This post is not about making language mistakes. It’s about mistakes relating to your learning process as you learn a foreign language.
Making mistakes is fine, and it’s a necessary aspect of learning anything.
Within this and next several articles, let’s look at the most common mistakes language learners make and how to fix them.
Let’s a take a look at the first and most common language learning mistake:
Not setting goals
Many language learners just ‘learn’ a language. When you ask them what they’re learning at the moment, they’re likely to say ‘I’m learning Spanish’ or ‘I’m trying to improve my pronunciation’.
They’re not very specific goals so how will they know they’ve achieved them? When you don’t set yourself clear goals, you may get frustrated and disappointed very easily.
You will find it difficult to see your own progress and you risk picking learning activities at random. And random learning leads to random results!
How to fix it:
If you don’t know what you’re aiming for, you’re aiming too low. Having clear, SMART objectives will make your learning more focused and speed up your progress.
Make your goals specific, measurable, ambitious, realistic and time-bound (or S.M.A.R.T. for short, which does sound cheesy, and is exactly why it’ll help you remember it for longer). Each goal should relate to a specific skill or achievement that’s small enough for you to be able to meet with a reasonable amount of work.
For example, instead of saying ‘I want to speak French’, say ‘By the end of the month, I will have learned the 10 most common uses of the subjunctive in French’.
That way, you have a goal that’s not too overwhelming, and you can take specific actions to achieve it, such as look up examples of when the subjunctive can be used and examples of sentences containing it, and practise using it in speech or in writing.
