It’s February and already your New Year’s Resolutions are very likely to be toast.  I came up with a new strategy for achieving sticking to New Year’s Resolutions taking inspiration from how software development has improved over the years.  It’s working brilliantly so far.

Instead of making New Year’s Resolutions, this year I’m making New Month’s Resolutions.  It’s much easier to stick to something if you shorten the timeframe, and make sure to review progress every month – learning from what worked and what didn’t.  So, my challenge to you is: what are you going to resolve to do in February to make your life (or someone else’s) better?  Specifically, what can you resolve to do to improve your language skills in whatever language you are learning?

As well as making a simple commitment around improving my French (which was to watch a specific episode of The Returned – in fact I watched three it was so good), I made a whole raft of actions in various areas in my life from Health and Fitness through to my business goals.  I made a worksheet to help with this:

Download: Gruff’s Agile Approach to Resolutions

It really helps to declare your intentions to someone else who can help hold you accountable.  If you use this, or something similar, don’t just fill it in and then put it in a drawer. Instead, pin it up somewhere you’ll see it every day so you can check if you’re on track.

Here’s mine for February (signature blurred for obvious reasons):

As you can see, my goal this month is to learn a text in Spanish.  I’m building on an idea I had a long time ago to use film to help learning (see How to Learn a Language Matrix-style).  I broke this task into subtasks and worked out reasonable dates within February that I could achieve, starting with finding a suitable Spanish monologue to learn.  I have several Spanish plays by Lorca and a translation of Nabakov play, but the language of Lorca is slightly old-fashioned and the Nabakov play has no audio.  I’ve plumped instead for the opening scene of Almodóvar’s wonderful film La Mala Educación (Bad Education), since this is a film I can capture the audio to listen to; this ensures my pronunciation will be correct but also will help me learn the lines because I can listen to it on the go.  (This is quite a demanding challenge, so if you would like try this with shorter pieces, of course our Bitesized Daily Emails are perfect for this and they come with audio already.)

Now, the real gem here is the final goal: how do you prove you’ve learned it?

My goal is to record myself delivering the monologue to camera – probably my webcam – without referring to the text.  (I’d love to take credit for this idea, but I have to thank my friend Duncan Kenworthy for giving me it.)

I plan to learn a lot more of the dialogue, so I went to the expense of buying the film script for this in Spanish for my Kindle.  It was expensive for a book, but a real time saver, so worth it.

I used Goldwave to capture the audio of the first scene and I made a second version of it slowing the sound down to half speed whilst preserving the pitch – something Goldwave can do very well.  This is quite important because Spanish speakers tend to speak very quickly.  I’ll work up to full speed over time but when practising at the beginning it’s really important to speak slowly to get the pronunciation correct.

I Googled for the text in English and found that here.  It’s quite a loose translation, so the last few days I’ve been looking up various words and expressions to determine their meaning and origin.

Learning a text so well that you can deliver it from Memory is a wonderful way to improve your speaking skills. It’s a real challenge.  If you’ve never acted before and had to learn lines, there are a few things you need to know about this process, because it’s even harder in a foreign language than it is in your mother tongue:

1. This type of memory (procedural memory) forms over several days (5-7 in fact).  It’s not like episodic memory where you can just recall something you’ve seen (unless you’re unusually gifted).  Don’t expect miracles overnight. Have faith in your brain.
2. Read SLOWLY.  Focus on pronouncing the words correctly.  Save speeding up to later on.
3. Sleep is vital to the learning process.  Even a ten-minute nap has been shown to improve recall.
4. Instead of trying to remember the words, try to mean them when you say them. This technique from acting is called Active Experiencing by psychologists Helga Tony Noice (Indiana State University) and has been shown to dramatically improve recall.
5. Look up any word or phrase you don’t understand and make sure you understand them in detail. Going beyond the context of the text will also help you embed the language well.
6. Read and listen. Listen and read. Take every opportunity to go over the text. Don’t try to learn more than half a page of A4 at a time.
7. Practise daily.  It will take a week probably before the text goes in, and when it does it’ll feel a bit magical. Overnight you’ll suddenly go from the frustration of not recalling it to fluent recall.  Once you can recite the whole text, you can start to work on your speed.

If you decide to have a go yourself, let me know how you get on!

Gruff