Have you ever wondered how it would feel to speak another language? When you are traveling to another country, you could form friendships with people you might never ordinarily be able to meet.

It opens a possibility of meeting more people, infact their would be millions more people who you could get to know and traveling and seeing the place you desire to visit most in a different way.

Have you ever found yourself not continuing to learn a new language after learning for a short time?

One of the big secrets in language learning, or getting good at anything, is to form a habit when you are learning.

You may already have found yourself being good at forming habits that aren’t that productive for learning something new, such as spending hours on social media.

A really interesting book is called “The Power of Habit: Why we do what we do: and how to change it” by Charles Duhigg.

In his book one of the things Charles Duhigg talks about is a lady who was a smoker for many years, and engaged in other bad habits of lifestyle, one day she put her cigarettes down and never smoked again.

How did she do this?

When scientists looked at her brain, and observed her patterns of behaviour in her new fullfilling new life they found something interesting, they found that what had happened was that although the old habit patterns of smoking were still there, that also now, the new pattern of not smoking and doing other things instead, could be seen, these new patterns of behaviour that were making her life better were overiding the old patterns.

When you are learning a new language, the old patterns of being addicted to social media, are still there,

so what you have to do instead is forget about the old habits and, to do that, you have to focus on forming new habits.

This can be applied to anything, but in this case forming new patterns of learning a language each day.

It’s better to try and study a little each day, and keep going over the long term,

slow and steady, rather than just working really hard for two weeks and then stopping for 6 months or not even continuing at all.

There is something to be said about taking breaks, which I’ve wrote about in this article, where I talk about Graham Wallas and his book the Art of Thought. Breaks are important, but you have to take them at the right time.

Before taking longer breaks in your language learning studies, it’s important first to make sure you have formed a habit of language learning.

When I first started learning Japanese, I would feel so excited about the idea of learning a new language that I would find myself studying intensely for short periods but then stop and not continue over the long term.

What I realized is you need to form habits when learning a new language or changing any behaviour.

A lot of research has been done into forming habits and one the things that researchers agree on is that the environment you are in affects the kind of habits that you do each day.

So setting up simple reminders to study a language can really help you stay motivated when learning.

If you are living in the country of the language you are learning then it’s easy, because you are surrounded by the language, you have to try speaking it to get around and order food so you find yourself practicing the new language automatically.

However when you are in your native country, you might find it more difficult because nothing is triggering your mind to start learning the language you are learning.

You need to set a ‘cue’ as Charles Duhigg describes in the Power of Habit.

This cue could be something really simple, for example, if you place a language learning book on the table infront of your tv you will be reminded about learning your new language every day by your automatic habit of going into your living room and doing the habit of watching tv.

Everytime you see your language learning book, you will remember about learning the new language, this may help to trigger you into taking action and making a start at learning your new language.

James Clear the author of the book Atomic Habits

talks about also giving yourself a small reward after you have completed the new thing that you are trying create a new habit in doing.

For example if you are trying to form a habit of exercising regularly, then leave your running shoes next to your bed and also after you have done some exercise then give yourself a reward like a small piece of chocolate. However language learning is slightly different and there is another method that I will talk about in a moment to help you stay motivated with your language learning.

Another thing that James Clear talks about is that we all fear change, which I think is very true, I find myself fearing even good change.

James Clear says this is because we think change will come around very rapidily and we will have to completely abandon who we are and our life as we know it now.

However James Clear teaches us that this isn’t the case,

that in fact change comes from making small changes,

if we could make just a 1% change for the better each day, our lives would be profoundly different after a year and we will not completely abandon who we are, instead we will make changes that last and without the fear of sudden drastic change.

So when you start learning a new language, why not leave a cue in your usual environment to trigger you into learning that new language? and then try reading abit of the language, just the first few lines of a book, or listening to 2 minutes of a podcast or video on youtube in the language you are learning.

It’s important to make a start, small steps in starting, lead to big changes over the long run,

remember slow and steady wins the race.

If you are planning on going traveling to another country, one thing you can do is to place an image of that country in a place that you see all the time.

What is the space that you are in most of the time?

Your screen on your phone and computer screen is also a space, that you are ‘in’ most of the day if you are someone who works on a computer all day or if you use your computer a lot.

This will sound almost too simple, I almost didn’t type it because it sounds too simple, but I think simple things do work the best sometimes.

I wanted to go to Japan for many years, but i kept forgetting and going off on tangents and doing other things, so one day, I got a picture of a painting that someone had painted of a street scene in Japan online and I saved it as my background image on my laptop. I think it might have helped because finally after about a year I found myself visiting in Japan. I think just having that in my mind, right in front of me all day, made me unconsciouslly think about going to Japan more and because of that, I started doing small things each day to go to Japan, such as, looking up accommadation in Japan, looking up flights, learning Japanese by taking small steps each day.

So try to find a way of reminding yourself to make a small start each day to learn or practice your new language each day, even it’s just for a few minutes.

Eventually these new habits will grow from just a few minutes to a few hours. You may even find yourself learning your new language for most of the day and that you will actually find it feels strange not to be learning a language each day. This is when you will realize that you can change your habits to achieve constructive things, and not only for language learning but for all areas of your life.

One of the things you also need to do,

is to form the identity that you see yourself as a language learner,

you can do this by thinking about your language learning not as some isolated thing that you are doing on your own but as it is, which is you are in a large community of people all over the world learning and sharing languages.

James Clear talks about this and he also teaches us that making small incremental changes helps us to form this new identity not in a drastic way that many of us fear, that is big sudden change, but over the long run, in a slow and steady way.

If you keep making these incremental changes and learning a new language each day

you will find yourself seeing yourself as the speaker of a new language and at the same time you really will be speaking in that language and making new friends all over the world.

The most important thing is to start. Set a cue, that triggers you into starting each day, and then in a moment I’m going to talk about the idea of the way we think about reward in language learning.

Even if you only do a few minutes a day at first, it’s ok, as long as you keep going, these small habits will develp into larger habits and you will find yourself speaking and learning new languages as if it’s your everyday routine.

To take this one step further, what I found worked for me was to find the reward in doing the thing itself, not to get an external reward at the end.

So the idea is to make the process of language learning a pleasurable one.

So that you forget about the end completely because often giving rewards to motivate people or yourself for doing complicated tasks doesn’t work.

It works for repetitive tasks that don’t require much cognitive skill but language learning is more complex so to motivate yourself with external rewards at the end isn’t the best way to go about it.

Richard Feynman the nobel prize winning physicist explains in his BBC interview and book the Pleasure of Finding Things out, that he wasn’t really that bothered when he won the nobel prize, he said,

“I’ve already got the prize, the prize is the pleasure of finding the thing out”

Michel Thomas the language master talks about this, he explains how in his method, it’s the thrill of learning which keeps a person motivated and coming back and continuing to learn.

Stephen Krashen the linguist and activist talks about this in his idea about the pleasure principle in language learning. He says that if we are enjoying the process we are more likely to continue doing the thing.

Therefore it’s important to form a habit in learning new languages but the best thing you can do is to find a way of learning that you enjoy so that the reward in the habit loop, is already in the habit loop, it’s in the pleasure of finding things out as Richard Feynman would say.