🍿 I'll tell you.
Last fall, I decided I needed to take the IELTS. I took a leap, so to speak. I immediately came up with another challenge for myself: study every day - record the process - post it on Threads. You can see, I'm still doing it to this day.
For the first three months, I thought studying for half an hour a day was my limit. Two jobs, a bunch of tasks, and I barely had time to work on English at night. And guess what? Now I'm studying for 2-3 hours every day. At the same time, the workload at my jobs hasn't decreased, but has only increased.
🤦♀️ This is the first paradox. Now for the second, more interesting one.
For many years, I've been absolutely sure that I have a hard time memorizing words. Names, titles, abbreviations - I don't even try to remember them, it's useless. Of actors, I only know Tom Cruise by name. The rest are content with, "well, that British woman who fought aliens with him" (who remembers, by the way?)
😭 To introduce one word into speech, I need to compose a hundred sentences, study its entire biography, get to know its relatives up to the 7th generation, its friends and opponents. Then go back and dance with all this crowd according to the principles of the spaced repetition system🤯 It took hours to say one word.
And just a couple of weeks ago, I noticed that working with words has accelerated. A few sentences, clarifying the peculiarities of use - and voilà! I'm already saying it in the next voice message, conjugating it this way and that, and generally feeling as confident as possible.
What am I getting at? Not that you need to spend 3 hours a day studying a language, don't worry. But that any training sooner or later gives results.
Even if you think you have no talents, and every achievement of yours takes years of work. I'm with you, guys. I don’t solve it elegantly — I just brute-force it. And we have a huge advantage! Because languages are learned just like that: behind every polyglot are years of work.
And with each year, new languages become easier and easier. You get more and more data, your brain gets stronger, like your neighbor in the gym 🏋️♀️ This training doesn't go to waste.
And how to train regularly, without overstraining, and effectively - that's what I'm writing about here. I'll soon launch a newsletter too, I've gathered a lot of material.
❓What would you like to know about foreign languages❓ Or about my preparation for the exam❓
