How to Study Languages with a Full Time Job

Hello everyone, hola, merhaba, annyeonghaseyo, hallo and sawasdeeka and welcome back to Micaela Learns Languages. Today I wanted to talk about how we can be successful in language learning even while having a full time job. Now this is something that I have been struggling with a little bit lately because right now I'm learning five languages and working a full time job and it's a lot. So today I wanted to give some tips of things that have been helping me lately, but this does not mean that I have everything 100% solved and my language learning always goes 100% perfectly every week and I never have problems, no. I still struggle with things, I'm just like you, just a person trying to learn languages and having struggles along the way and that's part of the reason I wanted to start this channel is to just talk about some problems that I've been having and solutions that I've come up with that are working for me and hopefully will work for you too and just things I've learned along my journey. I have been learning languages for many years now and I have learned some things, I've still got some things to work on, some things to improve, but we all do. I just wanted to preface the video with that because I don't ever want to come across like I have everything 100% solved and my life and my language learning is perfect because it's not, but with that being said, these are the things that have been helping me lately. So the number one thing that I want you to take away from this video, if you don't take any other advice from this video, please take this advice. You cannot study if you are physically and mentally exhausted. You have to take care of your physical and mental health before the language learning even starts. Before you sit down to study, you have to take care of yourself. And I know these things can be so easy to forget, to push to the side, to ignore until they become a big problem. The number one thing is get enough sleep. We all know sleeping is crucial for your memory and learning, but on the job side of things, nobody wants to work with you if you are grouchy and mean and cranky all day long. And that's what you're going to be if you're sleep deprived. So do everyone, yourself included, a favor and get enough rest. So one thing that has really helped me with this is to set a strict bedtime. Now if you've seen my video on routines, you know that I don't really have strict routines in many aspects of my language learning. But one thing that really helps me is having a strict bedtime. And my next tip is to drink enough water and eat nourishing foods. I feel like this one's pretty self-explanatory. You need to be hydrated and you need to have the nourishment to fuel your brain and body. My next tip is to move your body. Now I'm not saying that you need to go from couch potato to having a full exercise routine where you're exercising seven days a week because it's probably not going to be sustainable. But add just a little bit more movement in your day. Exercise helps memory and learning and it'll also just help you feel better throughout the day. And my last health-related tip is to take breaks. I am really bad about this one. I will try to just push through and work harder and get all this stuff done. And the truth about language learning is it will never end. You will be learning this language for the rest of your life. You will eventually, hopefully, get fluent in the language. But there is always more to learn. There's always more studying to be done. So it is not like it is a task that can be finished. It is OK to take breaks. And I would really recommend that you have at least one day a week where you fully rest. And while we're talking about taking breaks, if you are just finding yourself extremely exhausted or if you are sick, I would cut back on studying or just take a break for a few days. You will find that if you take a break when you're first starting to feel sick or first starting to feel a little burnout, that it will help you get back to studying faster rather than keep pushing through, keep working hard and either burning yourself out or finding that now you're really sick and you need to take a week off or something like that. It's better to just take a break when your body tells you, hey, I need to rest a little bit. Just listen to your body when it's telling you that it needs a break. So I really think this first section of the video where we're talking about taking care of your physical and mental health is the most important. It's really the key to success in language learning when you have so many responsibilities, you have a full time job, you have family that you need to take care of, you have household chores that you need to do. All of these things can weigh on us physically and mentally, and we really need to be mindful and take care of ourselves. But now let's move on and talk about some tips for managing your time just a little bit better, making the most of the time that you do have available without pushing yourself too hard. Now, you know, I'm not really a fan of trying to make your study schedule as efficient as possible. I think really that just wastes a lot of time with planning and over planning. And I think most of the time you just need to sit down and study at some point in your day. And that's going to get you closer to your goal than planning the most efficient language learning schedule that you never actually do. So these are just small little things that you can do. It's not overhauling your whole study schedule or lack thereof. It's just small little changes. So my first time management related tip would be to focus on smaller chunks of time in your day. So maybe you've been telling yourself that you're just waiting until you can sit down for two hours straight and study. But finding two hours, especially during the work week, is not realistic for most of us. We have all these other responsibilities that we have to take care of. And not to mention that most of us are pretty tired when we get home from work and we may just not feel like studying for two hours, even if we were to have that amount of time. So instead of waiting for the perfect opportunity when you are energized and you have a big chunk of time, focus on small blocks of time throughout your day. Fifteen minutes is honestly a great little chunk of time to use for language learning. Don't ignore that 15 minute chunk of time in your day just because you think, oh well that's not enough time to get any real studying done. Because it adds up. Actually studying for that 15 minute chunk of time each day is going to help you make a lot more progress than if you wait for a two hour block of time that only happens maybe once every two weeks. Don't try to fill your entire schedule for your day from the minute you open your eyes to the minute you lay down in bed because that is just going to stress you out and again will lead to burnout. But what I am saying is that you can learn to find more value in those smaller blocks of time throughout the day that maybe you were just scrolling on your phone or wasting time in some other way and you can use that for language learning instead. You can use some of those little blocks of time throughout your day for language learning. Not all of them. And going along with this point about valuing smaller blocks of time, if you're someone like me who procrastinates quite a bit on pretty much everything, even things I enjoy doing, then you might find it helpful to just tell yourself that you're going to sit down and you only have to study for five minutes. Just sit down and study for five minutes. You can set a timer if you want to or just look at the clock, see what time you're starting and just sit down and start studying. And you might find that once you're engaged in it that you want to continue studying. This tip just really helps me get over the initial procrastination that I have a lot of times with starting a task and once I actually start studying, I enjoy it because I like learning languages and I want to continue studying once I've started. But actually starting the task is quite difficult for me sometimes. My next tip is to replace your doom scrolling. Now I'm willing to bet that most of us spend more time doom scrolling than we are willing to admit and probably most of us would like to reduce the amount of time that we spend doom scrolling each day. So one thing I've been trying to do is to replace my doom scrolling with language learning. Now this can be really tough because doom scrolling is addictive and social media is designed to keep you engaged. So breaking this habit is not an easy one but it is something that I've been trying to do lately. Now one tip I would say is put something on your phone that you can click on instead of social media. Now this needs to be something really easy to do as well because you will never replace your doom scrolling with intense study. It's just not going to happen because doom scrolling is just way too easy to do instead of something hard. So you want something easy that you can put on your phone that you can click on instead of clicking on social media apps. So for me, I like to do flashcards. Maybe that is not your cup of tea but I have a flashcard app on my phone that I try to get myself to click on when I feel the urge to doom scroll. I want to be clear that this does not work all the time and I still find myself doom scrolling when I don't want to but even if I'm just replacing half of my doom scrolling with something productive, it's a win. My next tip is to use a structured course as the backbone of your language learning. I'm not saying this is the only thing that you need to be using. You can use other resources too and I would encourage you to find other things that you enjoy doing because let's be honest, sometimes structured courses can be a little bit on the boring side of things but having that as a guideline and to help you fill in all the gaps and make sure you're not missing important grammar or important vocabulary can be really helpful. And especially if you are working full time, it can just take some of the mental load of trying to plan what you're going to study next off of you and you just open your textbook or open your course to see what the next lesson is. And finally, we kind of talked about this earlier when we were talking about rest but let your low energy days be either complete rest days or you could do review or something low effort. I really find it kind of pointless to try to get myself to learn new things when I'm just having a really low energy day and it's best to either review or maybe you just take a complete rest day. Now if you decide to take a complete rest day, really let yourself rest. Don't be stressed the whole time about how you're getting behind on your language learning because then you're going to feel worse the next day and that's just going to continue. And finally, I just have some mindset tips for how you should view your language learning when you are learning while having a busy schedule with a full time job. First, you should definitely celebrate all the little milestones along the way. So for example, instead of only feeling proud of yourself when you finish your entire textbook that you've been working through, celebrate each chapter that you finish because that is one step closer to finishing the textbook. And finally, don't stress over how fast you should be learning because there's really no guideline for how fast or slow you should be learning a language. Just relax and take it at your own pace. You will get there eventually if you just don't give up. So that's it for today. I hope you all enjoyed. I hope these tips are helpful and I will see you all next time.