Routine Vs Exploration

Learning a new language or keeping rust away from a language we learned during our teens while fearing its slow vanishment with the years and years of complete practice absence,  are both a matter of worry for most people. We worry about how to start and we worry about how to keep up.

The concept of Routine Vs Exploration is a very interesting one. The idea behind it is that either repetition is key to succeed in learning new languages, or the excitement of discovering new things is.

Repetition is indeed quite efficient for that matter, because thanks to it, every task becomes natural, thus performing ends up to be automatic, which is something we all long to in order to get to that fluency level.

Exploration, on the other hand, helps our brain neurons stay fresh, excited and alive. And that helps the memory as well, because everything exciting is kept in the “hard to forget” drawer of our brain.

Both these approaches are crucial to language learning. But we need to pick a winner, don’t we?

Well, they both are! We need both notions to succeed in learning and a good balance of both is the solution.

We should always focus on keeping the learning materials interesting. That stimulus is the connection we require to make us want to know more and not get bored and give up.

Routine is yet another strong component in the language learning process that can only help us get to the way children learned their mother tongue. Repeating over and over again makes communication turn into a smooth, natural course.

So how do we match these two concepts? How do we make it happen in real life?

Keep it simple. Choose your own topics. Choose your own novels, short-stories, articles, movies, TV shows. Anything goes, as long as it is something you are interested in. And make sure to design a routine that you can keep up every day of the week. It doesn’t have to be a two or three hours of hardcore listening to a difficult theme or reading a medical report. Actually less is more when it comes to language learning sphere. Ten minutes could be all you need, who knows?

It might sound strict when you hear that you will need to do this particular task every single day, but once you try it, you won’t go back. The repetition becomes a natural and mechanical routine, just like brushing your teeth, making your coffee or checking your Facebook first thing you wake up every morning.

Next step is really up to you.