Part of LCP’s strategy for supporting language learners is to have language learning coaches. At the moment I am the only coach, but within the next year we expect that two more people will be trained. A language coach is someone who comes alongside of you to help you develop, implement, and evaluate your plans for language learning. LCP is trying to do a better job of tailoring our language instruction to the individual, and language coaches are a big part of that.

What do you think of when you think of a coach? I think of this:

As a non-athletic person, a coach is for me someone who:

• Cares way more about sports than I ever will.
• Has an innate talent for sports that I simply don’t have.
• Enjoyed sports in school to the point of developing it into a profession, instead of—as I chose to do—leaving sports behind as soon as it was possible.

I can only assume that “coaching” had more positive associations for the people who recently began applying it to other fields!

So I want to acknowledge that, in many ways, it feels odd for a linguist to be the coach. Still, we need to keep in mind that a coach is not a model to be imitated. My goal is not to turn you into a linguist. The goal is simply to help you put together a customized learning plan. Your plan will be different from mine, because we all have different needs, strengths, and weaknesses.

For instance, my being an introvert is a clear disadvantage in language learning, since I don’t get a lot of social input. But it also offers a certain advantage: sitting down with a cup of tea and Dari book is a pretty attractive way to spend an hour. So rather than trying to force myself to be a person I’m not, I can get good language input by playing to my strengths. Those are the kinds of trade-offs that you can figure out with the help of a coach.

We can all improve as learners, and learn to make better use of our language learning time. If you’re feeling stuck, or feeling that you could be doing better, please drop me a line.

All of us get discouraged occasionally, and especially when it seems like we’re not learning fast enough. In this post, I’m going to suggest a simple strategy to overcome this problem: learn faster! Instead of learning just a few new Dari words in a lesson, learn more Dari words in that lesson. Instead of learning a little grammar, learn a lot of grammar. And instead of getting in just a little practice time, get a lot of practice time.

Okay, that’s a bit tongue-in-cheek. But I do want to highlight a danger that may not be apparent: it’s possible to learn too slowly.

We’re all familiar with the opposite problem, where the material comes too quickly for us to process it. But you’ve probably also had an experience in life when things are happening too slowly. Even a book or a film gets boring if the plot is slow. Can the same thing happen in your lessons? Certainly. And there are two specific harms.

First, it’s boring and unrewarding. You need positive reinforcement if you’re going to progress in language learning. If you’re not learning enough in your lessons, you’re not going to get that reinforcement. If you take an hour out of your day to learn language, you’d better get a some reward for it!

Second, your brain will learn better if it has to learn. You brain is like a giant trash compactor: when it gets full it compresses your experiences to form long-term memories. Have you ever spent a day hammering nails? What do you dream about that night? Hammering nails. That’s your brain compressing your day into a long-term memory. But if the trash compactor never gets full, it’s not going to require much attention from your brain. Make sure you’re getting enough language input that your brain must deal with it.

In the linguistics program I’m a part of, there is a course in which the students learn to hear, pronounce, and write all 160+ plus letters of the International Phonetic Alphabet, and a lot of diacritics as well. They do this in nine weeks. It’s an intensive schedule. Before an exam, the teachers always give the first lecture for the following exam. Cruel? Not at all. They’ve learned from experience that students will do better on the exam that way. If they have to process new material, the old material gets pushed into their long-term memory.

So I encourage you to ratchet things up a notch, and see if that doesn’t help you to learn the language better. Perhaps you’ve even got some surplus language learning hours from the last few months and want to put together an intensive language study program….