How can we make our language study more relevant to our daily lives? How can we break out of the pattern where our language lessons become an event of their own, unconnected to our learning goals? My suggestion here is to build two habits into your day to help you to learn language. Neither will take much time.

Working around the house, or walking down the street, we all maintain an internal dialog. Perhaps we’re thinking about something we need to say, or something we wish we had said, or just about life in general. Try to have that dialog in Dari. If you’re thinking about a familiar topic (e.g., what you see on the street), you’ll build fluency as you think of words. If you’re thinking about a topic that you wouldn’t normally think about in Dari, you’ll quickly become aware of the Dari words you need to learn.

A related idea is to carry around a notebook, and write down notes and questions that come up throughout the day. (“What does this word mean?” “What should I have said?” “How do I say such-and-such?”) This has two uses. First, you can bring those questions to your language lessons. Second, even if you don’t use this for your language lessons, it will help you to pay attention to regular parts of the input. I discovered this trick while studying a different language. I wrote a note to myself to, “look into indicative vs. aorist subjunctives.” I never actually followed up on that, but just after writing it down, I found myself paying more attention to those things automatically.

Keep your language notebook around. It will encourage you by showing the progress you’re making in learning new things. It can also be a reminder to practice the new things you’ve learned.

If done successfully, you will end up with a lot of little bits of information. Don’t let those things get away! Many people benefit from creating flashcards, but everyone has different preferences.

I recently finished a nice book entitled, How Languages are Learned. The answer of course is, “Often poorly, and always with great difficulty.”

Ha ha.

But there was an interesting remark in the book about the way that language learners receive feedback, but usually fail to make use of it. (This was in the context of classroom , but I think it’s applicable to everyday learning as well.)

The researchers found that most people correct language learners by repeating their sentence back, but fixing the errors. So if someone said to me, “He eat cookies,” I might say back, “He eats cookies.” Or if someone said, “He smashed his finger,” I might echo back, “He smashed his thumb,” if that was the more correct statement. I know I do this all the time as a parent, and with non-native English speakers, and I know that Afghans do it a lot as well.

The problem is, language learners don’t often pay attention to it! Apparently this is because echoing somebody’s statement is something that we do fairly routinely in everyday conversation—active listening, as it’s sometimes called.

So this week’s encouragement is to develop the habit of paying attention this feedback. When people repeat your sentence back to you, try to learn the better way to say it. It may take a while to develop the habit, but it’s a great source of instant feedback for your production skills—people even do it without noticing!