How To Improve Your Attitude Towards Language Learning

Learning a language is easy. There, I said it.

If you’re about to complain it isn’t, you’ll be right too. As Henry Ford said,

“Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.”

When I was in middle school, I struggled with learning languages. I thought they were hard. When I was in high school, I tried learning the two main Japanese scripts — Hiragana and Katakana. It took me two years and I still couldn’t recognize them with ease.

When I left high school and started to be passionate about language learning, something changed. In 2 weeks, I could write and read both Hiragana and Katakana. In a few months, I could have simple conversations. A few years later, I could not only speak Japanese well, but also Spanish and Korean. My English level had also risen to heights I had never even dreamed of as a teenager.

What changed was my attitude. I had stopped having high expectations. I was focusing on the present moment, improving and having fun. I stopped associating learning languages with terms like “boring”, “hard”, or “slow”. Language learning wasn’t a chore I had to do anymore, it was a fun activity I was looking forward to.

If your attitude is wrong, you’ll never improve. You’ll stay stuck in a vicious circle. Don’t you want to get out of it?

If you do, here are a few tips I found helpful on my own journey.

Create daily victories

It doesn’t matter how big they are, you need to create daily victories. Don’t focus on making leaps, focus on doing one more step, day after day.

Studying for hours every weekend works against you. The brain needs time and repetition to retain information. You’ll always forget a certain percentage of what you learn. The more you study, the more you’ll forget. Spread your study throughout the week to avoid procrastination. It’ll also give you the opportunity to review and remember something already forgotten.

Succeeding in keeping a streak will already be a great accomplishment you can be proud of. But what if you made a point to make one small action in the language outside of your comfort zone every day? You’ll see yourself improve much faster and will start to crave these successes.

Here are a few options you could try, no matter your level:

• Write a small text to be corrected on Journaly.
• Record yourself daily for a month to observe improvements in your pronunciation. — You can compare yourself with native speakers too by asking for recordings on HiNative.
• Have a chat with a native speaker for a few minutes. Making it sometimes a written one, some others a spoken one.
• Watch a video without subtitles to see how much you can understand or recognize.
• Read an article on a topic you love already. If you are a beginner, make it a few sentences first.
• Explain in your own terms a grammar pattern or some terms you learned recently.

Let your imagination go wild and have fun. Find your own daily reachable victories. As you see them pile up, you will realize learning a language isn’t really hard. It only takes time.

Notice your time

Like every new learner, you’ve probably wondered how to find the time in your busy schedule. To solve this problem, spend a week like any other but be conscious of the wastes of time in your schedule. For now, no need to do anything about it.

Write every day where, when, and how long you spent time doing nothing worthwhile. Resting is important. Be careful not to consider watching one episode of your favorite show a waste of time! You could, however, consider the next 3 as unproductive indeed.

Sitting on the toilet, scrolling down Instagram? Walking to the supermarket listening on loop to the same song? Watching a YouTube video while waiting for your meal to be cooked? All are bits of time available throughout the day!

Some will be long, some won’t. But you’ll always have the time to do certain actions related to the language you are learning!

After noticing and writing down your “free” time for a week, start changing some parts of it. Make your YouTube video one about the language or, even better, a video in the language! Spend your time on the toilet doing some flashcards. Listen to a podcast on your way to the supermarket.

The more you stay consistent with using your time, the more you’ll gain confidence in yourself and the motivation to keep improving!

Look back

I’ve found one great way to stay motivated and positive is to look back at my old level.

Once every week or two, look back at some notes you wrote or watch again a video you saw. Observe and appreciate how much you remember or how easy it became.

In some cases, you’ll notice you barely remember anything and begin to sulk instead. When that happens, go back a bit further in time. What seemed so difficult a few months ago has certainly become easy for you now.

Take a long breath and appreciate it. Then remind yourself that language learning is exponential. The more you learn, the more knowledge compounds. In a year you’ll look back laughing at what you’re struggling with now. In a few years, you won’t even remember what it felt like not to speak the language.

After all, do you even remember when you struggled to make correct sentences in your native language?

I don’t. I also don’t remember struggling with English, Spanish, Japanese, or Korean. One day, you won’t remember your struggles with the language you are learning now.

That is; if you remind yourself regularly that attitude is key and keep going forward.

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