It’s been said that habits are formed in around 30 days or less. By setting yourself a goal of doing a specific task every day for a month, you are likely to assimilate it into our life as one of our everyday activities.
So what if you were to challenge yourself to the habit of studying Chinese for 1 hour a day?
Studying seriously becomes so much easier when it becomes a habit. Let me explain.
Habits | What They Are and Why We Have Them
People like to believe that they have absolute free will over their actions and behaviours. That they are the one master of their destiny.
n reality, most of our behavior is hardwired into our subconscious – we don’t notice, of course, but a lot of what we do is governed, and explicable by reference to these unconscious processes of the brain.
An example of this is psychological addictions, such as addiction to drugs such as marijuana that, chemically, have no physically addictive qualities. Specific behaviors develop and strengthen over time. In order to use it to its full potential, we must recognize that the brain is a muscle that must be trained, just like the muscles needed to physically carry out the brain’s messages.
The reason you cannot immediately play a guitar the first time you pick it up is not only because your fingers can’t physically perform the required movements, but also because your brain doesn’t have the capacity to do so yet. Over time, your fingers develop ‘muscle memory’ that allows them to quickly snap from chord to chord. Your brain simultaneously develops the neural connections associated with playing the guitar, without which you would not be able to play.
We can extend this to the question of why people procrastinate. Why do they seem unable to stop themselves? In case you don’t see where I’m going with this, I’ll spell it out for you: they have gotten into the habit of procrastinating and cannot just simply, well, stop. They need to train their subconscious to ignore the temptation, and their conscious mind will follow.
Developing the Habit of Learning Chinese
We are creatures of habit. If you can commit to doing a bit of Chinese every day for one month (30 days), then this action will become a habit. It will be one that will be much easier to maintain henceforth than if you study only sporadically every few days or weeks.
You won’t even think twice about getting your daily dose of 汉语. It will seem almost automatic, and, in fact, it kind of will be, as this behavior will be determined by your subconscious as part of your daily ritual rather than as a tedious task you’d rather avoid.
Chinese won’t be something you put off. Of course, of equal importance is loving the learning process, but don’t get me started on that – that’s a post for another time!
Here are some ideas to kick things off:
- Be Dedicated…but Flexible: Sure, maybe you are busy one day and don’t do your study. Whatever, dude – don’t sweat it. I suggest you make up for it by doing extra the next day, at the very least in the first month. If you regularly skip days, then you are greatly decreasing the effectiveness of the ‘one month challenge’ experiment.
- Set a Specific Daily Target. The more specific, the better. As mentioned, my target was 1 hour of input (reading or listening) per day, every day. I used a number of different Chinese learning resources. Can’t manage an hour? Make it half an hour, or even just 15 minutes; just make sure you do it every day. C’mon, you expect me to believe you don’t have thirty, measly, spare minutes in your day?
- Log Your Progress: You will be surprised at how well you go, and how easy and natural it becomes. Mark down how much you did for every given day on your phone or on a piece of paper, and maybe a tick if you reached your goal, and a cross if you didn’t.
So how did my 30-day challenge to learn Chinese go? Check it out in the next section.
One Month Challenge | 1 Hr of Chinese a Day (My Results)
I wanted to start with a modest goal for my first challenge. I think this is a good way to go, because you don’t want to be overwhelmed from the get-go and give up after a few days.
Do as much, or as little, as you can manage. If reaching your daily goal seems like a chore, consider reducing it.
In fact, there is something to be said for easing gradually into the habit. Maybe start with 20 minutes a day for the first month, then 40 minutes the next, then an hour the one after that.
If you are too ambitious, you will likely burn out quickly and lose motivation. It’s easy to get super excited a do 2 hours on the first day and think, “Shit, I’m going so well!”, but keeping it up for the whole month is where the heart of the challenge lies, and, unfortunately, that’s most likely the only way it’s going to work.
So, how did I go, you ask?
Well, as I said, I was aiming for 1 hour a day on average for the entire month, so, 30 hours in total. I took down the amount of time I spent listening using the ‘Notes’ app on my phone, but I’m going to also include the time I spent on Anki (I used it nearly every day for the whole month) and Skritter (my favorite app for learning to write Chinese characters).
BONUS SKRITTER DEAL: Try Skritter free and get 50% off with promo code CB50
Here it is.
So, I almost made it to an hour a day of solid studying. That’s not too bad!
My Analysis of Results
I can’t really give you guys a bunch of diagrams and numbers without telling you what it means, now can I?
In terms of my listening ability – it has improved immensely. That’s right, my improvement was so significant that I felt the need to both underline and italicise that word. It’s legit.
I went from having a sketchy understanding of basic Chinese, to having a solid intermediate level understanding. That’s not to say I learnt all of that this month, but I definitely consolidated a lot of new words.
I can now quite comfortably follow Intermediate and some Upper Intermediate level conversations in the great ChinesePod course. I can even follow some TV shows on YouKu.com without too much difficulty.
Due to all this input, words and phrases that I’ve heard before, particularly those from dialogues that I listened to multiple (10+) times now spontaneously spring to mind when I need them.
Remembering Chinese Characters (Using Skritter)
You can see from the week that I used the awesome Skritter app, I ‘learnt’ 366 characters, in 1759 reviews, in about 4 hours and 45 minutes.
Woah, easy tiger. Let me put a disclaimer on that.
A lot of those I already knew, and I added for the purpose of review for my upcoming exams. I did create a list of ‘extra’ words that I learnt in that time, however, which amounted to 81 characters.
Still, 81 new characters in a week, I’m happy with that! That’s over 10 a day, and I wasn’t even particularly focussed on learning new characters, I just wanted to try Skritter out.
I can’t wait to use Skritter when I’m in China – I think I could realistically step it up to 20-30 characters a day. I have a visual memory, and find learning characters, as well as remembering tones, quite easy. Any thoughts, anyone?
What is great about Skritter is that you can test yourself on tones, character writings, and recognition of characters, which you can mix and match as you go.
It is surprisingly addictive. I found, however, that if I got a character wrong, and did nothing actively about it, I would get it wrong again and again. My solution: write the character you get wrong out by hand, on paper, once or twice. I am too lazy to do this on the spot, plus I was usually using Skritter on the train and so this wasn’t practical. What I did was I ‘starred’ these characters inside the app, and then reviewed them later.
Using Anki Flashcards
I used Anki most days, when I could be bothered (hey, language learning is supposed to be fun!) for a total of 4 hours 35 minutes.
What makes sense about Anki, is that it is essentially efficient input. What I mean by this is that you only review cards (mine are all sentences) that you, yourself, added to Anki. Therefore, you are reviewing sentences that have words or structures you need reviewing, making this pretty much the ultimate input machine.
I will probably write a whole post on Anki, at some stage. If this interests you, leave a comment or shoot me an email to convince me 😉
So, as you can see, I made my goal! 26h40 + 4h45 + 4h35 = 36 hours, unless my maths is off (this is likely, haha). Boo yah!
What Next? What About You?
Get into it! I hope I’ve inspired you to give one month challenges a try.
I think they have the potential to be enormously beneficial for anything in your life – personally, I plan to use them in other non-language related endeavours. Also, in my one month holidays coming up I’m also playing to have another Chinese challenge!
Other ideas include doing 30 minutes exercise a day, eating vegetables every day, being nice to your parents every day – the list goes on!
