If habits are actions that we do easily, fluidly, all the time, without even needing to think about them, imagine how great it would be if we could make language learning a habit! No more forcing yourself to open that grammar book! No more groaning at the thought of going through that writing practice exercise! No more endless cycles of motivated bouts of intense study followed by barren patches of language-learning wasteland! We learn most effectively when study is an anxiety-free and smooth-flowing activity, and habits are those activities that we do most easily and automatically. So let’s harness the power of habits!
The problem is that it’s not easy to get into the mood that gives us the best chance of success with our second language study. How can we change this? Well, by learning about our habits, how they are formed, how to work with them so that they serve us best, rather than us serving them, and by cutting out the bad habits that put barriers between us and our learning goals! Just so we don’t have to launch a research career into Habit Formation and Manipulation 101, let’s look at the work of an expert in the area of habits, and try to apply his knowledge to the habits and processes that exist around our own language learning.
Atomic Habits is a book by James Clear about understanding and applying the human tendency to form habits and to live large parts of our lives through these habits. It explores how it’s not our conscious brain but our habits that control a lot of what we do regularly. In some ways, we act like robots following a programmed set of instructions. But that’s not to say that we cannot reprogram the machine! In fact, Clear looked at how best to do that – hack our habits so that we can put the things we most need to do on autopilot, even though they might be hard to do at first – like exercising, eating the right food, doing work tasks, meditating, washing the dishes, and so on. Clear thinks we can make a habit out of doing the things we know we should do, and do less of the things we know we shouldn’t do.
We carve out behavior grooves when we form new habits, and we find it easier to continue in these grooves than to exit them – when we build up momentum, it’s hard to change course. Atomic Habits tells us how to gain and maintain control of the type of grooves we carve out and where they lead us to over time. It focuses most heavily on areas of life related to health, daily activities and the workplace, and in this post I look at how Clear’s ideas can be applied to learning languages so that we can find it easier to learn more consistently and for longer, and to eventually reach mastery of the second language we want to speak.
Habits are in all the little things we do without thinking – how we stumble like zombies through our morning routine (wake up, go to the bathroom, shower, brush our teeth…) We do these things on autopilot, we don’t need to plan them, strategize about them, schedule them or weigh up their pros and cons. We just do them. Clear wanted to find out how these habits get established, and how we can manipulate the habit-making process to our advantage. He looked at how to increase the frequency of good habits, and how to do fewer of the things that do not benefit us. After all, people have bad habits too! Our many daily habits, both good and bad, combine to define who we are. Remember the famous quote from Steven Covey:
Sow a thought, reap an action. Sow an action, reap a habit.
Sow a habit, reap a character. Sow a character, reap a destiny.
It all starts with the mind! The way we think becomes our reality. Whether you believe you can, or you believe you can’t, you’re right! There are endless quotes that suggest that our thoughts form the foundation on which our reality is built. Clear subscribes to this view, and as the first step to mastery of our habits he encourages us to think of ourselves as the aspirational person we wish to become. Believe in a higher vision of yourself as you wish to be, visualize it clearly and regularly, and it will become more attainable.
To visualize your future second-language-fluent self, imagine yourself in a restaurant in Spain ordering food from the menu with confidence, without using pictures of the food! See yourself making friends with ease using Korean on your trip to Seoul. Visualize yourself acing the oral Portuguese exam at university. Whatever the goals you have for your language learning, spend some time becoming the person who has already achieved those goals in your own mind. This will give you a foundation of positivity, and a vision of the future that is unique to you that will provide the motivation you need to keep going when the going gets tough. Do this regularly, until the vision seems so real it’s as if you are that future person already, time just hasn’t caught up yet!
Clear identified 4 Laws of habit formation. I will look at each of them, and at how they can be applied to language learning.
Law 1: Make It Obvious
When you want to make a habit stick, you should write it down, and write it down often!
One way to express the habit you wish to form is by using this formula to make it explicit using this formula:
I will (activity) at (time) in (place).
For example, if I wanted to improve my relationships, getting in touch with friends and family more often might help. So I would write down a habit that would move me towards the goal of being more social. It might look something like this:
I will call or text a family member every day at 7pm at home.
I would read this habit goal daily, and push myself to do it as often as I can. After doing it regularly for a little while, the time of day will become a trigger for the action. Every day, at 7pm, I’ll start to naturally pull out my phone to see who I’ll call today. And if I don’t make a call, I’ll get a feeling that something is missing, that I’m forgetting something. A habit is being formed! To apply this to language learning, you could write something like:
I will read one chapter of my textbook from 4pm-6pm on Tuesdays in the library.
Every morning add this line to your list of goals for the day (another great habit to develop is writing out your daily goals every morning), keeping it fresh in your mind. This act will enhance the chances that you’ll actually do what you promise yourself you’re going to do. And once it becomes an entrenched habit, you won’t need to write it down any more. It will become as natural as brushing your teeth in the morning – just another thing that you normally do.
Another good idea is to make a weekly schedule that displays the times and learning activities that you will do each day, placed somewhere you can see it easily. You’ll be reminded of the tasks you need to do, and when you see your schedule you’ll be reminded of the motivation behind your desire to build the habit – your vision of yourself as a fluent speaker of the language!
When you want to form a new habit, a there’s another hack that Clear writes about in his book. He calls it habit stacking. Basically, it means hitching a new habit onto an already established one. Using the example of brushing your teeth, you could tag on the new habit of going over some new vocabulary from the previous day’s lesson. So the new habit would be:
I will practice 10 of yesterday’s new vocabulary items in my head while I brush my teeth every morning in the bathroom.
Congrats! You’ve just made learning new vocabulary as easy as brushing your teeth, and turned it into an activity that’s just as normal and regular!
Law 2: Make It Attractive
We tend to repeat actions that we find pleasurable. We are naturally inclined to do again and again those things that give us some kind of reward. This is very obvious from the way we use social media. We get a hit of dopamine from interactions on social platforms. Dopamine is the brain’s reward substance, released into the brain when we eat, exercise, get positive social feedback, snuggle, accomplish tasks and so on. It’s the body’s way of telling us: ‘This is good! Do it again!’
As an extension to habit stacking, and following this second law, we can tag a habit we need to do onto a habit we actually enjoy doing, simply by doing the difficult habit immediately after finishing the pleasurable one. In essence, we are hijacking the good feeling we naturally get from Habit A (which could be eating dinner – a daily habit most people enjoy) and tagging a tough Habit B onto it. So even if Habit B is not particularly pleasant, we can associate it with something pleasurable and watch as we become addicted to that difficult but necessary habit! Try making a habit promise to yourself:
I will call or text a family member every day after watching my favorite tv show at home.
The desired habit of calling family of friends is tagged onto the measurable habit of watching that tv show. Over time, it’s as if the two habits become one. Whenever you do one, you’ll tend to do the other too. For language learning, just substitute in a learning habit that you want to cultivate. An example might be:
I will do a listening exercise in French every day after watching my favorite tv show at home.
These first 2 laws from Clear’s book should help you to upgrade your language learning quite a lot! But there are 2 more laws you should know about, which I’ll explain in the next post. Meanwhile, give the suggestions from the first 2 laws a try and see what a difference they can make to your learning progress.
Good luck with your learning!