How can you stay consistent when learning a language and not burn out and lose motivation and at the same time perform better when learning and remember over the long term?

Graham Wallas was one of the founders of the London School of Economics. In his book The Art of Thought,

Graham Wallas talks about the four stages of the creative process.

Which are Preparation or what can also be called Saturation followed by Incubation, then Illumination and finally Verification.

In his book the Taipei Lectures, Stephen Krashen the linguist and activist explains how to apply this to language learning which I will talk about more in a moment,

by the end of this post you will know how to use this process and to apply it when learning any language and improve performance.

First lets look abit more into the creative process.

In the first stage we have Preparation,

during this stage the person gathers as much information as possible about a subject,

looking at all possible angles of the subject and saturating their mind with the subject. Then comes the second part of the creative process according to Graham Wallas.

In the second part of the creative process (Incubation) The person, completely relaxes and goes and does something else for a period of time.

The incubation period of creativity is not a conscious thing, it happens unconsciously in the mind while the person is relaxing or doing other things.

During this time the mind is processing the information and doing something with it on an unconscious and unforced level.

Then suddenly the third stage of the creative process occurs which is illumination.

Illumination is when the idea suddenly comes to you after a period of preparation or saturation and after a period of doing something else or resting and not consciously trying to think about the problem you are working on.

Suddenly the idea comes to you.

Then you are ready for the final stage.

Verification, during the verification stage, you test your idea, and check it and apply what you have gained in the first three stages of the creative process.

The final stage of verifcation, is like the first stage of preparation or saturation, a stage of conscious effort and work.

Richard Feynman the Nobel Prize winning Physicist and genius knew about incubation, he once said,

“You have to do six months of very hard work first and get all the components bumping around in your head, and then you have to be idle for a couple of weeks, and then – ping – it suddenly falls into place…”

and Albert Einstein

“Einstein clearly knew about incubation… Einstein would allow the subconscious to solve particularly tricky problems…

…his eldest son said, ‘he would take refuge in music, and that would resolve all his difficulties.’

…’with relaxation, there would often come the solution'”

For more information on this please checkout Explorations in Language Acquisition and Use – The Taipei Lectures by Stephen Krashen.

The creative process as Graham Wallas describes it can also be applied to language learning.

I’m learning Japanese and have applied this process to learning the language.

First you try to learn as much about the language as possible, saturate your mind with the new language,

keep listening to audio on youtube or podcasts, even if you don’t fully understand everything.

Keep reading and looking up grammar points if you like grammar. If not use different apps for learning as much of the language as possible, don’t worry if you can’t understand everything, just keep going and focus on what you can understand.

Then when you have learned as much as possible and completely saturated your mind with the new language, stop and have a break, go and play football, go for a walk, go out with your friends, or do some other thing that relaxes you and don’t think consciously think about the language.

The thing that relaxes you could also be some kind of ordinary task in your day to day life as this lets the ideas sink in on an unconscious level.

Somehow our minds naturally acquire languages, no one really knows how or why, but it is clear that our minds have the capacity to learn languages, this is not just a select few, but all of us, since we all have acquired our first language.

During the incubation stage, somehow something is going on in our minds at an unconscious level, that is allowing us to process the language that we have been learning. So rather than trying to make yourself learn a new language, let yourself learn the new language.

After you have a break, the language will start to ‘click’ into place. This is the illumination stage that Graham Wallas talks about.

Finally during the verification stage, you can test your knowledge by practicing reading and confirming the language has gone in by checking against a dictionary and also trying out your new skills by talking with a native speaker to see if they can understand you.

Keep repeating this process, and your language skills will improve, all the while while taking breaks. Which are not just a luxury but are essential to allow the language to go in.

Once the language has gone in like this, you know it, and as Michel Thomas the language master teaches us,

“What you know, you don’t forget” Michel Thomas

Give it a go, try taking breaks in your language learning journey, and see how your mind is able to acquire the new langauge naturally.

I’ve found this process has really helped me in learning Japanese and also, it has helped me to remember things over the long term as well. There’s more information on this in the blog post I wrote here Keeping healthy while studying to feel good and increase performance, and to remember over the long term.