How To Make Your Language Learning Study A Habit

Learning a language takes a long time. The secret to doing anything that takes a long time is to build a habit around it.

If you want to lose weight, save money or learn a language, having good habits will help you out massively in reaching your goals.

What Is A Habit?

Before we get started at looking at how to build a habit, we should probably look at what a habit actually is.

It’s really quite simple, it’s just something you do regularly, and to not do it, feels wrong.

Think about brushing your teeth before bed. This behaviour is a habit. If you forget, it feels all wrong and you have to go do it or you won’t be able to sleep.

You also do not really think about doing it, it’s almost autopilot a lot of the time. It’s engrained into your routine.

This would be an example of a positive habit, but of course you can have some negative ones too, like biting your nails or smoking. People who do these things don’t even realise they are doing it, it’s a strange autopilot compulsion that they must do.  

Why Do We Need Habits For Language Learning?

Learning a language is a really long and difficult task. We can’t just do it a couple of times and be fluent.

We need to repeatedly work on acquiring a language and by making this process a habit; we will become far more efficient at learning over the long term as we are making the whole process sort of automatic.

Making our learning a habit will make sure we are always doing it. It will become a part of life and we are much more likely to stay on track and actually make progress if we feel compelled to study in this way.  

How Long Does It Take To Form A Language Learning Habit?

Forming a new habit can take a little time to achieve. There is so much scientific research and anecdotal information about how long exactly it takes that it’s hard to know exactly what is correct, I’ve read  it can take 21 days ,60 days and even as many as 90 days.

Some people even suggest it’s even longer than this. The exact number is not really relevant as I am certain it all depends on both the individual and the habit they are trying to form.   

You just need to be aware that it might take a while to form a habit around your language learning, so be prepared to put a couple of months of effort in.

After this you should be well into your language routine and it should be a well established habit in your life.

How To Form A Language Learning Habit

There are many different ways to make your language study a habit. If you follow some, or even all of the tips below you will quickly make studying a part of your life and it will become a habit that you want to keep.   

Set A Target

Firstly you need to set a target. What exactly do you want to achieve with your language? The goal of “learning a language” is great, but you need to break this down a little bit to make things easier.

You kind of need to ask yourself how you will get to the final goal. What steps do you need to get there?

Remember that language learning is long and slow. What little steps can you take to reach this bigger goal? Maybe it’s as simple as learn a new word a day, or practice speaking out loud for a few minutes every day.

It just needs to be something that you can repeat over and over again. All this repetition will add up to give you real progress.

Your target should be attractive to you. It should be something you want to do. If you actually want to do it, it will help a lot. Doing something you hate is always a struggle.

You should also try and make your target slightly easy to achieve. In the beginning this is important. You want to be able to achieve what you set out to do.

You also need to be able to get some satisfaction from hitting the target. Actually being able to complete it, is a form of satisfaction and it will help you make the progress a habit.

Be Realistic With Your Language Goals

Your language target needs to be realistic, both in terms of what you plan to do in your sessions and for how long.

We all start out saying things like “I’m going to learn 100 new words a day” which may be possible today …but can you do it again tomorrow? and the next day?

 I think you will very quickly become overwhelmed and exhausted from trying to reach this goal.    

Maybe you set your goal to be “I am going to study for 3 hours a day”. Again, this might be possible once, but when you are going to be able to repeatedly doing this, can you sustain this level every day?

It is far more sensible to set a target you can actaully achieve without ever getting overwhelmed or exhausted.

If you only set a target for 10 minute of study, you will all hit this. Some days you may just keep carrying on. Maybe you hit 3 hours. It doesn’t matter. So long as you keep hitting your 10 minutes it will all slowly start to add up.   

A realistic target is going to become a habit every easily.  

(You can read more about – How To Set A Language Goal)

Be Consistent With Your Language Learning

If your language learning target is realistic, this should mean it can also be consistently achieved. These two things are very closely linked.

You also need to be consistent in carrying out your learning. You should aim to practice often. The more you do, the more you will get into forming a habit.

Make Your Study Apart of Your Routine

To help make your study a habit, you should try and add it into your daily routine, this is exactly how brushing your teeth works. You get tired and you just automatically know to brush your teeth.

You can do this by doing the same thing at the same time each day  and it will very quickly become routine.

Personally I like to go through my Anki cards just before lunch. I always look at the clock and see its approaching lunch time and I go straight to Anki, knowing I can eat as soon as that’s done.

I have made my listening a apart of my daily routine. Now when I finish my dinner, I fire up YouTube and sit and videos In French for an hour.

These two activities are just part of my routine now, they are a habit. If I forget it doesn’t feel right, exactly like how it feels strange when you forget to brush your teeth.  

Try And Study your Language Frequently

You should aim to study every day, although if you have a day off, it’s fine. Maybe you want to relax on Sunday. That’s cool; just make it consistent that you do this every week and it will just become a part of the habit.

This frequency will help make your study a part of your routine. I actually break my study up throughout the day, so there are multiple times during the day where I just feel I need to study now.   

That frequency really helps keep me feeling like I need to be studying. However, if you just wanted to study once a day, this is still enough of a frequency. After a few weeks you will feel unusual if you miss a day as it will be such a common part of your life now.

(You can read more about – Why Should You Spread Out Your Language Learning Throughout The Day?)

Make Your Self Accountable

Being accountable can help you to form a habit. The accountability will make sure you don’t give up and eventually your study will become a part of your routine.

You can do this by telling someone you trust what you are planning to do and have them support you and check on your progress.

However, you can easily do this online as many of the language apps have daily targets and “streaks” to show you how many days in a row you have been learning, These try and make you accountable and keep you not wanting to give up and keep your streak going.

No one wants to break a streak! These can be very useful when you are trying to form a habit. After a while the number doesn’t really matter and its more about just turning up and studying as it is just ingrained into your routine now.    

Make Your Language Learning Convenient

To make your learning a habit, you need to make it easy to do. The more convenient it is, the easier it can become a part of your routine. Basically it needs to just slip into your life without disturbing anything else, or it won’t happen.

If you have to drive 30 minutes every day to go to the library and study, this is going to start to get annoying and you will stop going.

Having your resources easily to hand is going to make it a lot more convenient to learn. Luckily we live in the age of the internet and smart phones, so you have no excuse.

You can easily use your phone to study, which make learning anywhere at any times, really convenient and easy.

Being able to quickly pull your phone out and start studying is going to make this very easy for you and you will find you can do this over and over again, there is no resistance to studying, so whatever you are doing, try and make it convenient to yourself.

Monitor Your Success

Checking on our success is a huge part of language learning that I think is often neglected.

We need to check how we are doing and we need to see what we have achieved every now and again. If you can’t see any success, you will just want to give up. You should be regularly checking up on yourself to see how you are doing, such as once as month take a look back and see what you’ve achieved.

Being able to see that we are making progress will keep us engaged with our studies and it will help us to make it a part of our routine.

Knowing that on a certain date each month you will be checking how much time you have spent studying or testing yourself in some way is going to help build a habit. You are going to be looking forward to seeing what success you have made this month and will keep pushing towards that, sort of like you are in competition with yourself.

(You can read more about – Why It Is Important To Track Your Language Immersion)

Motivation Isn’t Needed When Learning A Language

I often hear people say they are not motivated to study and I tell them its fine. They do not motivation.

You need discipline. Discipline will form a habit.

Think about all the boring tasks in your life. Washing the dishes or putting the bins out. Is anyone motivated to do these? Of course not! But it gets done!  Why? Because, it has to be done.

We have the discipline to do these things every day.

If you apply this to all aspects on your life you will get a lot done. This is especially true with language learning.  

If you want to learn, stop waiting for the motivation and start having some self disciple. Set yourself a goal and do it every single day.

You will want to fight this and your lazy side will want to take over. Just like how you try and delay doing the dishes, but like in the same way you force yourself to do the dishes, you just have to tell yourself that you need to study your language.  

If you can get this mindset right you will unstoppable, but I do appreciate it is quite hard to achieve.

Try and work on it, you will not regret it.

(You can read more about How To Fight Procrastination In Language Learning)

Set Your Priorities So That You Focus On Language Learning

There is a theory that you only have so much “energy” or “will power” every day. Call it whatever you want, “effort”  “motivation ”or even “attention span” it doesn’t matter, but I do feel it is real.

If you see yourself as battery, it makes sense that by the end of the day you are going to be lower in energy.

The theory suggests you should set your priorities around this. The most important tasks in your life should be done first. This way you will have the most “energy” to dedicate to it

This means if you want to focus on something, you should really be doing it in the morning. If you leave it until later in the day you will be tired and way more likely to put it off.

I have found this very helpful in life in general. I try and do the most important things first.

When I was trying to get back into exercising it was the first thing I did in the morning. I did this for a few months until it became a habit. I did see my work and other aspects of life suffer from this. I just didn’t have the energy for these other things, but that was okay. My goal was to make exercise a habit.

After about 3 months I was able to readjust my day and now I work out in the afternoon. This means I can I can put my focus back on my work. However, as exercise is now a habit, I still do it every day.

I did the exact same for language learning. I was trying to learn in the evening and it was a real struggle I was too tired. For a long while I did it first thing in the morning until it was a habit.

I now do it just before my lunch. I still have plenty of energy at this time and it is now one of my favourite habits.

Conclusion

You will not succeed in language learning unless you make it a habit and make it a part of your life. Push yourself to be self disciplined and make your language learning a habit.

After a few months you will be totally addicted and it will feel wrong if you are not studying. By this point you will see the results and see how much you are progressing, so it can be easier to keep going.

When you are starting, just believe that what you are doing is going to work, just believe you can make this a habit and you can get to your goal.

Language learning takes a long time, but you can do this and you can form the learning habits to help you.  

(You can read more about – How Long It Can Take To Learn A Language)