Tips for Working Towards Discipline and Consistent Study Habits
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- Опубліковано 1 бер 2024
- A conversation about steps you can take to psychologically prepare yourself to develop the regular and systematic habits you need to be a successful autodidactic language learner. Join my academy: www.alexanderarguelles.com/ac...
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Join my virtual academy and meet with me every week to get a systematic theoretical framework for long-term language learning in the Path of the Polyglot: www.alexanderarguelles.com/academy/ Join also to read and discuss French, German, Italian, and/or Spanish literature, to learn sacred languages such as Arabic, Sanskrit, Greek, or Old Norse, to develop conversational abilities in Latin, and/or to read and discuss Great Books of Western Civilization or the Comparative History of Religions in English. And subscribe to my monthly newsletter at: www.alexanderarguelles.com/newsletter/
Very convincing point about breaking your language learning into several slots during a day to tap into the spaced repetition mode and have the language at the forefront of your mind often during the day. I like it a lot. Wow. Really rings true.
Thank you for the appreciation.
I had not heard about breaking up the studying in blocks.. Thank you for your wonderful insightful content.
Yeah, I think that's one thing about learning in general, but languages especially, that people don't realize. I didn't for many years. It's more effective for internalizing information to work in multiple small study sessions a day than one larger session. Cuz then you're waiting 24hrs until the next session which slows the short to long term memory shift.
@@SpainishRain212_7 Science says it too, brain rests & consolidates in the breaks so better to break up study.
@@spacevspitch4028 Exactly, I am now brushing up on my French that way, doing 10 very short sessions per day, literally 5-10 mins. I feel immediately the results. It becomes alive again, after almost a year break. And this repetitive encounters build momentum that sucks me in to do even more. Good feeling.
Once again, a helpful video with good insights.
One aspect I've found important with forming habits is liking what I'm doing. By "liking", I mean that the activities leave me energized and satisfied rather than frustrated and stressed. The key I see is the difference in body chemistry between positive and toxic emotions. My understanding is that much research has shown that such body chemistry changes have a large effect on learning. Caveat: some researchers talk about how the negative side of things improves some types of memory, but this is the type of learning that takes place when burning your hand on a stove. In general, better educational learning outcomes are achieved when you are enjoying the journey rather than tolerating it.
I've learned to monitor myself for this. Anecdotally, I can feel the difference when doing things like chorusing along with audio. If I start getting frustrated, my body tightens up and it feels like being tongue-tied where my tongue is tripping over itself and my mouth is full of mush. I take a few moments to breath deeply, relax, remind myself this is supposed to be fun, and it's like my mouth completely loosens up and my brain goes from processing gibberish to increased clarity. When I first became aware of this issue, I'd sometimes have to completely step away from what I was doing in order to calm down. Now it usually just takes a few moments of conscious relaxation and shift of attitude and laughing at myself for getting so worked up over nothing.
My experience is that when a particular activity often leaves me with toxic emotions, I need to do something about it or my ability to learn is significantly compromised. It might mean that activity is too advanced for my level of progress or too simple. It might mean my attention span for doing it is limited to perhaps 10 or 20 minutes before my brain "tires". It might mean I have to make modifications to that activity to better suit me. It might mean I don't really understand the purpose of the activity or how I'm supposed to do it. I found that forcing myself to keep going with no adaptation ("no pain; no gain") was training my brain to associate negative and toxic emotion with what I was doing as well as accepting impaired learning from this as normal. I think the adage "work smarter; not harder" applies here.
Some of "liking" what I'm doing is motivation. There's been a lot of research done on motivation and AGT (achievement goal theory). External motivation (such as a teacher telling you to study something or you'll fail a test) tends to increase the amount of toxic emotion involved. Internal motivation (doing something because you want to for some reason) tends to increase the amount of positive emotion. Some researchers split internal motivation into a few different forms. There's doing something for the sheer joy of it. There's doing something for personal growth. There's doing something as a means to a desired end. These forms separately and combined are associated with establishing good habits associated with positive emotions and body chemistry. Another form of internal motivation is the satisfaction of meeting goals and accomplishing things. This can be a two-edged sword since one's eyes are not so much on enjoying the journey, but on getting to the destination as quickly as possible. Naive and unreasonable goals of beginners can lead to discouragement, frustration, and stress which in the long run is demotivating.
From what I can tell, the establishment of good language learning habits requires a foundation of good motivation as well as the ability to consciously monitor one's emotional and cognitive state of mind to make improvements to your language learning process. These help steer your efforts in a fruitful and satisfying direction and make it easier to build lifelong constructive habits that enrich your life.
Gandalf, thank you, as always, for making the comment sections of my videos worth reading by sharing your experience and insight on "liking," self-monitoring, and motivation.
When I was a monolingual first starting to watch AA videos I had this excitement about language learning I never had before - I was highly motivated to shadow, shadow, shadow. It worked exactly like he said. In the course of years, I could speak the language; could live in the lanuage; became good at the language. Work hard, trust the advice of the good prof, and you'll get there!
Thank you so much for your kind words of support, Liam Porter.
I always have the habit of setting time for learning and the time is also 15 minutes or the amount of 15*n minutes (30, 45, 60 etc). Very happy to see that other people also use the practice. But unfortunately I always struggle to get up early in the morning....Thanks for the video!
You are very welcome!
I appreciate this video. Very beneficial tangible breakdown of incorporating discipline habits for study.
You are very welcome.
Thank you for another pleasant video, Professor!
Interesting new tidbit about putting the book under one's pillow, never heard that one before from you! I suppose these days one can replace a single book with an entire library on one's phone. If I have the time in the morning, I do like to already make progress on some of the philosophy books I'm reading, but that's only after going through the messages on Discord. Perhaps I should eliminate that and just read first thing when I wake up.
One thing I've noticed about breaking up the time spent on one language (and this could just be a me thing) is that it whets one's appetite, builds up expectation for the next bout of doing that particular language. I remember back in 2020 I had a routine of listening to 10 mins Danish and 10 mins Latin when exercising in the morning, and then again when making dinner or something, and I was always really looking forward to getting back to those videos I was watching in Danish and Latin, and it was kinda like that for other languages, too!
Hello Yan, and yes, you are so right about the build up of expectation.
Fantastic video, Dr Arguelles! I much appreciate the way to discipline you showed on the video. I will adapt and apply it.
I saw one time that you talked about one specific prayer in latin to introduce the language learning.
Unfortunately, i changed computers and the message was lost. I searched it a lot, and I didn't found it. By any chance, do you remember it, or a link for me to access it?
Hello William! Would that have been Thomas Aquinas' prayer before study? Here it is:
Creator ineffabilis, qui de thesauris sapientiae tuae tres Angelorum hierarchias designasti et eas super caelum empyreum miro ordine collocasti atque universi partes elegantissime distribuisti: Tu, inquam, qui verus fons luminis et sapientiae diceris ac supereminens principium, infundere digneris super intellectus mei tenebras tuae radium claritatis, duplices, in quibus natus sum, a me removens tenebras, peccatum scilicet et ignorantiam. Tu, qui linguas infantium facis disertas, linguam meam erudias atque in labiis meis gratiam tuae benedictionis infundas. Da mihi intelligendi acumen, retinendi capacitatem, addiscendi modum et facilitatem, interpretandi subtilitatem, loquendi gratiam copiosam. Ingressum instruas, progressum dirigas, egressum compleas. Tu, qui es verus Deus et homo, qui vivis et regnas in saecula saeculorum. Amen.
@@ProfASAr exactly, thank you!
Great video. Was wondering if you have advice for study on public transportation. That alone gives me about an hour and a half of solid study time daily. Currently I am just reading through graded readers. My problem though is that I get more easily distracted and I can't speak out loud. Thanks.
Hmmm... Yes, I do have some thoughts about that, which I don't think I've articulated before. Let me let it percolate. Thanks for the suggestion!
I used earplugs and a baseball cap to help focus. You could use noise cancellation headphones (noise cancellation earbuds are less effective). Regardless, this is not an ideal situation for concentration for all the people, the low frequency rumble, movement, etc.
I'm learning German in order to play an elaborate prank on my friends. We're all motivated a bit differently.
We are indeed! Let us know how that goes!
@@ProfASAr I will, but it's a long project. :D
Dobry żart tynfa wart @@luszczi
i will only speak Danish on April 1st .
speaking of waking up early i have a real problem with my sleep seclude i pretty much go to sleep in the morning and wake up in the afternoon. its so bad i wake up earlier in the winter because i want to walk before sunset .there are several reasons for this like back when i was 19 i still lived with my parents and i could only get privacy at night when they were sleeping. but another reason is that once UA-cam and live streaming got popular i noticed there was nothing interesting happening during the day. in europe streamers from the uk were only active at nights while Americans were early birds sometimes. i would sleep early only to find out interesting stuff happened at night but they removed all the recordings .people in my own country don't use the internet for anything except facebook .but i noticed there was interesting stuff in German French Italian or polish during the day since most native speakers live in the same time zone as me. so learning these languages motivated me to sleep earlier .unfortunately the 3d and 4th languages i learned were Spanish and Portuguese so i had the same issue as English with those.
Thank you for sharing your interesting motives for learning.
Is there any information on the influence of nutritional factors on progress in foreign languages, perhaps personal observations of polyglots? In Indian culture, vegetarianism is believed to increase the ability to learn per se.
Eating generally does.
veganism wont help but wealthy people and scientists are more attracted to veganism compared to regular people
From personal experience, ingesting a good deal of proteins and carbohydrates helps a lot in studying.
Dominic O'Brien, the world champion memorizer, wrote in his book that he uses Ginko-Biloba.
I wish there were, but if there is, I don't know about it.
I'm pretty sure I'm not a morning person. It feels like my brain runs at half capacity before 11 am. I still try to get my Anki reviews done in the morning but most of my serious studying will be after lunch until late at night.
Thanks for sharing.
I wake up early, I follow up my list to do things… I am still not improving my the 3rd important language..😢
Sorry to hear this, but these things do take both time and consistency as well as tweaking what you are doing. I hope something clicks soon!
I started gradually, cutting down my sleep time by 15 mins. 15-30-45 and so on. Until I arrived at the point when just before going to sleep at night I said to myself: hey, no point in sleeping, I'll be hitting the book in a quater, so might as well do some pushups to invigorate myself. So yeah. Since then I never slept again.
I hope you're joking, no sleeping at all will damage your language learning and your quality if life. You may even collapse in the middle of the day. The danger increases the more days you skip sleep
The limited number of hours in a given day is indeed a hurdle.
Get at least 6 hours of sleep, but make them count. No caffeine for 6 hours, total silence if possible, and no screens for 1 hour bf bed. And sleeping in a pitch dark room. Read a short story or something right before going to sleep.
@@fisicogamer1902 where is your sense of humor?
First
You usually are!
please, buy a microphone that can be attached to your clothes for youtube video. It is a little difficult for focusing on the sound. Nowdays, resolution for sound is more important than the one for screen.
Thanks for commenting. I'm afraid I have never had much luck with microphones.
Sounds perfectly fine to me