🪷 Happy New Year

I hope you’ve had time to rest and enjoy the close of 2024, and I hope you have a wonderful 2025.

🔑 The key to a language learning New Year’s resolution

Although I don’t think we should feel obliged to make strict, burdensome New Year’s resolutions, I do believe this is an ideal time of year to let ourselves try new things or let go of old habits.

If a regimented list or habit tracker format works best for you, then that’s great, go for it - but if you find a less intense approach more suitable, that’s grand too.

Personally, I prefer the more subtle approach, as I find it easier to adapt and thus sustain alongside the natural ebbs and flows of my schedule.

I find this especially relevant for language learning. For example, I usually try to be quite strict when setting New Year’s resolutions relating to food or exercise, but when it comes to learning, I find it helps with motivation if I accept from the outset that I won’t be able to repeat an identical learning habit each day.

This helps avoid the sinking feeling of ‘straying off course’, which can easily turn into a spiral of giving up on the process altogether. 

☕️ How to Learn Any Language

Before we look at how this subtle approach can be applied to language learning, it’s important to understand the fundamental elements required for learning any language. I call these :

• Passive learning: Immersing in authentic content that first-language speakers would watch, listen to, or read - and doing this as often as possible. Fortunately, the passive nature of immersion means you can attach this to things you already do, such as your commute, cooking, cleaning, or exercise.

• Active learning: Taking time out of your day to actively learn the language through learning whole phrases or sentences. I call this Sentence Collecting, but you might have come across other terms like 'chunking' or 'sentence mining'. They all boil down to more or less the same thing; learning whole phrases or sentences. This is much more effective than trying to learn individual words, as learning a phrase or sentence provides you with multiple words in one go, improves your understanding of the grammar contained within that phrase, and gives you phrases you can use in conversation with first-language speakers.

• Practice: This is simply having conversations with first-language speakers - be it through typed messages, audio messages, voice calls, or even in person if you happen to live in a country, region, or community where the language you’re learning is spoken. Practice is the most natural and authentic way of applying one of the most effective memory techniques: using or applying what you've learnt.

If you'd like to learn more about these fundamental principles of language learning, check out How to Learn Any Language: Free 40 minute Video + eBook. They’re the principles that provide the foundation for how I learn languages, including Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Mandarin Chinese, and Vietnamese.

🪴 The Subtle Approach to New Year’s Resolutions and Language Learning

When learning a language, the subtle approach to New Year’s resolutions will take forms unique to you and your daily life, but as an overview, it looks something like this :

Good days (when you have as much spare time as you could ever realistically hope for)

• ☕️ Spending time passively learning the language

• ☕️ Spending time actively learning the language

• ☕️ Spending time practicing the language

Ok days (when you have some spare time, but less than ideal)

• ☕️ Spending time passively learning the language

• ☕️ Spending time actively learning the language (but less / much less than on a good day)

• ☕️ Spending time practicing the language

Very busy days (when you have very little spare time)

• ☕️ Spending time passively learning the language

• Spending time actively learning the language

• ☕️ Spending time practicing the language

Those days (when you have no spare time)

• ☕️ Spending time passively learning the language

• Spending time actively learning the language

• Spending time practicing the language

🇨🇳 Example : Preparing for HSK 6 (Mandarin Chinese Exam)

I’ve followed the above approach to learning languages for more than six years, and I’ll be using it again as I prepare for the HSK 6 exam this spring / summer.

Good days (when I have as much spare time as I could ever realistically hope for)

• ☕️ Spending time passively learning the language (watching series like 大唐狄公案 (Judge Dee’s Mystery), news reports, documentaries, vlogs, listening to podcasts, etc.)

• ☕️ Spending time actively learning the language (completing one unit of the Standard HSK Course Textbook and the corresponding practice exam questions for that unit)

• ☕️ Spending time practicing the language (chatting with Chinese speakers via typed / audio message / voice call if possible or at the very least recording a daily diary where I respond to questions or comment on the content of that day’s HSK unit or some of the content I’ve immersed in that day or just general reflections on my day)

Ok days (when I have some spare time, but less than ideal)

• ☕️ Spending time passively learning the language (watching series like 大唐狄公案 (Judge Dee’s Mystery), news reports, documentaries, vlogs, listening to podcasts, etc.)

• ☕️ Spending time actively learning the language (but less / much less than on a good day) (briefly reviewing content from previous HSK units)

• ☕️ Spending time practicing the language (recording a very short diary)

Very busy days (when I have very little spare time)

• ☕️ Spending time passively learning the language (if I don’t have much time, perhaps I’ll immerse less than usual, for example by only listening to a podcast whilst going for a walk that day and watching a quick news report in the morning or evening)

• Spending time actively learning the language

• ☕️ Spending time practicing the language (recording a very short diary)

Those days (when I have no spare time)

• ☕️ Spending time passively learning the language (I’ll immerse a lot less than usual, for example by just watching a quick news report in the morning or evening)

• Spending time actively learning the language

• Spending time practicing the language

🪷 Preparing for HSK 6 Without Pressure

I never study a language for the sake of taking an exam.

On the rare occasion I do take a language exam (such as for Vietnamese last year), it’s because it happens to be a good idea for work or study opportunities at that time - but it’s never the reason I start learning a language.

In the case of HSK 6, there’s two reasons I’ve decided to sit the exam this year.

The first, is that achieving HSK 6 certification (even though the HSK levels are in the process of being updated) is useful for work and study opportunities.

Learning Mandarin Chinese can be useful for work opportunities for someone based in just about any country in the world these days, and this is certainly the case for Việt Nam - a country that shares a border with China.

Learning Chinese also allows me to study Vietnamese history from the late first millennium BCE to the late first millennium CE, as for much of this period parts of northern and north central Việt Nam were under the political rule of Chinese dynasties, and so an ability to read Classical Chinese is essential for studying many of the written documents available for the period.

From the tenth century CE, an altered form of Chinese characters designed to reflect Vietnamese pronunciation began to emerge alongside the continued use of Chinese characters for legal documents and education. This form of Chinese characters is known in Vietnamese as chữ Nôm, and became particularly prominent in Vietnamese literature from the fourteenth to eighteenth century. An ability to read Classical Chinese is therefore crucial for learning to read chữ Nôm.

The second - and most important with regard to deciding to take an exam - is that I felt that using the commitment of an exam would finally give me the impetus to prioritise improving my Chinese.

Before now, I’ve always wanted to keep improving my Chinese, but due to work commitments and living in Việt Nam, it’s never been the priority.

As a result, I’d end up wasting time trying to improve my Chinese here and there as something squeezed in around my priorities, but it was never enough to sustain any strides I made. I usually found my level would go up and down, without being able to build on any recent progress.

So this year, I decided to set the target of taking the HSK 6 exam, and use both this commitment and the formulaic unit structure of the HSK textbook to keep chipping away until I’m ready for the exam.

Using the goal of sitting the HSK 6 exam therefore made sense for me at this time, but I won’t let it become a burden. I see it as a strategy or tool for improving my Chinese that made sense in light of my current situation and schedule, but nothing more.

Sure, it would be nice to have an HSK 6 certificate, and I intend to work as hard as I can to achieve it, but not at the expense of it becoming a burden.

To ensure it remains a useful tool rather than an unnecessary pressure, I’ll have to keep two key things in mind :

• Follow the flexible approach outlined above

• Don’t set a rigid deadline for sitting the exam (if I’ve had time to work through all the HSK 6 units by spring, that’s grand, but if it ends up being summer, that’s fine too)

This way, I should be able to harness the benefits of preparing for the exam whilst making sure it doesn’t become a burden. Put another way, my real goal is to improve my Chinese, not sitting the HSK 6 exam.

 🪴 Enjoy Learning Languages

Although the above example covers preparing for a language exam, this isn’t my motivation for learning languages.

I learn languages because I love learning about the world and meeting people.

I also enjoy the process itself, and this is largely down to the flexible approach outlined above.

Whether you’re learning Spanish, Vietnamese, Swahili, Italian, Korean, Arabic, Nahuatl, or German, you’ll enjoy the process so much more if you adapt and align this process to your life and your goals instead of to an inflexible notion of New Year’s resolutions.

By all means use the fresh start provided by a new year to give yourself the impetus to achieve your goals, but don’t let a rigid conception of ‘habit tracking’ define that process.

For example, instead of having a resolution like ‘learn ten Spanish phrases every day’, have one that’s simply ‘learn Spanish every day’ - so that you can continue your resolution by adapting your Spanish learning to whatever life sends your way.

One of the great things about learning a language is that there’s always more to learn, and this only enhances the importance of viewing it as a process that should ebb and flow in harmony with the ebbs and flows of your life.

Of course, when preparing for an exam we have to have specific goals in mind, but beyond that, you should allow your goals to be as flexible as feels right for you.

For example, there’s nothing wrong with having the simple goal of learning a language for the sheer sake of enjoying the process. Indeed, it’s arguably one of the best reasons to learn a language.

☕️ How to Learn Languages

Whether you’re looking for resources for learning a language or you’d like help with the entire learning process, How to Learn Languages has you covered.

If you want to save hours looking for resources, then Resources for Learning Languages are eBooks with links to all the online resources you could need for learning a specific language (at the time of writing, there are eBooks covering Spanish, Vietnamese, Mandarin Chinese, Italian, Portuguese, German, French, Catalan, and Russian).

If you’d like support for the whole learning process, then I’d recommend the How to Learn Languages Guides.

These are eBooks in which I guide you through the whole process of learning a specific language - and you also receive all the links to resources covered by the Resources for Learning Languages eBooks, and I even cover a short history of the language you’re learning so that you can deepen your understanding.

Each eBook also comes with a Welcome Video covering how to get the most out of the guide, as well as a Checklist PDF to help you keep track of your progress.

At the time of writing, there are eBooks covering Spanish, Vietnamese, Mandarin Chinese, Italian, Portuguese, German, French, Catalan, and Russian.

I’d also recommend checking out the How to Learn Languages Blog, where you can find lots of useful articles about language learning and film suggestions covering a wide range of languages. There’s also the Get to Know area, where you can learn more about languages less frequently covered online.

For a more detailed overview, I’d recommend watching the Welcome Video on the Home page, where I guide you through all the support and resources available on the website.

As ever, if you have any questions then please feel free to reply to email me at contact@howtolearnlanguages.info. I’d be more than happy to help.

Have a wonderful year 🪴

Warmly,

Sean