Lesson Transcript

Hey everyone, welcome to The Monthly Review, the monthly show on language learning, where you discover new learning strategies, motivational tips, study tools, and resources.
By the way, all the lessons and bonuses you're about to see can be downloaded for free on our website, so click the link in the description right now to sign up for your free lifetime account.
Okay, today's topic is how to ramp up your language progress for the second half of the year.
If you started learning a language at the start of the year, we're now pretty much halfway through the year.
Has your language improved since January? And what about these next remaining months? Do you have any plans?
If you don't want to feel guilty about being lazy with the language, and if you want to end the year strong instead of restarting next January for the millionth time, then now is the time to do it.
Today, you'll learn 1.
The best ways to ramp up your language progress without having to study more.
2. Seven tips and learning tools for faster progress.
And 3. Much more.
But first, if you're looking for new free language resources and downloads, here are this month's new lessons and resources.
Be sure to download these now before we take them down in a few days.
First, the All the Language You Need for Everyday Life PDF eBook.
All of our best Conversation Cheat Sheets rolled up into one PDF eBook.
Download it right now before it disappears.
And second, the How to Talk About Your Family Conversation Cheat Sheet.
To get your free resources, click the link in the description below right now.
They're yours to keep forever.
Now to today's topic.
How to ramp up your language progress for the second half of the year.
So if you want to ramp up your language progress, what should you do?
Well, let's ask the question in a different way.
What can you control within your language learning?
You can't easily control results because that takes time, right?
But you can always control your effort, meaning you can do more and spend more time.
And for most learners, spending more time is usually the answer.
And that's it.
Just put in more time.
Lesson over.
But if you're not like most learners, if you've been learning a language without much Just throwing more time at the problem is not the best answer.
Now, it's more about spending that time better because some methods get you better results than others in the same amount of time.
In fact, there's a popular story about a ceramics class you'll hear if you're learning about productivity, where a ceramics teacher split their class into two groups, where one group was graded on quality, where they had to create just one perfect pot to get a perfect grade.
And the other group was graded on quantity, so they had to make 50 pots to get a perfect grade.
And both spent the same amount of time.
Can you guess who made the best pots?
Was it the group that had to just make one perfect pot or the group that made 50 in the same amount of time?
Well, the group that made 50 pots ended up creating higher quality pots because they learned from the experience.
Whereas the group that sat around thinking of one best idea didn't get to improve at all.
So both groups put in the same amount of time, but one group's results were vastly different.
Just goes to show that if you want to ramp up your effort, it's also important to spend that time wisely.
If you spend one hour cramming for the week, or if you spend 10 minutes a day for six days, both adding up to one hour for the week, you'll make better progress with 10 minutes a day for six days rather than cramming.
Cramming doesn't work for hours up front, it just doesn't work.
Similarly, if you spend 10 minutes watching YouTube videos on language or 10 minutes saying 20 specific phrases where you're doing output over and over, you'll be way better off with the 20 phrases.
The second lesson from that ceramics class story is this.
Frequency is much more important than the time put in.
The group that got the best results made 50 pots.
That's 50 practice attempts.
So the amount of times you do something is way more important than how long you do it.
Between cramming for an hour once a week and spending 10 minutes a day for six days, which is also an hour a week, you'll make better progress with 10 minutes a day for six days.
With cramming, you only technically learn once and then you forget.
With 10 minutes for six days, that was six practice sessions where your brain had time to rest, time to process what you've learned, and then had a chance to revisit it the next time around, allowing you to remember things better.
So to recap, if you want to ramp up your language progress, you can put in more time, which is good enough because most learners aren't putting in enough time.
You can spend your time wisely with better learning techniques.
And you can also increase your frequency of practice and learning.
So what can you do?
Part two, seven tips and learning tools for faster progress.
If you want to ramp up your language progress for the second half of the year and speak more, one way to do it would be to put in more time.
If you're only putting in 10 minutes a day, try 20.
But putting in more time for the sake of doing it may not always be the best approach.
It depends on what you do with that time.
So if you want to ramp up your speaking progress, here's how you ramp up your output.
One, increase the frequency of your output or practice sessions.
And this is the main takeaway from this lesson.
However you choose to practice, you'll get better results from practicing several times a day or several times a week instead of once a day or once a week.
This is why cramming never works.
Here's how.
Two, practice your speaking skills by sending recordings to your premium plus teacher.
The easiest thing you can do here is to send three recordings a day.
One in the morning, one during the day, and one at night.
Detailing what you've done.
Like, I wake up, I brush my teeth, I have breakfast, and I go to work.
Just send three or four lines like that, nothing complicated.
And they'll review your recordings and respond with corrections.
Three, take our hand-graded assessments to practice and assess your speaking and writing skills.
You'll find these in the recommended pathway.
And remember, you can always retake them after if you want to improve your score or apply the teacher's feedback.
If you're a premium member, you can take our multiple choice assessments instead.
Four, practice shadowing the lesson conversation three times in one day.
For example, after taking the lesson, shadow it once.
If it's in the morning, then do it a second time at noon and a third time in the evening or before you go to bed.
The point of spacing it out throughout the day is so that you remember it better instead of doing it once and forgetting it.
Five, practice reading the lesson dialogue out loud.
If you can't easily shadow a conversation just yet, then reading is the next best thing.
You can read along with the dialogue tool, lesson notes, or lesson transcript.
Six, you can also practice writing out the lesson dialogues.
Our lesson dialogues are conversations that you can use in real life with native speakers.
And by writing it out a few times, you'll remember it better that way.
Seven, use the voice recorder to record and compare yourself with native speakers.
You'll find the voice recorder inside the dialogue tool in all of our lessons.
Just look for the microphone icon next to each line.
By the way, all of these suggestions shouldn't take more than 10 or 15 minutes.
And all of these shouldn't be done just once a week.
Just pick one or two from this list of suggestions and try them out.
The goal here is to increase the frequency of sessions or output throughout the day or week.
Remember, even though putting in more time can be a way to ramp up your progress, you still have to apply that time wisely.
You could spend 15 minutes practicing speaking or do just five minutes three times throughout the day, which is also 15 minutes.
But you'd remember things better with the extra repetition.
Thank you for watching this episode of Monthly Review.
Next time, we'll talk about how to maintain your mindset and language learning routine.
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See you next time. Bye.

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