ESL Study Tip: Daily Practice
Posted by: Mark Stoneman on: November 16, 2008
When learning a foreign language, it is important to practice daily or even more frequently than that. Many readers will say, “But I don’t have time for that!” Sure you do! Really. You just have to let go of the habit of doing a lot of homework and studying all in one long weekly session. Do many short sessions instead. If you only have two hours a week to devote to learning a new language, you could break part of that time up into shorter chunks. You could, for example, take one hour for a long study session. And then you could divide the other hour into four 15-minute sessions. That would give you a total of five sessions in a week. Add to that the class you are probably taking, and you are up to six sessions per week. That will give you the repetition you need to make new words, grammar, and habits of thought sink in. This little amount of time is not ideal. More studying is desirable, but it will bring you a better return on your investment than one long session per week.
Of course, once you get into the habit of these short study sessions, you will find that you can schedule more. What about the five or ten minutes you spend waiting for a bus or train? What about the time you spend on the train? What about when you’re walking? You can’t look at your books then, but you could look at flash cards with idioms, confusing words, or irregular verbs. You could also simply try thinking in the language you are learning. In this way, the two hours you spend learning the language will grow substantially without actually costing you extra time. And because you are studying frequently and regularly, your brain and mouth and ears will grow accustomed to the language more quickly.
And you know what? It can be fun. It takes your mind off your daily troubles and lets you accomplish something in a short period of time. Pretty soon you will notice that you can feel good about this activity, which gives you one more reason to feel good about yourself. These positive feelings will spark you to keep up and even expand this new study habit.
3 Responses to "ESL Study Tip: Daily Practice"
January 2, 2009 at 11:56 pm
That’s one of the tools I use to learn some of the subjects I deem as ‘challenging’.
Study stuff, small stuff, concerning those subjects, one tiny part a time, as you said, Flash cards and the like.
And it does help!
Its more or less based on the belief that ‘Saving up small pennies does amount to making a million.’
March 2, 2009 at 2:23 am
Interesting post indeed. I missed several of your earlier posts on English language. I am keen on perfecting my fluency and vocabulary of the rich English language., and I find your posts quite helpful. I am happy to say that with my limited English knowledge, I could successfully help a poor boy, a first-generation student to attain some working proficiency in English and he ultimately became a hardware engineer earning a handsome income now. My ambition is to impart English on a personal level to the needy as a service and not as a profession. I will be a regular visitor to your blog.
Please add me as your follower.
Gopal.G
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December 15, 2008 at 7:28 am
This is so true!
I love the part of thinking in another language, and I mostly do it with English, which is my favorite. But I remember that in my short period as a German student, while I was walking or riding on the bus, I always tried to think in German, or just try to name things that passed by. When I didn’t know something I used to go: “hey, I need to check this on my Wörterbuch!” (and most of the times I would actually DO it afterwards). Also, because thinking and naming things is actually something that has a meaning for you, I believe it can be far more productive than those drilling and terribly automatic exercises with which we spend so much of our time as foreign language students.
Finally, I also suggest reading newspapers or magazines in the target language. After all, we should always try to be on top of what is going on in the world. Since we have to do this reading anyway, we would kill two birds with one stone if we did it in the target language.
As Stoneman put it, we could be studying without feeling we are putting a lot of time in the process. Besides, using the language meaningfully could have better results than you think!