Stories to help you write your story
Learning without thought is labour lost; thought without learning is perilous. Confucious ⏱ Reading time: 2 minutes How can keeping a journal help you learn a language? For one thing, it helps you understand yourself better. Your mind is your primary language learning tool, so keeping tabs on it is important. Writing in a journal involves reflection, which is critical …
Don’t aim for perfection. Aim for ‘better than yesterday’. Izey Victoria Odiase ⏱ Reading time: 3-5 minutes. In an ideal world, we could travel to a foreign country and communicate with the natives effortlessly and flawlessly–no grammar mistakes, no contextual misunderstandings. However, we all know that such a world doesn’t exist, and as the saying goes: nobody’s perfect. The real …
Comparison is the thief of joy. Theordore Roosevelt ⏱ Reading time: 3 minutes Comparison is a dangerous poison to the language learner–but it’s one that we’ve all gotten ourselves sick on. Comparing our language ability to others’ can be enticing for lots of reasons. One of the most compelling reasons for us to compare ourselves with others is because we …
Making Peace With Our Mind, Our Most Important Tool “We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world.” Buddha ⏱ Reading time: 4 minutes One of our most powerful tools in learning a language is being self-aware. When we talk about self-awareness and language learning, we’re talking about: Stay …
Recognizing and Staying On Top of Stress As a Language Learner “Rest when you’re weary. Refresh and renew yourself, your body, your mind, your spirit. Then get back to work.” Ralph Marston ⏱ Reading time: 2 minutes How do you know that you’re stressed? Sometimes, it’s easy: you feel anxious and overwhelmed. Other times, it’s less simple to recognize. Stress …
Avoidance: One of the Biggest Pitfalls in Language Learning and How to Overcome It ⏱ Reading time: 2 minutes Have you ever heard of the fight or flight response? Chances are, you have. But we’ll explain it a little bit anyway: when faced with a threat, your natural instincts give you two options–fight or flight. Fight means you face it …
Flipping the Script on Stress in Language Learning Your living is determined not so much by what life brings to you as by the attitude you bring to life; not so much by what happens to you as by the way your mind looks at what happens. Khalil Gibran ⏱ Reading time: 3 minutes Stress can help us! Believe it …
Proven Strategies to Beat Stress in Language Learning Between stimulus and response, there is a space where we choose our response. Stephen Covey ⏱ Reading time: 2 minutes Learning how to effectively cope with stress can help you stay in control of your language learning. Think about it—what gets in your way the most? You might first think, “This language …
Why Stress in Language Learning is Nothing to Be Stressed About Emotional discomfort, when accepted, rises, crests, and falls in a series of waves. Each wave washes parts of us away and deposits treasures we never imagined. Martha Beck ⏱ Reading time: 2 minutes Everyone experiences stress! Yet somehow, we are still surprised and even a bit ashamed when we …