Hey reader,
You've probably seen them online, ultra optimised influencers, 5:30am wakeups, 2 hour workouts, all followed by 10 hours of productive work.
I wish I could be so disciplined, you might have thought. Discipline is good for language learning, so who wouldn’t want to be a more disciplined language learner?
First of all, those videos are probably mostly fake, but even if they weren’t, the good news is that don't need to get up at 5:30 to be a good language learner.
The other bit of good news is that discipline is more a collection of habits and tools than a personality trait, meaning you can develop it too.
Today I’d like to share one technique I use for building discipline: the minimum commitment.
Often, the biggest hurdle occurs right at the start. Once you have some momentum, continuing becomes relatively easy.
To combat the beginning hurdle, start with a minimum commitment. Tell yourself you only need to do 5 minutes.
After five minutes is up, you can then consider if you are doing fine and want to continue. You might be surprised by how easy it is to continue from there.
If you do end up only doing 5 minutes, you have still made progress. In fact, five minutes is far superior to losing the habit altogether. The imperfect routine done consistently is better than no routine at all!
Okay, enough lecturing, here’s a few things I found on the internet recently.
🌐Language learning
What are your go-to exercises?
A great library of YouTube content for many languages.
💻From around the web
Language guesser, a fun game where you have to guess the language from music videos.
What is the oldest language in the world?
In this video, someone used AI to change the class accent of two British men to see how accent impacts how you perceive them. What do you think? Did their accent make a different for you?
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