Tip: Have faith

How do you learn a language? The same way you learned to walk… one step at a time. There are no magic shoes (no matter what the shoe shop assistant may tell you). There is no substitute for being brave enough to take a step, achieving a little, soon wobbling and then falling over.

Not many of us still have the patience as adults that we had when we learned to walk, nor do we have the same imperative when learning a language. Even when you live in a foreign country, it’s easy to plateau. You can buy a train ticket, you can order a coffee and a sandwich, and your colleagues speak English. Falling over is hard; where’s the incentive when you can already get by? Humans are naturally “lazy” (or “energy efficient”, to put it more generously)! Why work harder? That energy may come in handy when you’re next caught unawares by a sabre-tooth tiger!

So it’s no surprise that we don’t study as much as we know we should. What is required is faith – faith that what we can do, even if it’s small, will somehow be enough. The student who crams may pass the exam spectacularly, but when an interviewer casually throws in a question on (insert obscure academic curiosity here) all will be lost! The student who studies for two hours a day may feel lazy compared to his friend in revision week, or hard-working compared to his friend at the start of term – but while his daily toil isn’t spectacular, his ultimate success will be. What I’ve found from years of experience trying to learn languages is that the difference often isn’t available time, or a snazzy textbook, or even cold, hard-nosed discipline… it’s faith.

If I say to you “study for two hours a week and you’ll know hiragana and katakana in a month” you probably won’t believe me. You will lack faith… so you won’t install the SRS, and you probably won’t bother to study for fifteen minutes a day. At the end of the month you still won’t know hiragana or katakana. You never believed you could! But if you did install the SRS, and fire it up for even just ten or fifteen minutes each day – after breakfast, or during the lunch hour/coffee break… or for a few quiet minutes when you first get in from work, before settling down in front of the TV – you would know hiragana and katakana in a month.

The difference isn’t discipline; you go to work/college/school every day, chances are you even do the washing up sometimes! It’s not a textbook… that’s been gathering dust nicely for a few months now hasn’t it? And if you think hard enough, I’m pretty sure you have the time. You don’t have to use an SRS (although they are very fashionable at the moment, probably because they work)! Anything will do, as long as it doesn’t create a prohibitive overhead. You need to be able to do about fifteen minutes of study without more than one or two minutes preparation.

So for your next “new, fluent-quick scheme”, why not try a tool they don’t mention in the books? Why not try believing that just a small amount of effort, most days, will succeed. You’ll be surprised. Of the many tools (and books, and gizmos, and techniques) I’ve tried over the past four years, it’s the one I wish I’d applied the most.

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This may be the last post here on CL for a little while. The site will still be here, but it’ll be “moth-balled” until further notice. Life has changed a lot since I started this blog; after eight years working in IT, I’ve re-trained as an English Language Teacher and am now teaching full time. I also have another writing project (documenting that journey), as well as a great deal to learn about my new profession – there just isn’t time to maintain regular, decent quality posts on this site as well. So rather than have you all wonder what happened, I wanted to add this little note to explain.

Stay tuned to the RSS feed, Twitter account or e-mail subscription if you’d like to find out when site updates resume. I hope that by that time I’ll be able to share better informed views on language learning! In the meantime, best of luck with all your studies and thank you for supporting this site over the last two and a half years.

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