Do you promise yourself every time to do the task, your teacher has given to you, outside the class? Do you think it's time to at least try to learn the language yourself? But you never get round to it? Today I'm going to talk about a few reasons of the problem and their solutions.
Your brain is overwhelmed by the amount of information it needs to process. That's right, 20 minutes of video or 10 pages of a story in a foreign language is a lot of information! After all, your brain is already overloaded with life's worries and, most importantly, the information you receive from social media.
I once heard someone say that the brain is not a sieve, so you can't sift information through it: everything you read or watch stays in your mind.
What to do.
Firstly, take care of your brain's cleanliness and save its energy. Instead of spending 30 minutes scrolling through your social media feed or watching meaningless videos, pay attention to a foreign language. The more time you spend on learning a foreign language, the faster you will speed up the process, because it is a skill that requires constant practice and training, just like we exercise our body muscles. Just think, you speak your mother tongue every day and you can still make mistakes, but what about a foreign language?
Secondly, divide a large amount of information into small pieces.
For example, you need to watch a twenty-minute video. Imagine that the video is a stick of sausage. Would you eat it right away, and in one piece? You could choke to death! It would be more convenient to cut it into pieces and put it on bread. That's what we'll do with your video. Be sure that sometimes you can do a million different things with a twenty-minute video. For example, divide the video into 5-10 minute chunks, learn new words, or practise your pronunciation.
Thirdly, spend at least minimum amount of time studying a foreign language every day or every other day. It's better to spend at least 10-15 minutes than ZERO. Do you think there is not enough time and why are there 24 hours in a day? When you start keeping track of how and where you spend your free time and set yourself up to find a space in your schedule for a foreign language, you will find it. You can take a shower while listening to a podcast or watching your favourite film in the background, you can read posts at breakfast, and even in the toilet (oops!) you can learn a few new words!
And finally, your task is to understand whether you really need to learn a language. If the answer is yes, then set yourself up to find the time you need to devote to learning a foreign language. Yes, it is not easy, sometimes you have to give up some of your not very useful habits, but what is more valuable? You have to get in the water to eat fish! They say that success begins with the first step, which we all constantly put off. We see successful people on our screens, learning a language, working and spending time with friends, but you don't need to keep comparing yourself to others if it demotivates you. Stop it! Look at what you are doing and how you are doing it. Just imagine the feeling when you look back and realize how far you've come towards your goal!
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