511: The ONLY study habit that actually makes you fluent

The only real reason that people fail to get very good at other language is simply because, Hey everyone and welcome back to the Story Learning Podcast. I hope you've been having a great week. I've recently been getting a very curious and interesting bug for a particular language, cropping up again and again for me. And I'm kind of debating whether or not to indulge myself and dive into this particular project. We shall see. It happens to be on one of the languages, which is forthcoming in my new short stories series. You might remember a few episodes ago, I showed you some covers for these five new short stories books that we're getting ready to release. Which is super exciting. This particular language bug relates to one of those languages. I'm not going to tell you which one just yet, but I might bring it up again in a future episode. Today we're going to be talking about how to establish a daily study routine. Hard to imagine anything more important than this. And it comes, we haven't got a bunch of questions on this. Both from people I can't pronounce. So one is from Ramsey 10U1H, another from Shili Kitty 9298. I didn't do such a bad job with Shili Kitty. The question is, can you share more about how you go about planning your language learning routine? I'm having a hard time figuring out how to know what to learn. First of all, there are too many languages that should one decide on a finite list. And can you share your ideas on a language learning routine and how to establish it? All right then. So first of all, I'm just going to say straight out the gate. If you are sort of sitting here thinking, there are so many languages to learn, how do I know which language to learn first? I think with the greatest of respect, that's the wrong question. There's, I don't see any point setting out to learn a whole bunch of languages because you may realize that they don't do all that work. And actually, in the end, realize that it doesn't mean anything to you. Language is on there, in my opinion, to enrich your life. So I would start by asking, what language means something to me? Do I have a friend or partner or family or a member or interest in a particular language or country or culture? Start there. Because then you stand a chance of actually having enough motivation to learn. But once you've decided that you want to learn, maybe you're in the middle of learning, how do you actually make sure that the learning project goes well? And my headline idea here, what I always come back to, frankly, with everything I do, whether it's language or exercise or business or writing, whatever it may be, I think of language learning just like exercise or music, which is that success in the project, almost always comes down to a very small number of things done well. And so the challenge is it's so easy to get distracted. You could listen to-- spend your life listening to podcasts on different techniques and different learning strategies. But actually, it all comes down to one or two things. And the people who are very successful at language learning, they understand what those few things are, and they do them very consistently and very well. It really is about doing the basics well, not trying to develop ever increasing levels of skill or crazy techniques or whatever. And so you'll routine that matters. Your language learning routine is the key to getting fluent. It's not the materials you use. It's not the method you use. It's not the difficulty of the language that doesn't matter. It is about establishing a core routine and sticking to it. Because if you have a routine and you can stick to it, meaning that you are showing up every day, then the problems and the specific difficulties and challenges may vary and change over time. But the fact that you keep turning up means that you will solve them and get over them. And I can't stress enough how important this is. If you are showing up to study every day, then whatever the specific language challenge you may have, you will overcome it because you're showing up with time and dedication. You will figure these things out. I'm always wary of over-generalizing. But from what I see so much at the time, the only real reason that people fail to get very good at another language is simply because they don't turn up every day to do the studying. This is the first honest question to ask yourself, are you actually studying every day? Are you doing a meaningful amount of study every day? Because the answer's no. You can just turn this off right now. Because you don't need any more knowledge. It's just showing up, that's the main thing. So in terms of showing up, the way that I like to think about this is to have a routine that is small and achievable and to make it so easy to start so that you'll just keep going. And for me personally, what this looks like is naming a specific time and place where I will study every day. So for example, it could be from seven in the morning to eight in the morning. And so I know that at seven o'clock, it's go time. So at seven o'clock my language learning starts. And I will often say, I'm just doing this for 10 minutes. Because I know that the hardest thing of all is getting started. And so I'll say that if all I do is just 10 minutes of reading, that's already a win. Because I know that most likely after 10 minutes, I'll get into it and I'll probably want to carry on. The hardest thing is the resistance of actually sitting down to do it in the first place. And so you tell yourself I could just 10 minutes. But then I also make sure that a few other things are in place. Okay. I make sure that I have a very quiet, undistracted environment. So I'll go into a different room and I will close the door. There's anyone else around that they ain't getting in. My phone is as far away from me as possible. And I have a, I like that I personally like to have a clear desk special, a clear table space. And I use this as my, I take this very seriously. Because one of the things I've learned about language learning is that depth of focus trumps almost everything else. So the ideal that we're looking for for me, for an effective language learning routine, is one hour a day of deep focus uninterrupted study. So if all you do is carve out a specific time of day, say seven to eight in the morning, right? And your phone is nowhere near you. You have a clear space where it's comfortable to study and you're not going to get distracted, you are already ahead of the game here. Because I see people learning language on the bus and on their phone, one of the reasons I hate language apps is because it gets you on your phone and your phone is just a distraction magnet. So you want to get that as far away as you possibly can. But in one hour a day, if you're able to engineer it so that it's very, very focused like that, you have this clear focus time, then the only good things will happen from that. And this is why I say like the method, obviously I teach learning through stories and whether you're learning my, whether you're using my language books, you can see the Norwegian one down there in the corner, you're watching this one video, or whether you're learning one of my story learning courses, like the method is learning through stories. But that doesn't matter, you could use anything, you could use any old textbook you've got from the 90, I've got textbooks back here from the 1930s, like they're not exactly fresh and modern, but they work because they contain language stuff for me to learn. The core thing is just making sure that you carved out that time in the first place, to be sitting there and doing it. And one hour is really all that you need. One hour of really good quality study is more effective than three hours of distracted study. It really is. And so when I think of how to start off a language learning project, if I think about how to make progress, I'm thinking what is the hour in the day that I can carve out, where I am going to be undestracted, I'm going to be focused. And I can just do something effective during that time. And the thing that you do in that time is quite important, needs to be what you would call active learning. So watching a movie is not language learning. It's exposure, it's input, it's immersion, it's not language learning to improve reliably, you need to study. And so active study would include something like actively reading through a book, stories, processing it. It might include going through a chapter of your textbook, a module in a story learning course, for example. But it's focused time when you're actively focusing on the language, okay? And again, it's a method agnostic here, I don't really care, but you do need to be focused on what you're doing because the kind of passive thing is, now you can do that one hour in the morning or whenever works for you of active learning. And then the thing about passive learning is like listening or watching movies or TV or whatever. You can go and do that for the rest of the day. You can have something on the background while you're washing the dishes or when you're on the train commuting to work or whatever it may be. There's so many points in the day where you can use your dead time just to get exposure or immersion. Listen back to the chapter of the book that you were reading in the morning or whatever. But it's not enough by itself, right? People that say you can just listen, immerse and then you'll be fluent. No, it doesn't work like that. You do have to actively engage your brain. And the thing, the precise thing that you're doing will change over time. So at the beginning you might just be listening and reading to familiarize yourself with the language. Sooner or later you will need to do some direct grammar study. You may then need to do some work with a teacher to fix your pronunciation of certain things. The exact thing that you study will change over time. But you need to have active learning as part of the regular routine and it needs to be on a daily basis and it needs to be undistracted and focused. And I think it is as simple as saying, if you have that in place, nothing else really matters. And unless and until you're doing that on a daily basis, I honestly would not worry about anything else. The longer term thing to think about is what is your goal in the language, right? Because why would you get up to study at 7 a.m. every day, right? And to spend an hour doing it, why would you do it? And the danger is that sooner or later you just fall off the log and you just stop doing it, right? And so having a goal and being able to measure your progress in some way is the thing that kind of enables this focused study to actually happen. It's like it's how you hardwire your brain to make sure that you actually turn up and do it in the first place, right? And so for this, if you'd like some help with that, I have a free language goal planner. And what this is, is a tool to create your consistent impact for daily study routine. It helps take the very intangible, ephemeral world of languages and boil it all down into something that you can measure. And that's motivating. So all you do with the language goal planner is you can select your language running goals, you can track your progress, that will help you stick to them and then you'll be fluent by Christmas promise. You can download this for free. Link's going to be in the description. And so for Ramsey and Sheelie Kitty, I hope this was helpful. If you enjoy the podcast, please subscribe. If you'd like to leave us a review on your podcast platform of choice, that would be very much appreciated. We read every single review it comes in. And that's about it for today. Thank you very much for listening. And I'll see you back in the next episode of the Story Learning podcast.