. For the time being, ignore all the other one hundred grammar rules you could be practicing. To do that, you should identify what your most frequent and most important mistakes are. Most people do not have a ready answer to this question.

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Gerhard Ohrband is a psychologist, book author and language teacher from Hamburg/Germany. Starting as a shy student, he currently speaks over 21 languages and assists business executives and companies in developing better international communication skills.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/gerhardohrband/ 

Want to get rid of insecurity and bad feelings regarding the foreign language(s) you have already started to learn? Want to learn a new language, without going through various levels of standard courses? You feel you are making no progress?

Go to Amazon and grab a copy of my classic book ”The GO Method – breaking barriers to language learning”.

https://www.amazon.com/GO-Method-Breaking-barriers-language/dp/1973118688/ref=sr_1_1?crid=ZLMGYKR6PDY3&keywords=Gerhard+Ohrband&qid=1694099394&sprefix=gerhard+ohrband+%2Caps%2C239&sr=8-1

 

 

 

 

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