While I sit here procrastinating about writing a post about procrastination, I often end up thinking about God. God is also a topic that is very important to me, for what exact reason I cannot say. I might suggest that because I find that all things in this life are somehow connected in a way more magical than has ever been explained, the insistence of the existence of God becomes all the more insulting to me. While it might not seem appropriate to discuss this kind of topic on a website that is seemingly related to a particular aspect of Japanese learning, it’s just me writing this stuff, and right now I cannot seem to write out motivational or language based posts.

(Please procrastinate here.)

OK, so let me try for a few seconds to get a grip on myself and type something worth reading… ah. Procrastination when it comes to Japanese language learning or the learning of any other language for that matter is to be expected. This of course goes way beyond the learning of language and into almost any field of work that requires you to work on “long-term” projects. Keeping up motivation is tough. So this post is my attempt to shed light on at least a few of the possible ways for you to keep yourself motivated while learning a new language.

The first thing that comes to me on methods for motivating yourself would have to be that there is no method, at least not for everybody. Everybody is different, everybody sees things slightly differently from one another. So the best answer that I could give you for motivating yourself would be “figure it out yourself!”. Haha, yeah but seriously. Do it yourself. I did.

You will need breaks, try not to feel like taking a break is a bad thing, it is a good thing and very probably (unless you are a robot) a necessary thing. You might need an hour or so, you might need a week. Take the time to reflect, and allow the reflection time to bring you motivation. Definitely breaking things down into bite-size chunks is a good way to manage things. Don’t just “learn a language” that is a bit of bite to say the least.

Maybe a good way to start would be memorizing a few of the phrases that you want to say in the language. This is more a technique for motivation as it is language learning advice btw. You will want to get away from phrase books after the first couple of days I would suggest. Use them for useful phrases and grammatical structure, to get a feel for the language and then move on. The sooner you are able to attack real language the better, but never feel afraid to switch between tough stuff and easy stuff when and whenever you feel like.

Mixing it up is a great idea to be sure, but don’t lose focus, if you have too many mini projects on the go at the same time it might be de-motivational, because you might feel that you are not making progress with any of them. This is something that I have encountered in the past and still fall into the trap of doing from time to time. I would say just try and focus on you want to achieve and build a few (not too many) goals to be working on. And don’t forget to take those well-deserved breaks and enjoy them too.

Just one last thing on motivation, procrastination and the loss of focus on a project such as learning a language; while consistency is the most effective way to achieve your language learning goals in as short a time as possible, worrying about maintaining consistency can be nastily de-motivational, so missing a day should be no big deal, you’ll just pick up and carry on from where you left matter how long of a break you took. It’s fine to do this.

KB.