Changing Bad Habits Into Strengths
Dear lilioftheworld.com reader, here is Dimo, your co-editor. This is the first article of our new Active Life section. The section will present topics related to both: the physical and mental aspects of our lives. We hope that you will find lots of useful information and inspiration in our articles. Enjoy your read!
This very first read is based on my own experience and is dedicated to an example of bad habits transformation.
I usually apply very organized and consistent approach when chasing my goals. Still, as every mere mortal I also get distracted and happen to waste my time. I have always had two or three bad habits, which made it difficult for me to focus on what matters. I guess we all have them. That is why, I would like to share with you my story of changing bad habits and transforming them into strengths to help me learn foreign languages.
My background
I have been living and working in Bulgaria until I was 29 years old. Then I moved to Austria searching for new challenges. I had a very basic language knowledge in German back then. Further to this I have never been the brightest person when it comes to learning languages (I had a negative experience with French :).
I started a job, which was mainly in English, but I was the only person within the company who didn’t speak German. Therefore, I had a strong motivation to learn the language: firstly because I wanted to integrate into the team and secondly because I wanted to use the opportunity of living among native speakers. Two years later, even though my language skills were far from perfect, I was able to have an adequate conversation. Just so you can get a better idea about my level from purely educational perspective: I have got a B2 (Upper Intermediate) certificate and covered the C1 (Advanced) courses.
Shortly after I covered the B2 in German, I gained self-confidence and decided to chase an old dream of mine: learning Spanish. I started learning it with a Mobile App (Rosetta Stone, which I highly recommend), taking 1-2 hours about 3-4 days per week. So far I haven’t done a real Spanish course with a tutor, but 12 months since I started learning, I am able to have a basic conversation and I understand almost everything written or said.
My Bad Habits
Going back to changing bad habits and how I used them, when learning languages. Here is the full story of my top 3 bad habits:
1. Watching movies and TV shows.
I like watching a good movie or show. This is a distraction, which takes a lot of my free time. Sometimes during the weekend, I could watch a whole season of a show. It can be a massive waste of time. And despite acknowledging this, I still love to do it 🙂
I have always felt guilt of wasting my time after spending long hours in front of the TV. This changed only when I realized that I could forge a win-win and actually use TV to help me advance with my language skills. This is how I started watching all shows and movies in German. At the beginning I watched the movies with German dubbing and English subtitles. With the advancement of my classes, I have switched to German dubbing and German subtitles. Then I got to German dubbing only.
I have to be fair: during the first 6-9 months I understood little to nothing from what has been said. Funnily, this resulted into certain loss of motivation on my side. I was tempted to switch back to English and on single occasions did so. I am sure you all know this feeling when you have been trying something for a long time, but you don’t see a meaningful result. One might feel tempted to just quit and return back to normal habit. However, if you are convinced that this is the right thing to do, then you shouldn’t quit.
How was I sure that continuing was the right thing to do? The answer isn’t so simple. I knew that I was putting strong efforts into understanding the language. I read lots of articles, which said that your brain needs time to process new and complex data. The more complex the data, the more time needed. And there are not so many things as complex as a language. I have read about many people who have had hard initial time learning a language until a moment or a point, when suddenly, everything started clicking. That is why I decided to go on and gave a promise to myself that I won’t give up.
And my silver lining came. It was around the 12th month. I had a breakthrough and began understanding more and more in the months to follow. Not so long after that I went to the cinema, watched my favorite movies in German and actually understood them at least as good as in English 🙂
I know many of you love Netflix, Amazon or other similar services, so my advice to you is: use them to help you learning something new and start changing your bad habits!
My tip: put your focus on the TV shows, as there are more conversations, dialogues and phrases in comparison to movies 🙂
2. Spending long hours reading news and articles on the Internet.
I am a very big sports fan (football in particular, but also other popular sports) and read lots of sport news. I also spend long time reading economic and finance news (but this I wouldn’t consider a bad habit :).
Many times when I get some free minutes or when I want to get some break from work, I go and check the sports news. I do this when commuting and when at home. I know that the time I spend with it has limited to no added value when it comes to my life and career objectives. It is just some form of distraction from real world issues. The funny thing is that I have always realized it, but wasn’t very successful in fighting it :).
However, when learning Spanish, it came to my mind that this could be another win-win situation for me, if I make it part of my language learning experience. I decided that instead of limiting my sports reading, I will just do it in Spanish. So I started reading articles only in Spanish. In the beginning there were many words and phrases that I had to check to understand or I needed google translate for whole paragraphs. But with the building of my vocabulary and learning grammar, I started understanding more and more. Google translate was no longer needed!!!
Inevitably, we spend time going through Internet content (not necessarily sports one:). Therefore, what I describe could be a very good way to continue doing so, but at the same time forge a long term win, changing bad habits.
3. Social networks and media.
After the significant gains from the transformation of my first two habits, this one was easy.
I focused on content which is in German and Spanish. The social networks can add to what you learn with movies and articles. While the latter two are usually in a formal and literary language, the social media gives you the “contemporary” slang. This can be very useful to learn most commonly used phrases and expressions. Of course keep in mind that there can be also lots of phrases and expressions, that you shouldn’t actually take 🙂
So, don’t wait, start following your favorite topics in the language, which you want to learn!
Instead of Conclusion
I know many people who have similar bad habits. I also know many people who waste time with various other distractions.
Therefore, I hope that my experience will give you a good idea of transforming your weaknesses into strengths. This can be an inspiration not only for language learning, but also in many other fields. The wins over bad habits are all around us, waiting to grab them!
This topic is very interesting to me, so I will be happy to learn more about your thoughts and stories on changing bad habits. Let me know about your experiences and challenges: maybe I could help you find your way 🙂
Stay tuned for our next Active Life topics. Coming soon!
Yours,
Dimo
One Comment
Trifon S.
I am also a big fan of acquiring knowledge in foreign languages. My current challenge is to learn 3 languages at the same time: one from the Roman group (Italian), one from the German (Dutch) and one from the so-called “exotic” languages (Arabic).
The thing I have found to work the most for me when it comes to learning new languages is to go out of the comfort zone consistently (on a daily basis) and immerse yourself to the new languages. The easiest way to immerse is to be in the actual environment in which the languages is spoken (usually in the same country as the native speakers). But not all of us can do this, so what is the next best option? For me, another way to immerse yourself is to start “consuming” contents in that language (as you mentioned: TV, articles are great; children tales are also an option because the dictionary used in those is not complex).
But what really helped me a lot to immerse in the language was changing my default phone language to Italian.
Think about it: you are using your phone on a daily basis, so you are constantly part of dialog in Italian (even though it is a visual one). It is indeed uncomfortable to do so, but comfort zones are there to be expanded with uncharted territory.
I am a huge fan of the gamification concepts and am quite competitive, so for me personally Duolingo is currently the best app out there when it comes to having you keep the habbit to work on that language day-in, day-out. It helps quite a lot that they focus not just on vocabulary, but on grammar and pronounciation as well. I used it primarily for Italian and Dutch and am currently on a 140-day streak of using it – can take from 10 minutes to several hours a day – but it’s definitely that is quite addictive.
Now, about Arabic: It’s was great news that the Duolingo team recently released an Arabic course – something which quite a lot of users were waiting for. For me the biggest challenge in Arabic is wrapping my head around the alphabet (I am still not 100% done with understanding it). For this part I would suggest using Duolingo (which is entirely free app, by the way) in combination with another app (paid), called Drops (I am on a 60-day streak day).
In general, whatever you want to learn my advice is to do it EVERY SINGLE DAY and define clear goals.
It doesn’t really matter how fast you progress, as long as you progress.