Too lazy
April 13th, 2007
A lot of people tell me they that they really want to study English but they are too lazy. I don’t believe there is such a thing as laziness. Here’s why; suppose I told you that I would give you a million dollars if you studied English for 2 hours per day for a whole week. If you really believed me, would you do it? Absolutely you would! (If you wouldn’t then I suppose you really would be lazy). Now suppose you studied for the whole week and at the end of the week I told you that I lied and I was no longer going to give the million. Well, you’d be really pissed off at me for lying to you but you would have studied for the whole week; something you usually wouldn’t do. It’s interesting to think that you only studied because you thought you were getting some reward for it. Nothing else.
So why do some people study and some don’t? In other words, why are some people are what we call lazy, and others are not? The answer is just motivation. The people who do choose to study are people who are better at seeing the benefits of studying. Now you might tell me that you know the benefits, you know you’d probably get a better job, you know you could communicate with more people, you know you could travel around the world more easily. So if you know the benefits, why are you not studying. The reason is the benefits seem too far off and hard to achieve. Let’s be honest, if you study English really hard for one day, it’s not going to make a huge difference in your life. You might not even notice that you’ve improved at all. In some ways it feels like a waste of time because you don’t notice the improvement. Of course you are smart enough to know that you are probably improving, but the reward still doesn’t feel great enough. That’s why you don’t do it.
So what do you have to do then? Somehow you have to make your brain believe the benefits are worth all the effort. You need to reward yourself when you finish the task and punish yourself when you don’t. If your goal is to study an hour per day, you should think of some kind of reward you will give yourself when you finish. Maybe you will watch a great movie when you finish, maybe you will go and do something fun with your friends. Choose something that you would enjoy. If you don’t study, you must make sure that you don’t do this fun thing or anything else fun. In other words, don’t reward yourself for failure. You should also punish yourself for not doing it. Don’t let yourself watch TV, don’t let yourself talk on MSN, don’t let yourself talk with your friends. That is the hard part. If you can get in the habit of rewarding yourself when you do complete your study goal and punish yourself when you don’t, you will find that you spend a lot more time studying. Good luck.
Please write to me and let me know what you think. I’d love to hear from all of you.
Andrew
Learning and Improving English Self Improvement
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April 18th, 2007 at 1:42 pm
SOFA~~~~
Good to see that you have more interesting articles here, it seems I need a “1 millIon” tale too
April 27th, 2007 at 8:52 am
I couldn’t agree with you more, I think that’s the most of the english learner’s problem, all in all, there is no positive motivation to learn english for them(including me). If someone says to me :” i give you one month to learn english well, and during this period you need to recite 8000 english words and speak fluent, otherwise i will shoot you” i think i can do it, even to be a nice translator or interpretor, casue i m frightened to die,anybody is afraid to die…
April 29th, 2007 at 10:30 am
Hey guys. Glad to see your blog. Well done, buddies.
Too lazy? I agree you need motivation to do things. You know people have motivations, people have dreams. But why some people achieve the goals while some people never did? The difference is they do it. They work really hard. However, some people just stop in the middle as being lazy. I do think personality change things. If you have a strong will, you will carry it on, no matter what. If you are not a tough person, you might just want to have a easy life.
Well, how to carry it on? There are tons of smart ways to help people to work on it, for example to learn how to speak fluent English. Like what you said, give yourself some rewards after you are done of your task. Additionally, I know another a good way. I would like share with all of you. Once I heard an interview for a long distance runner. He was asked how could you finish the extreme long distance just by keeping running and did absolutely nothing else? He answered:” it was a painful process. The destination was so far away that you couldn’t see. And the action is just running, which is kinda boring. However, why don’t you break the final destination into some closer and smaller ones? Like you achieve the goal by every five miles. So it drives you excited when you achieve the 5 miles, and you would feel the final destination is reachable. In terms of study English, you need to set some resent and small goals, like everyday study 50 words, like score well on the coming up exam, and like get a good job by your good English. Just break the huge goals into some smaller ones. Therefore, you wouldn’t feel the destination is far to reach, because these smaller goals are just in front of you.
All right, that’s my rough thinking. Good luck.
April 30th, 2007 at 6:53 am
Interesting! Motivation and learning attitude was just the topic of my MA dissertation last year:) Everyone needs to be motivated to do one thing. There are only a few learners who have real integrate motivation in terms of foreign language, so we need to find our goal and encourage ourselves from time to time. Or maybe the learners here are longing for the encouragement from our generous, cool and friendly china232.com teachers
May 11th, 2007 at 9:38 am
Absolutely interesting topic. When we learning something, we must have an appetite for learning. We cant learn under a pressure situation or force ourselves to learning something that we not interested. However, we must clear how important it is. we must know why we should learning it? Try to make ourselves interested on it, then only we are able to learn in perfect situation.
That is my opinion, and this is a perfect learning site for me. thank you.
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January 17th, 2008 at 11:20 am
A considerable problem is:
Learning a foreign language takes lots of time and also effort…
Some people are pretty good at learning languages (I’d love to be that kind of person), and they are able to learn really fast. Although I bealive most of us take at least some years.
What will be crucial is as you’ve mentioned the determination and how important we think learning might be…
I’m a good example, i’ve been studying English for 4 years, but during the first two and a half years I couldn’t understand almost anything considering the spoken language when I tried to watch movies, i could read and write but no listen. I had though of giving up… Then i tried to force my brain to understand… I knew I had the vocabulary… So gradually I started understanding and noticed how I’ve improved by working hard…
Currently this wonderful podcast has been helping me a lot.
I still have problems though, and know that if do not give up i will succeed…
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March 24th, 2008 at 2:54 pm
I think that motivation is a very important thing. For me motivation for learning English is based on the following.
The other day I came to hate living in my country. Lawlessness and other crap got me out of control. I am not a revolutionary nor want to sabotage or complain. So I have strongly decided to move to another truly constitutional state. But how to do it if you don’t know the language except the state language.
So I decided to master English at a level acceptable to get a job in another country maybe somewhere in Europe where English is widened or is one of the state languages. I don’t want to do dishwashing or become a male prostitute :), so I consider I have a strong motivation. =)
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December 14th, 2008 at 7:44 pm
I’m learning Chinese, right now. People say that I’ve improved a lot. I’ve listened to, and studied, dialogues, by Follow Me In Chinese. Other than many tiring hours, my only major secret is to look up words in an online dictionary.
My major motivation is to speak each new sentence so fluently, that I can surprise people just for fun. Just in case anybody didn’t notice, I don’t try to get a large vocabulary before aiming for fluency. I try to be as fluent as possible with each new word or phrase, before moving on to something, unless moving on to something else is a good break.
December 14th, 2008 at 7:50 pm
Another thing that I found rewarding is going back through the old dialogues, and noticing how much easier it is to understand them. When we first learn the easier dialogues, we tend to skim over certain words & phrases, because they aren’t the main focus of the lesson, and/or because we foolishly think that we already understand the depth of the meaning. After learning a few more lessons, the words might begin to take on more shape.
That’s why I’m quite disappointed with how my students don’t study on their own.
August 31st, 2009 at 7:52 pm
Andrew made a good point.Learning languages should be fun.30 minutes everyday is better than 3 hours in a week.Learning foreign language requires quite a lot of commitment.You should throw yourself into it,I mean with a positive additute.When I’m learning english I don’t try to think that I’m learning language.I mean I don’t look at it as a lesson.I look at it as fun process,activity.It’s more comfortable that way.Because even If we’re learning,reading,doing something else in our language,and we don’t take it as a fun activity like say stories, novels then we gonna get bored.That’s the main part of the learning languages.You crazy two guys keep going forward and I’m sure you’re helping future famous people,advocates,doctors,writers and so forth.
Good luck!
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