The Blueprint to Spanish Fluency (Part 3) - Stay the Course!
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Contents
The magic of habits
Tip #1 - Use “Dead Time” to your advantage
Tip #2 - Keeping the streak alive
Tip #3 - Keep it simple
Tip #4 - Track your progress
In the previous two posts in this Spanish Fluency series we talked about the power of reading and listening. About how you can use these two tools to improve your Spanish in the most effective way.
However.
None of these tools are of any use if we don’t find a way to do them in our daily busy lives. To succeed we need to be able stay the course and not quit!
The magic of habits
The actual language learning activities needed for us to improve aren’t complicated. The challenge often lies in getting it done.
This is without a doubt the number one reason I’ve seen people fail. People learn as long as they feel motivated. Then eventually fall off the wagon and stop. Showing up every day is the best predictor of success in language learning (or any skill for that matter).
If you just continue, you’ll get there.
There are a couple of methods that I have developed the past several years that has let me and the people I help have a high level of consistency in learning languages.
Consistency is crucial because it ensures continuous progress . Which leads to motivation. Which makes you want to do even more of it.
It can be summed up in one word.
Habits.
Habits drives your progress forward more than your efforts, goals or motivation could ever dream of doing (I also talk about this in my post How to Find Time to Learn a Language When You’re Busy).
Making the choice to learn Spanish every day consumes energy. We only have the capacity to make a certain amount of decisions each day. Habits removes having to make that choice. It saves you energy.
Habits also remove having to rely on the fleeting feelings of motivation and willpower. They build up consistency.
Consistency makes learning Spanish a natural part of your day. With time it becomes a natural part of your identity (which is a big key!) and something you do without even thinking.
Here are 4 of my best tips for staying on track consistently on your journey to fluency.
They will help you both on a practical, but also on an emotional and mental level.
Tip #1 - Use “Dead Time” to your advantage
This is a method I’ve been using for many years now. It works amazingly well. Especially when you’re busy and have to be smart with your time.
If we start looking at our days, our schedules, routines and we think a bit creatively we start finding these “pockets of time”. I call these pockets “Dead Time”.
What is “Dead Time”?
Dead time refers to the time that you have in your day that would otherwise be wasted.
These small windows of time can be used to learn Spanish. Without having to add any learning time to your schedule. It’s extra time that is just sitting there for you to use. Time that you might not have realized that you actually had to learn a language.
This was something I noticed particularly powerfully when I started learning Spanish. I needed to find “extra” time, while also keeping up my Cantonese and Finnish.
I think we actually underestimate the power of this. Doing something for 5 minutes doesn’t feel like a whole lot. But 5 mins spread out over 6 different times a day is 30 mins.
If you spend that time doing something like reading then that’s a good amount! Totally enough to see tangible progress. Especially when you stretch it out over weeks and months.
What are examples of “Dead Time”?
It can be sitting on the bus, queuing at the post office, using the bathroom, waiting for your friend to arrive at the coffee shop or your lunch appointment. Literally ANY time when you are more or less just waiting.
In these moments, I like to open up my LingQ app and just read a few sentences. The app saves where I left off last time. This makes it easy to use sporadically throughout the day without losing my place in the book I’m reading.
With listening, this is even easier. Since listening doesn’t require you to use our eyes. Only your ears. You can listen while doing housework, dishes, walking and driving between places, working out etc.
Dead time let’s you use your own unique schedule to your advantage. Rather than having to change it to be able to learn Spanish.
It makes it easy to get the learning done.
If you’d like a simple way to find these pockets of time in your schedule then download my free “Dead Time Tracker” below which will help you do that:
Tip #2 - Keeping the streak alive
This is honestly one of the most powerful habits to bring you to your goal of fluency.
This particular hack will lock in your consistency. It will boost your motivation significantly.
What is this hack?
Keeping a daily streak.
Keeping an unbroken chain of a daily actions does something to us on a mental and emotional level. For every day that the streak continues you’re telling yourself: “this is what I do. This is who I am.”
It’s about the person you’re becoming.
Learning Spanish is not just about learning a new language, but really about becoming a new person, or an updated version of yourself if you will. You’re adding a new language, skill, culture, way of thinking, and even unlocking a new side of your personality (which is one of the most exciting parts!).
This is something that takes time. Continuous action every day will reinforce this new identity.
James Clear said it well:
“Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.”
Keeping the streak alive keeps you walking in the direction of becoming a Spanish speaker.
It also boosts motivation. You start to feel proud of yourself that you’ve taken action every day. It’s much easier to continue a streak than it is to start a new one after having taken a break.
The streak should not be a high goal. It’s there to make sure you do something in the language every day.
I have my LingQ app set to “50 coins”, which is just a way to track my reading. For every word that I read and every “LingQ” that I create (new words) the coins add up. Once I hit 50 the app tells me and adds another day to my streak (which currently is at 290 days).
This literally takes me less than 5 mins to do.
Once the habit is established it’s much easier to add more time. Because the hardest thing is to get started every day. Once you do you typically want to do more.
Tip #3 - Keep it simple
It’s important to mix things up from time to time. Just to keep things interesting.
But it’s even more important to choose something and stick with it. It takes away the guess work about what to do every day.
The reason I use LingQ (sign up through this link to get the best discount that I have found) as my main resource is for two main reasons:
It works really effectively
It makes language learning fun
But there’s another not so obvious reason:
It makes learning Spanish simple and clear
By having one main resource I don’t have to be thinking: “should I use this or that?”.
Keeping myself confined to the world of LingQ brings me a lot of freedom.
We tend to skip doing things for lack of clarity. Having too many options (and Spanish has a lot to choose from). We don’t really flourish with 100% freedom. But rather when restricting ourselves within certain boundaries.
As contradictory as it sounds, restricting yourself actually brings more freedom.
If you’ve started reading a book, then focus on reading that book. Read it until it’s finished.
You might feel at some point that “ooh I would love to also read this book”. Make that a reward for you. You get to start that book when you’re finished with the one you’re currently reading.
If you’re not enjoying what you’re reading then move on to something different. But once you find something you like - stick with it.
Sure, you can mix it up here and there, but have one main thing that you focus on.
We get more out of narrowing our focus rather than diversifying.
Like I mentioned earlier it takes energy to make choices. The more you can remove those and keep it simple and clear, the more you’re likely to stay consistent.
Tip #4 - Track your progress
After the beginning stages it gets more and more difficult to feel you’re actually progressing.
The quick gains of when you started is a thing of the past. It can sometimes feel like you’re not progressing at all. Even when you are.
Keeping track of your progress will you help you with this feeling.
LingQ and platforms like Dreaming Spanish (that we’ve already talked about in the first and second posts in this series) do this. They not only tell you when you’ve hit your daily goal. But also how much time you’ve spent and how many words you have learned.
For listening (which I showed you how to do in The Blueprint to Spanish Fluency (Part 2) - Listening) - I use Dreaming Spanish.
I like how it looks and how easy it is to input the time from my phone or computer. It needs to be easy so I’ll actually do it.
Seeing the bar fill up when you watch videos, listen to podcasts or audiobooks, watch TV is very motivating.
Seeing when you’ve hit your daily goal is helpful as it’s shows you clearly when you’re done.
It feels nice.
It will also show how much time you have spent with the language over time.
My minimum daily goal is to just listen or watch something in Spanish. This I can accomplish every single day. Without fail.
Then I have a “stretch goal” that I that I can hit 95% of the time (30 mins). This is so I see progress at a good rate.
Having a listening goal will help you stay on track and keeps the momentum going. Because none of us are going to feel like it every day. It gives you that extra push to get it done matter what.
It also makes it clear so you know when you’ve actually hit that goal.
Because like we talked about earlier, things tend to fall apart when they’re not clear enough.
LingQ also tracks how much you have listened to automatically. Just like Dreaming Spanish you can also input the time spent listening through other sources.
I just prefer to track listening with Dreaming Spanish. It’s easy and has a few more visual features than LingQ. It just looks great to me.
However, I prefer use LingQ to track my reading. It’s the best app that I know of to do that.
LingQ tracks how many words I know, how many words I have read that day, the last week, in total since I started, and so on.
It gives me a sense of how far I’ve come and how far I have to go.
It’s a lot of fun to follow the progress over time.
Being frustrated for the wrong reasons
Many people get frustrated with their current level and think they “suck”. But the real reason isn’t that they’re not talented, but just that they haven’t spent enough time yet.
You might be feeling frustrated with your Spanish progress. Only to realize you haven’t gotten as much listening or reading in as you thought.
Keeping track of your time spent will keep things honest and realistic. It makes something as ambiguous as learning a language concrete.
You will know if you’re going at a good rate, or if you need to increase the time you spend with the language. Once you’re going at a good daily rate it’s just a matter of letting time do it’s magic over weeks and months.
Progress is simply the result of the time you spend with the language. It has really very little to do with your efforts.
Pablo from Dreaming Spanish says:
“Count hours, not months or years”.
- Pablo Román
Who is going to speak a language better? The one who spent 1 hour a year for 10 years? Or the one who spent 100 hours in 1 year?
It’s quite a silly example, but it shows that months or years really mean nothing when it comes to learning a language. What happened during those months or years is what matters.
Focusing on the TIME (which we can control), rather than how much you’re progressing (which we can’t control) will remove a lot of frustration for you.
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In the next post we’re going to talk about how to increase the fun of learning Spanish. Doing this you will lose track of time and forget you’re actually learning a language!
It’s going to make spending the time needed to really progress in Spanish a no-brainer.
Let me know what part of this post you found the most helpful. Comment below!
