The 3-part routine that helped me learn 20+ languages

[0:00]I don't have time for language learning. I hear that all the time. People tell me, you know, I would love to learn Spanish or some other language, but I just don't have time. So I want to share with you my experience, because I have been learning languages, sort of not in a language school for most of the last 60 years. And I want to share my routine and why I think it works and why recent things that I've discovered about how the brain learns, confirms to me that this is the best way to organize your day. How do you organize your day to find the time to effectively learn languages while doing other things like working for example. Now, right now I'm retired, so I have no obligation to work. However, most of my language learning of the last 60 years has been while I have been working at other jobs. So, I like to divide the day into three sort of compartments. Corresponding to different things happening during the day and the sort of receptivity of the brain to receive different kinds of language inputs. In the morning, my brain is freshest. And therefore in the morning I listen, it's also the easiest thing to do. My brain isn't bothered by things that I don't understand or things that are fuzzy. I'm quite prepared to bathe my brain in audio input of things that might be very difficult and maybe I'm only picking up a word or a phrase here or there, but it's okay, it's all good. I'm enjoying it. And, depending on where I was at certain times in my career, I might be jogging before breakfast. Or now I will be preparing breakfast before my wife gets up, or I will clean up after breakfast. Uh, all of these things are things that I can do while listening to the language. Similarly, in an earlier stage in my career, I would be driving to work or taking public transit to work, which is also an opportunity to listen. So, the morning time is when our brains are freshest, most receptive to uncertainty, which is a big part of language learning. And most receptive to getting that exposure to the language and then anticipating when we're going to be able to re-engage with that same content later on reading or using link to look up words and so forth and so on. So that morning period is very important in my language learning, and I've always felt we should get in 60 to 90 minutes a day, so you can get in the first 30, 40 minutes of that in the morning. While the brain is fresh, primarily through listening, that gets you well on your way. I'll move to the final stage in the day before touching on the middle stage. Now, apparently, and I didn't realize this until recently, if we learn something or review something before going to bed, that that sleep is very important for reinforcing, soaking in whatever it is that we're learning just before we go to bed. But on the other hand, we are more tired in the evening, so we are less willing to engage with things that are difficult or uncertain or things that we don't understand that well. So the evening is a better time to be using perhaps, you know, less demanding content or reviewing vocabulary or reading and slowly going through looking up words without worrying about how much material you are covering. Whereas in the morning with a fresh brain and a lot of listening, we can be moving forward in the language, leaving a lot of it poorly understood, it doesn't matter. So, in the evening typically, I will go through something that I listened to in the morning, saving words and phrases, and depending on how tired I am, I will either go, you know, page mode, call it, covering a lot of material, or I will take it easy, go through sentence mode, maybe review the matching pairs, the words, reconstitute the sentence. So I'm spending more time with the content itself, trying to sock it in there before I go to bed in the hope that it'll be more likely to stay with me. So in the morning, lots of listening, the brain is fresh, willing to take on more demanding material, in the evening, more review, easier content, but still taking advantage of the fact that if you take that to bed with you, it's going to at some level start to stick in your brain. Now the third period of language learning is whatever else you can get in during the day. So it might be you're waiting somewhere or you're driving to something or you're in trans, you know, transit to somewhere else. Anything you can add is just extra. Another thing I would say on the idea that apparently, whatever you learn or review before going to bed is going to be, you know, reinforced during sleep, if you have an opportunity to get together with people and speak the language you're learning, let's say over dinner or whatever, at night, that's gonna be with you while you sleep. So that's very, very powerful, apparently. Similarly, if you watch a video, because you're too tired to go through looking up words and so forth, reading, but you can watch a video in your target language and you may not understand everything you hear and maybe you're relying to some extent on the subtitles, but all of that is patterns in the language that you're going to take into your sleep and it'll be more likely to be reinforced, apparently. The other thing too is that if you know you're going to be using the language at night because you're getting together with people to speak the language or you're gonna watch a video or even anticipating that you're going to be reading and looking up words of some content item that you listened to in the morning and didn't fully understand. All of that anticipation, looking forward is very powerful. We learn better when we're looking forward, we have that anticipation, that anticipated dopamine, you know, feeling good about something that's about to happen to us. Uh, it helps us focus. So that whole pattern of doing things in the morning that trigger your curiosity, trigger some level of anticipation and then consolidating all of that in the evening before going to bed. I think it's a very uh useful, purposeful way to organize your day. And as long as you are motivated and can maintain that positive mindset, I think you will be able to find 60 minutes, 90 minutes, perhaps not every day, but many days to work in your language learning so you won't be able to say, I can't learn languages because I don't have the time. In my experience, if you are motivated to do it, you will find the time and so I offer that as a way of organizing your day, that I hope you find useful. Thank you for listening.