Happy New Year!

Welcome to 2023. As it’s the New Year, people often make resolutions about learning or relearning foreign languages. People also often give up on resolutions so how can you stop this from happening? For 10 days, we are giving out a tip per day to help you stick at your language learning resolutions.

Tip 1.

The what and the why

What do you want to learn and why? This is really important as you will keep coming back to the what and the why throughout your language journey. It may even change, that’s ok (more of this later). Your goal may be to learn French. Ok, so get a notebook, file, word document whatever works for you and write it down.

Learn French.

Ok good. What about the why?

Learn French because I like France.

Yes. What about more information? Write all the reasons you can think of.

Learn to speak French because I like going on holiday to France, eating French food, visiting museums and not speaking English.

Right. Do you understand any French now? Where are you starting from?

I can only do very basic greetings and struggle with basic numbers. I can’t understand very much from what people say.

From these points you can create some goals.

I want to be able to move on from basic greetings, get more confident with numbers, and work on my listening skills.

How much time can you spend on language learning and when? Think about how it will fit in with your day and when you feel best learning.

I aim to spend one hour a week in a class (Wednesdays) and one hour a week studying on my own (split into 3 x 20 minutes during my lunch hour).

Give yourself a concrete goal(s), as vague or specific as you like. It depends what will motivate you the best. Be wary of specific goals and not meeting them and feeling dejected. There is nothing wrong at all with missing your classes/study time for a while. The trick is to get started again and not to feel angry with yourself. You are amazing for giving yourself this challenge!

In one year, I want to make progress in these goals

Ta da! So now we have this.

Learn to speak French because I like going on holiday to France, eating French food, visiting museums and not speaking English.

I can only do very basic greetings and struggle with basic numbers. I can’t understand very much from what people say.

I want to be able to move on from basic greetings, get more confident with numbers, and work on my listening skills.

I aim to spend one hour a week in a class (Wednesdays) and one hour a week studying on my own (split into 3 x 20 minutes during my lunch hour).

In one year, I want to make progress in these goals.

So great, you have a basic plan for your learning. I have kept the concrete goal vague here, which does allow for you to look back at your notes in say April. And then see if you how you are doing against this concrete goal. If you’ve not met it yet, fine, keep going. If you have met it, I am going to quote Rapunzel from Disney’s Tangled for the answer to that one.

“Rapunzel:I’ve been looking out of a window for eighteen years, dreaming about what I might feel like when those lights rise in the sky. What if it’s not everything I dreamed it would be?
Flynn Rider: It will be.
Rapunzel: And what if it is? What do I do then?
Flynn Rider: Well,that’s the good part. You get to go find a new dream(goal).”

Now is the time to refine the goal, and start moving towards that one. It may be that your four months of study has opened up new interest areas.

By the summer, I want to have practiced basic tourist roleplays.

In the summer, you would then go back and refine that goal. This is a work in progress, and it changes as you improve your skills. I hope you have enjoyed this tip. Let me know in the comments if you do something similar.