If you’re thinking that you’re not making any progress when learning Italian because you’re not good at languages, stop now because I can assure you that that’s just an excuse.
The truth is that your success depends only on you. If you really want to improve your language skills, you can do it. Everyone can.
Today I want to share with you some of the habits successful language learners have.
1. SET YOUR GOALS
The first habit successful language learners have is to set clear goals.
Setting clear goals can help you in two ways.
The first one is to avoid procrastination. Indeed, it’s quite difficult to improve your language skills if you keep postponing your learning sessions.
If you have a clear goal in mind, you can decide the best way for you to achieve it by writing down a clear studying schedule to follow.
If, writing your goals doesn’t help you much to avoid procrastination, then I strongly suggest you to talk about your goals and learning schedule to as many friends as possible. In fact, it’s usually more difficult to repetitively admit our failures with friends without feeling bad and guilty.
The second way setting your goals can help you become a successful language learner is by keeping you motivated.
Indeed, once you see you can actually reach the goals you’ve established your motivation and self-esteem grow. And this is the exact fuel you need to keep going and improving.
And I haven’t mentioned the best part yet, your goals shouldn’t necessarily be big, they can be as small as “I want to learn three new Italian words”.
2. POSITIVE SELF-TALK
Remember what I told you before? Your success depends only on you. So, the second habit successful learners have is that of positive self-talk. What does it mean?
It means that you’re the first person that should motivate yourself. Don’t wait for others to do so.
Tell yourself that you did good, tell yourself that even if you had little time at your disposal, you managed to learn something new today, tell yourself that your listening skills have improved, even if just a little bit, tell yourself that even if you made a mistake, you did great, because this will help you do better in the future.
In short, don’t be too harsh on yourself, try to be positive and remember to note everything good you did during your day.
3. THINK IN THE TARGET LANGUAGE
The third habit successful language learners have is to think in the language they’re learning.
Thinking in a new language can be extremely difficult at first since it doesn’t come natural plus our knowledge of the target language is limited.
When I began to learn English I remember I had to try really hard to think directly in that language and the majority of the sentences that formed into my mind were like “how do I say that in English?” or “what’s the word for…?”, all the others were a mixture of Italian and English, more Italian than English, of course!
Even if I could form only few sentences in English, I kept trying, and with time this came a little bit more natural.
Thinking in the target language allows you to practice conversation every day and gives you the motivation to learn new vocabulary day by day.
Now, what about you? Do you have one or all these habits successful language learners have?
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