ZPoIr_LFCsw.txt

Speaker 1:          00:00          Uh, no. Say, uh, Paul, uh, [inaudible] Burke, Cornell, uh, man, I've been studying Indonesian for six months and 17 days and I still can't introduce myself. What's going

Speaker 2:          00:16          and Andrea.

Speaker 1:          00:23          Hi Guys. This is Paul. Today I want to talk to you about one of the most important elements of learning a language of studying a language. And that is consistency. This is one of my mottos is consistency is king. If you read my blog or something you've ever talked to me about languages, you probably heard me say that slogan, that model, the consistency is king. Uh, the people who really get good at languages are the people who study consistently. They study every day come hell or high water. They don't find excuses to skip the studying. The people who don't really learn as much, the people who, Ooh, don't get that good that people would learn just a bit. Um, those are the people who just study whenever, right? I feel like it, the people who don't study consistently, they just study based on a whim. So I like to think about consistency in a couple of ways.

Speaker 1:          01:14          The first way is like this, um, your language ability is like a bucket with a small hole in the bottom, right? Uh, so the water, the liquid inside is your language ability and if you stopped studying, then there's a slow leak and your ability will slowly diminish if you don't talk about the bucket. But if you top up the bucket every day by studying, then you can maintain the level, uh, consistently. You can maintain a certain level or even raise the level of the liquid inside the bucket. But it's when you stop studying, when you're not consistent, then gradually day by day, each day a little bit of the liquid leaks out the bottom and the level diminishes. So that's like your language ability going down. So if you've ever studied a language for a couple months and then you took a few weeks off, like maybe you just lost motivation or whatever, then you came back to it.

Speaker 1:          02:05          You probably noticed if you probably felt that you had lost the majority of what you had learned. Right? Uh, so that's because you had that little bit of liquid in the bucket. And then it gradually mostly leaked out. There was probably some residue in there, a few drops, but you probably lost a lot of the meat of what you had learned. So, um, it's one, uh, one example. Uh, you, if you've ever been a couple of years into studying a language like a year or two, and then you took a few weeks off, you probably noticed that your level had diminished a bit. Probably it had gone down, but you probably didn't feel like you lost most of what you've learned because it's that gradual diminishment is that gradual lowering of the level. It's a slow leak. So the more of a beginner you are, uh, the more of your ability you will lose if you're not consistent.

Speaker 1:          02:54          Uh, but the way to always maintain your level and to keep increasing it is to be consistent and top up the bucket every day. So that's one way I like to think about your consistency of and studying. The other way I like to think about it is, uh, in terms of investing, when you invest money over time, uh, when you do it consistently, you can gain compound interest, right? Uh, that means that you make interest on the money that you invest, but then you make interest on the interest as well. Uh, this is similar to a phenomenon that I've noticed when studying consistently. When you study every day consistently and you don't take days off, you're learning kind of takes on a life of its own and you end up learning more than you would expect from the amount you're studying. Right? Um, that's partly because just your brain is learning, uh, in the off time when you're not studying, it's kind of processing things in the background all day.

Speaker 1:          03:53          Uh, but basically if you are consistent, then you can get your, your learning to sort of critical mass where it starts to take on a life of its own and you learn more than you would have if you had studied that same number of days. But with breaks in between. So it's really important to, um, to always keep investing on a daily basis, investing regularly so they could, you can get that compounding effect in your learning. Okay. So that's another way I like to think about it. So there's the, the bucket with a hole in the bottom, but then there's compounding interest. There's those two ways. So the most important point is study every day. Be Consistent. Also put in a certain amount of time everyday. Try to commit as much time to it as you can. But more important than that is to do it consistently every day.

Speaker 1:          04:38          How do you be consistent? That's the question that remains. A lot of people intend to be consistent, but they end up taking a lot of time, often being inconsistent. So those people usually are taking action based on how they feel at the moment. They wake up in the morning and they think, oh, I'm tired today. A screw it. I just want to study today. Uh, they're basing their actions on the feeling of that moment, which is something you can't really control. I mean, the way you feel depends on all sorts of different factors out of your control. It depends on maybe what you ate yesterday. It depends on the weather. It depends on how well you slept, depends on stress at work, all these things. Uh, so you can't really control it that easily unless you're always monitoring all those things really closely. So the way to, the way to take action should be based on your vision for your outcome, what you want to get out of learning that language.

Speaker 1:          05:35          And also based on just the commitment, a commitment to achieving that outcome, achieving that vision. So let's say you want to be a French English translator. That's your dream. So you have to have that vision in mind for the future, that goal, what will that look like? And then a commitment to work hard every day to achieve then, right? So then in that case, if you have that vision and commitment when you up in the morning and you're tired or you're hung over or whatever, then you will just tell yourself, okay, I don't feel like it today, but I have that vision. And the commitment. So I'm going to do it anyway because it's not based on the feeling. So that's how you, that's how you can be consistent is by doing that. All right. Don't let it be based on a feeling. A feeling is changing by the moment. It's out of your control. A base it on your vision and commitment. All right. Hope that's helpful. Thank you very much for listening and talk to you, right?

Speaker 3:          06:33          Yeah.