One of the questions I often get when I tell people I’m learning a new language, is how do you stay motivated to keep learning a new language?

Often our experiences of first learning a new language come from our education in school.

A lot of the methods of learning are quite out of date, sometimes old school methods of learning work aswell, but

I’ve found a combination of old school methods and modern methods work the best.

Stephen Krashen’s idea of the pleasure principle in language aquisition is something that is quite useful in learning.

It comes from the idea that if we enjoy doing something, then we will continue to keep doing it.

So when we are learning a new language we should seek ways of learning that we enjoy, rather than ways of learning that we don’t enjoy.

Often we associate learning with only hard grinding work. Although sometimes it’s important to push ourselves while learning, and do old school methods of memorization, but if we only do that, we can burn out, get bored and frustrated and lose motivation to continue.

So when learning a new language, find ways that you enjoy, to acquire the new language.

Some people like reading novels, so you could try reading novels in the language that you are learning.

Some people don’t like reading novels, so if you don’t like reading novels don’t force yourself.

Other people like watching the news, but some people don’t. Some people will tell you, you should watch the news in the language you are learning because news readers speak really clearly, but if you don’t enjoy it, you won’t keep on learning.

Stephen Krashen the linguist, educator and activist, talks about this in his books on natural language acquistion. He did research into different groups of people and studied how they acquired languages.

He found that a group of students progressed very rapidly when they were reading comics, because those people were really into comics.

People who were into the subject matter, did much better in the long run, he describes trying to learn if you are not really interested in the subject or the other person as just decoding.

So it’s important to have fun and enjoy what you are learning.

So it all depends on you and what your interests are, don’t force yourself to learn from the news or force yourself to learn grammar all the time, actually some people like studying grammar directly, so if you enjoy that then you should do that. I like studying grammar directly sometimes.

Here are some of Stephen Krashen’s books on language acquisition.

This book is great for teachers and for students, as it provides a framework and some good ideas for learning a language, as well as for teachers teaching a language.

Another useful one is Exploration in Language Acquisition and use: The Taipei lectures

and Foreign Language Acquisition The Easy Way, by Stephen Krashen

In these books Stephen Krashen talks about processes of learning languages in an organic and natural way which moves away from old school methods of learning languages.

I think his books are great, and they have helped me alot during my time learning and acquiring languages.

The best thing to do then, is to find a way which works best for you. Then you will stay motivated and be more likely to become fluent.

Another thing that fits in with the pleasure principle in learning languages is the idea of flow, which is a concept recognized by the American-Hungarian Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and is another thing talked about by Stephen Krashen in his books.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi explains that when we are in a state of flow, we forget everthing around us, and we lose track of time, we are totally focused on the thing that we are doing and at these times we experience a state of happiness. If you can find a way to enjoy language learning through doing it in a way which connects to your passions and learn in a way that you enjoy, then you will find yourself forgetting everything that is around you and find yourself in a state of happiness. If you enter these states when learning through your passions you will constantly feel like learning and easily form a new habit of doing something that makes you feel great and your language skills will improve.

If you are interested you can read more about flow in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book, ‘Flow The Psychology of Happiness’

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