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Breaking The Language Learning Void: How to Refuel Your Motivation and Revive Your Dream of Learning a New Language in One Day
Are you learning a new language and are struggling ? You’ve made a lot of mistakes while learning, aren’t making the progress you want to make, and you’re starting to lose motivation? Or you haven’t even started yet, because you don’t know how.
First of all, everybody who learns a new language will reach that point at least once. To be honest, I was in that situation more than only once . I’ve made more mistakes than I can count.
That’s why I wrote Breaking The Language Learning Void . To prevent you from making these mistakes! And of course, to get you back on track if you’ve already made some of them! In this book I will show you the stuff that helped me find my motivation again, and what you have to do in order to never commit a beginner mistake again!
- Filip
First of all, everybody who learns a new language will reach that point at least once. To be honest, I was in that situation more than only once . I’ve made more mistakes than I can count.
That’s why I wrote Breaking The Language Learning Void . To prevent you from making these mistakes! And of course, to get you back on track if you’ve already made some of them! In this book I will show you the stuff that helped me find my motivation again, and what you have to do in order to never commit a beginner mistake again!
- Filip
62 pages, Kindle Edition
First published July 20, 2015
4 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
March 3, 2020
I would never give a fellow language learner one star. Sure, this book is more like a very long blog post (or series of) and most of it pretty much common sense but there are still people out there who need reminding and maybe they even learn a thing or two (I am one of those people. I really need to study grammar.) Also, kudos for writing book in a foreign language, that takes guts. I felt kinda sad when all the links to the author's blog were dead. I'm really interested where he is on his language journey (if he still is) and I would like to read about that. I really wanted to read that novel.
Good:
'You should not try to forge a perfect plan, like I did. This will lead to an inevitable fail.
Instead, you should just set a goal (Like, “I need to learn the past tense in [target language]”) and then you just start informing yourself. Read articles about past tense in your target language for example. '
'And don’t forget the meat. If you’re a vegan or vegetarian, then I respect your decision and I admire your willpower, but I still have to strongly advise you against it. Humans weren’t made to be vegans, we were always predators and we’ve always needed proteins from meat.'
"Never Compare Your Learning Pace to That of Others" (Absolutely)
'What I want you to do is to get a small notebook, or create an Excel sheet and start writing down what you’ve learned every day.' (I do that)
'I want you to look at the past few days. If you notice that you haven’t learned something new related to grammar since about 3-4 days ago, then set that as the goal for the next day, next to repeating learned stuff and doing some small exercises.' (That's my Achilles's heel - I almost never learn the grammar and it shows, I definitely have to change that, I think that was my take-out from this book.)
'The most stupid thing I did was trying to learn 100 new Kanji meanings per day.' - This is where I agree. I tried that with Chinese characters a long time ago and I don't think I succeeded, but in Japanese it's even harder because of different pronunciation (in Chinese there are sometimes different tones for the same character or different reading but it's rather rare and was never a problem for me.)
'Another thing I like doing is to use waiting times. I’m sure that you also have to wait for the train sometimes, or you have a doctor’s appointment and have to sit in the waiting room. Use that time to repeat some words.
Some thoughts:
Eating habits, sleep, exercise - yes. 'eating fruits instead of sweets' - green leafy veggies and nuts would be a much better choice.
'Yes, I did it out of impulse and because I hated waiting forever for just one manga chapter. I know, that’s a pretty stupid reason to start, but it got me motivated and I don’t regret it.' (it's not stupid, it's kinda the point)
'Hiragana and Katakana can be learned in a day' (Really? It took me more than a day. But I learned a bunch of words with every row.)
'You now know the two mountains, as I like to call them, of language learning: Vocabulary and grammar.' (how about adding listening and reading comprehension?)
Bad:
'So let’s get started with the first rule: No Naps!' (2-3 hours of sleep is not a nap! 10-20 minute nap is what you need)
'What you can do prior to sleeping is read a novel.' (I mean there are some novels that I absolutely can't put down, maybe he should have written is - pick a boring novel.)
'We saw some wild claims about how you can learn over 100 new words per day with this super awesome method... or how someone reached fluency within 2 months' (that is not a wild claim, 100 words a day is pretty common but depends on the language you are learning and your level of fluency of it; if you're just starting 100 words a day is out of question, with exception if the language you learning is close to your native language, but after 2-6 months (depends on the language) is what you really should - learn as many words as you possibly can, memrise and anki are great tools to do that, but of course there is no 'awesome method', although mnemonics might help.) Fluency in 2-3 month period is of course a crock of bullshit. No argument here. Having said that, I also must admit that Stuart Jay Raj is an exception to that. Check his book Cracking Thai Fundamentals: A Thai Operating System for Your Mind even if you are not learning Thai, you'll get a lot of good advice on learning languages and get a peek on how he does it.
"And to the people that claim they can learn 100 new words per day and still know them in a week" That is what spaced repition is for. Of course you'll forget them if you don't review them. But the most important thing to take words from context, and the more you like the source the better. I read the first sentence of Dictionar al religiilor by Mircea Eliade, and I still remember 3 words without even trying to memorize them (omul, apărut, puțin.) and this was my first day learning Romanian. I can agree if author means stupid lists of "the most common words" of course you'll forget those pretty quickly. And of course, you should read and listen a lot. That's how you can memorize 100 words or more. There is no 'secret' or 'amazing' method. Just common sense and a lot of work (again, mnemonics might help, let's say ねこ（猫 - a cat） sounds close to "neck" so if you can imaging somebody with a neck made of cat it would be easy to remember. Ok, maybe I should write my own book:) Without a doubt you have to take breaks and let those neurons grow and 25000 new words a year is out of question (not for Stuart Jay Raj of course:) He writes about Anki later on and the last chapter is also good.
'You’ll have an accent, but the more you practice the pronunciation, the weaker that accent will become.' Nope, You have to work on that. You just can't hear the sounds that are not in your native language ergo you can't say them. Just repeating don't work (even if you have a perfect pitch, you just don't hear those sounds, for example for Japanese and Koreans 'r' and 'l' is the same sound!)
"every Japanese character has its own writing order' (NO! There are rules to the order in which you writing them but they are universal, there are some exceptions to that, but EVERY Japanese character doesn't have it's own writing order'; maybe author didn't express his thoughts clearly, so I thought I have to point that out.
Good:
'You should not try to forge a perfect plan, like I did. This will lead to an inevitable fail.
Instead, you should just set a goal (Like, “I need to learn the past tense in [target language]”) and then you just start informing yourself. Read articles about past tense in your target language for example. '
'And don’t forget the meat. If you’re a vegan or vegetarian, then I respect your decision and I admire your willpower, but I still have to strongly advise you against it. Humans weren’t made to be vegans, we were always predators and we’ve always needed proteins from meat.'
"Never Compare Your Learning Pace to That of Others" (Absolutely)
'What I want you to do is to get a small notebook, or create an Excel sheet and start writing down what you’ve learned every day.' (I do that)
'I want you to look at the past few days. If you notice that you haven’t learned something new related to grammar since about 3-4 days ago, then set that as the goal for the next day, next to repeating learned stuff and doing some small exercises.' (That's my Achilles's heel - I almost never learn the grammar and it shows, I definitely have to change that, I think that was my take-out from this book.)
'The most stupid thing I did was trying to learn 100 new Kanji meanings per day.' - This is where I agree. I tried that with Chinese characters a long time ago and I don't think I succeeded, but in Japanese it's even harder because of different pronunciation (in Chinese there are sometimes different tones for the same character or different reading but it's rather rare and was never a problem for me.)
'Another thing I like doing is to use waiting times. I’m sure that you also have to wait for the train sometimes, or you have a doctor’s appointment and have to sit in the waiting room. Use that time to repeat some words.
Some thoughts:
Eating habits, sleep, exercise - yes. 'eating fruits instead of sweets' - green leafy veggies and nuts would be a much better choice.
'Yes, I did it out of impulse and because I hated waiting forever for just one manga chapter. I know, that’s a pretty stupid reason to start, but it got me motivated and I don’t regret it.' (it's not stupid, it's kinda the point)
'Hiragana and Katakana can be learned in a day' (Really? It took me more than a day. But I learned a bunch of words with every row.)
'You now know the two mountains, as I like to call them, of language learning: Vocabulary and grammar.' (how about adding listening and reading comprehension?)
Bad:
'So let’s get started with the first rule: No Naps!' (2-3 hours of sleep is not a nap! 10-20 minute nap is what you need)
'What you can do prior to sleeping is read a novel.' (I mean there are some novels that I absolutely can't put down, maybe he should have written is - pick a boring novel.)
'We saw some wild claims about how you can learn over 100 new words per day with this super awesome method... or how someone reached fluency within 2 months' (that is not a wild claim, 100 words a day is pretty common but depends on the language you are learning and your level of fluency of it; if you're just starting 100 words a day is out of question, with exception if the language you learning is close to your native language, but after 2-6 months (depends on the language) is what you really should - learn as many words as you possibly can, memrise and anki are great tools to do that, but of course there is no 'awesome method', although mnemonics might help.) Fluency in 2-3 month period is of course a crock of bullshit. No argument here. Having said that, I also must admit that Stuart Jay Raj is an exception to that. Check his book Cracking Thai Fundamentals: A Thai Operating System for Your Mind even if you are not learning Thai, you'll get a lot of good advice on learning languages and get a peek on how he does it.
"And to the people that claim they can learn 100 new words per day and still know them in a week" That is what spaced repition is for. Of course you'll forget them if you don't review them. But the most important thing to take words from context, and the more you like the source the better. I read the first sentence of Dictionar al religiilor by Mircea Eliade, and I still remember 3 words without even trying to memorize them (omul, apărut, puțin.) and this was my first day learning Romanian. I can agree if author means stupid lists of "the most common words" of course you'll forget those pretty quickly. And of course, you should read and listen a lot. That's how you can memorize 100 words or more. There is no 'secret' or 'amazing' method. Just common sense and a lot of work (again, mnemonics might help, let's say ねこ（猫 - a cat） sounds close to "neck" so if you can imaging somebody with a neck made of cat it would be easy to remember. Ok, maybe I should write my own book:) Without a doubt you have to take breaks and let those neurons grow and 25000 new words a year is out of question (not for Stuart Jay Raj of course:) He writes about Anki later on and the last chapter is also good.
'You’ll have an accent, but the more you practice the pronunciation, the weaker that accent will become.' Nope, You have to work on that. You just can't hear the sounds that are not in your native language ergo you can't say them. Just repeating don't work (even if you have a perfect pitch, you just don't hear those sounds, for example for Japanese and Koreans 'r' and 'l' is the same sound!)
"every Japanese character has its own writing order' (NO! There are rules to the order in which you writing them but they are universal, there are some exceptions to that, but EVERY Japanese character doesn't have it's own writing order'; maybe author didn't express his thoughts clearly, so I thought I have to point that out.
April 16, 2016
Good:
* There are some good suggestions in this book, e.g. set small daily goals.
Bad:
* Some downright bad or inappropriate advice, e.g. one should never take a nap, one should stop eating 3-4 hours before sleeping (what is this, a diet book?), etc.
* Some absurd claims, e.g. no one (except prodigies) can learn and memorise 100 words a day. Well I'm not a genius but I did it, although not over a long period of time. As if anticipating my reply, the author writes: "I'm sorry but you're either a genius or a complete liar. And to be honest, my bet is on liar...." What an awesome book.
* There are some good suggestions in this book, e.g. set small daily goals.
Bad:
* Some downright bad or inappropriate advice, e.g. one should never take a nap, one should stop eating 3-4 hours before sleeping (what is this, a diet book?), etc.
* Some absurd claims, e.g. no one (except prodigies) can learn and memorise 100 words a day. Well I'm not a genius but I did it, although not over a long period of time. As if anticipating my reply, the author writes: "I'm sorry but you're either a genius or a complete liar. And to be honest, my bet is on liar...." What an awesome book.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews