5 Ways to Succeed as a Language Learner

Hi guys, it's Agnieszka from 5-Minute Language and I'm really excited to bring you this new video today. So today I want to talk to you about the 5 top ways in which you can succeed as a language learner. Are you ready? Let's get started! Number one. Have a clear goal. Imagine I asked you to make a pizza but you've never seen a pizza before. What are you gonna do? You might have a list of ingredients and you might have the recipe but if you don't know what a pizza looks like you might make it into a square rather than a circle. Do you know what I mean? You might make it into a square and you might add a different type of cheese because you don't know whether to add mozzarella or cheddar cheese or pecorino or whatever it might be. Essentially what I'm trying to say is that if you don't have a goal, you don't really know what you're doing, it's difficult for you to succeed because you don't know what it is that you're trying to achieve. So have a clear goal whenever you make a pizza or whenever you learn a foreign language. Number two. Evaluate and reprioritize all the time. I've got another cooking metaphor for you now. Imagine you're cooking an omelette. You know that you want it golden brown, you know the ingredients, you've the recipe, you've mixed your eggs, you've added your salt and pepper and all the other ingredients, you've poured it into a pan and you start frying it but then the recipe says cooking appliances vary. So it might be three minutes, it might be five minutes on each side, you don't really know. So what do you do? So how do you make sure that your omelette is golden brown but it's not burnt? You lift it up whilst you cook it, right? To check what the color is. So language learning is a bit like making an omelette in that you have to constantly check where you are in order to know how long to go before you reach your goal. So what I'm saying to you is you need to constantly evaluate and reprioritize. It's not enough to evaluate at the end of the year, it's not enough to just keep going until you reach fluency because otherwise you might burn out simply or you might not make as much progress as you could if you were evaluating and reprioritizing all the time. So that's it. Number three, strive for progress, not perfection. I'm sure you've heard this one before. Anyway, this one is about making sure that you celebrate all the little successes that you have along the way in your language learning journey. Obviously it's great to be ambitious and to strive for fluency and being great at speaking your language but progress is the most important thing. So if you manage to say a sentence but you made one mistake, you can still celebrate it. It doesn't matter. You said something and that's what matters. Then you can take it to the next level and try to say it again without making the mistake. This way you can celebrate twice. You celebrate for the first time when you say it and then for the second time when you say it correctly. Number four, match your tools to your goals. I've written an article about this recently. It's about how to choose the right language learning resources. I've linked it below this video so make sure you check it out. Anyway, this tip is about making sure that you're quite particular about the tools that you use, the resources that you use to achieve or to work towards your language learning goals. So I've got another cooking metaphor for you. Imagine you're making pancakes. What kind of pan are you going to use? Are you going to use a flat frying pan or a deep pot? Probably the former because otherwise if you use a pot you won't be able to flip over the pancake and you're going to fail. So when learning a language you have to choose the right tools and you have to constantly evaluate whether the tools that you're using are actually giving you the effect that you're after. Can you tell I like to cook? Probably. Number five, work on your confidence and confidence is definitely something that you can develop. It's not something that we're born with. It's something you can learn and I'm sure you can do it too. Once you've worked on your confidence you will be able to do so much more. So don't be scared, speak whenever you have the opportunity to do so and you will make progress so much more quickly. So I hope you enjoyed these five little tips and I'll see you soon for similar videos. If you'd like to see anything specific please let me know in the comments below and if you're not subscribed to the channel then guess what? You should because I'm going to be delivering more similar content in the future so exciting times and I'll see you soon. Take care!