5 WAYS to Stay Motivated
We know that motivation is very important in language learning.
It's a key part of that learner's attitude.
It goes along with confidence, you know, the desire to achieve a certain level
in the language and motivation is what gets us started and keeps us going.
And I thought a bit about motivation because it's easy to
talk about motivation, but how do you motivate yourself or how
do you motivate other people?
What are the elements?
What are the components of motivation?
And I think there are five triggers to motivation, and I want to talk about these
five triggers at three distinct stages of our, uh, language learning journey.
When we are getting started, starting from scratch, obviously
a major trigger can be curiosity.
People are interested in Spanish culture or they've been watching Turkish
serial series on Netflix or anything which triggers a curiosity in another
language can be a major trigger.
Another important trigger can be a connection.
For example, a family member, maybe grandma who doesn't speak English
for people who have immigrated, say to an English speaking country.
It can be, uh, a girlfriend, a boyfriend, or simply a friend, or any kind of
a personal connection like that can be a major, you know, contributor.
A major trigger of interest in the language, a major, major motivator.
Another motivator can be an obligation.
Maybe you work for a company, say, in Japan, and they insist
on a certain level of English.
So whether you like it or not, you've gotta start learning English.
Uh, at school certain languages may be compulsory,
so obligation can be a trigger.
It can trigger resistance to the language as well, but it does get you
going starting to learn the language.
Now, uh, uh, on the other hand, a more positive trigger is a sense of success.
Let's say that you went to Mexico and uh, you had a little phrase
book, and you were able to say a few things and to communicate in Spanish.
Then perhaps when you come home, you're now more motivated to really
try to learn Spanish because you had some success with the language.
Success is, throughout the process, a major trigger of motivation.
And finally context.
Again, getting back to the person who visited Mexico or maybe visited China
or Vietnam or any country and was made aware that there is this other world
where people don't speak my native language, they speak this other language.
And so there is a context where I can see myself communicating in that language.
So here is where context becomes a trigger.
Now, as we then approach the sort of intermediate stage in the language,
uh, we find that the same triggers start to work as we've made sort
of some progress in the language.
We've gotten past the first stage, we've acquired some words,
and now we're discovering more and more interesting content.
In other words, our curiosity is growing.
There's a tremendous opportunity for that curiosity to grow.
What was originally sort of a surface like curiosity has now become a deeper
curiosity in the intermediate stage.
Similarly, with the connections, we can now find that we were able to maybe start
genuinely communicating with grandma or on our most recent trip to Mexico,
we were in fact able to communicate more with the locals rather than just
asking for a beer in a, in a restaurant.
The idea of the connections is strengthening and, and continuing
to, to trigger our motivation.
So again, the obligation can get stronger and reinforce itself.
Perhaps you now have, after some say, initial success in learning,
say German, you feel you might be able to go work in Germany.
So you're building on your success in the sort of initial and intermediate stage,
and you're adding additional obligations.
Or maybe you say, I'm gonna take a test.
I'm gonna take a test in Korean, or a test in Chinese.
And so you are prepared to put obligations on yourself to keep motivating
yourself to go forward in the language.
So obligation remains or can remain a strong trigger.
The next thing, of course, is success.
So as we're in the intermediate stage, we now have these eureka moments where
all of a sudden we understand this passage or we're watching a movie and
we understand the movie, or we were with people and we were able to say
more things, uh, than previously.
We kind of sensed some progress, and that feeling of success
can be a tremendous trigger.
In order to keep us motivated to learn the language.
Finally, again, the context is evolving.
Like initially the context was learner books and trying to get
enough words to sort of pick your way through, uh, the textbook.
But now in the intermediate stage, you're discovering
YouTube videos series on Netflix.
You may have started reading a book, so you're creating a language context,
which is motivating you to continue.
So, and finally, when we reach the sort of takeoff stage where we
feel we're airborne, so to speak, we have new triggers because the
curiosity trigger remains there.
The more we get into the language, the culture, meeting with
people, wanting to travel, there is no limit to our curiosity.
And so curiosity continues to be a very strong trigger of motivation.
Again, connections.
We make new friends.
We have people that we regularly have conversations with.
It might be a tutor, it might be a friend, it might be people
we met visiting the country.
But these connections only get stronger and the connections continue to
trigger our motivation in the language.
Next is this obligation, which at various stages of our learning can be a trigger,
even if at times, against our will.
And now as we get airborne, as I say, as we start to be more
comfortable in the language, we get a bit of a perfectionist urge.
And at least that has been my experience.
I recognize that there are shortcomings, there are grammatical
structures that I don't use correctly.
I wanna work harder on those.
Maybe that's where I get, um, uh, grammar book written in the target language and
focus in, again, in the target language on trying to refine my, uh, control
of the language as well as wanting to read more and more and listen more
and more to increase my vocabulary.
Uh, you know, on LingQ I talk about getting over 40...
it depends on the language, but over 40 or 50,000 known words.
I wanna push it.
Uh, in Russian, I'm at 90,000 known words in check.
Now granted, Slavic languages are very heavily inflected and we count every
form of the word as a new word on LingQ.
So I can't go bragging that I know all these words, but it is a motivator, this
attempt to try and push my vocabulary limit, uh, increase my accuracy in the
language we get that perfectionist urge.
Once we have the feeling that we're sort of airborne in the language.
Similarly, when it comes to the sense of success, we now find that
lo and behold, we don't have to translate everything from English.
There may still be moments when we're in our minds translating from, or
whatever your native language is, translating from your native language,
but increasingly, We're just speaking.
We understand, we respond.
We speak in the language, our thought processes, the
way we organize our thoughts.
Everything now is falling into place.
We are doing it in the way that language does it increasingly, and doing
that, that sense of success of being airborne in the language is in itself a
trigger and encourages us to continue.
And finally talking about context.
All of a sudden we're in a situation where the language triggers the language.
We are no longer, you know, looking for cues that, you know, help us understand.
Like someone says something in the language, what did he say?
We are responding to the language.
We have that context, that language context, so firmly in our, in our brain
that we are able to respond almost without thinking in the language.
So we are totally sort of embedded in the language context and that feeling
also is tremendously motivating.
So I hope you found this useful.
Uh, we need to be motivated.
There are different things that trigger our motivation at different
stages in our language learning.
But it's, it's very important to our success to be open to these triggers
in order to remain motivated and move along, ultimately to, uh, I guess people
typically wanna get to a B2 level or a, a comfortable fluency level in the language.
And I think everyone is capable of doing that as long as they remain motivated.
Thank you for listening.
Bye for now.
