Category: Motivation
The Wonder of Critical Frequency »
By Peter on Jan 7, 2011 in Motivation | 8 Comments
About two weeks ago, in an effort to increase my Esperanto vocabulary, I signed up for lernu.net’s Vorto de la Tago (Word of the Day) service, which sends a daily email with, you guessed it, the word of the day. These emails are great for SRS because they include quite a few example sentences. The […]
Learning a language is like having a pet »
By thomas on May 21, 2009 in Motivation | 12 Comments
Learning a language is like having a pet. You need to feed and water it everyday. You can’t miss days. Many people who try to learn a language do really well at first. They are really motivated. They daydream about being a master of their target language and it gives them all this purpose and […]
L2 Holy Grail Books »
By thomas on May 20, 2009 in Motivation | 10 Comments
My Japanese teacher back in college spoke perfect English. I wanted to speak perfect Japanese someday, so talking with her was always motivating to me. One time I asked her if she could remember what got her interested in English in the first place. She said yes, she remembers the very day it happened. She […]
Recovering from a period of demotivation »
By Peter on Oct 24, 2008 in Motivation | 6 Comments
I need to make a confession. Over the past month or two, I’ve not been studying Spanish or any other language as I should. I found myself neglecting my SRS for up to a couple of weeks at a time. I was not studying any new material. I was not playing My Spanish Coach on […]
What A Forest Monk Can Teach You About Language Learning »
By thomas on Oct 19, 2007 in Motivation | 4 Comments
Recently Khatzumoto over at All Japanese All The Time wrote a great article comparing language learning to boiling water. Khatzumoto’s metaphor reminded me a lot of one used by my favorite Thai forest monk Ajahn Chah. He said: Nothing happens immediately, so in the beginning we can’t see any results from our practice. This is […]
