Consistency is one of the most important leverage points for learning a language. Just by the nature of how learning and memory work, you are far better off spending half an hour each day interacting with Japanese than four hours once a week.
Today we’re going to explore the best weapon in your arsenal to reach that level of consistency.
Make Learning A Habit
Roy Baumeister is a social psychologist known for his research on willpower and self-control. He came up with what he called “ego depletion theory,” which states that our willpower is a limited resource that gets depleted over time. According to this theory, exerting self-control or willpower in one area of life can lead to reduced self-control in subsequent tasks or decisions.
Why is this important? If you are relying on your own willpower to get you to sit down and study, particularly if you’ve had a busy day with lots of decision fatigue, you could be fighting a losing battle. A better approach is to use your limited willpower to purposefully build the habit of studying and then let that habit take charge.
One more time: use your limited willpower to consciously built the habit you want to develop.
The cool thing about habits in general is that, once established, they require no willpower — they are just something you naturally do, a part of your identity in fact. Think about habits you already have, maybe brushing your teeth or working out. It’s highly likely that they are so ingrained that you feel uncomfortable if you don’t do them. To the extent you can make your studies habitual, the amount of effort you feel you need to expend will drop to zero.
That begs the question: how to I build such habits? Entire books have been written on this (I strong recommend James Clear’s “Atomic Habits”, more on this later) but to start with I offer the following tips.
Tiny Habits
“Tiny Habits” is the brainchild of B.J. Fogg, behavioral scientist and psychologist, founder of the Stanford Behavior Design Lab at Stanford University. One of the simplest ways to build a new habit, according to Fogg, is to start with a “Tiny Habit,” one so simple that not following through is practically impossible. He often uses the example of supposing you want to form a habit of flossing your teeth. He recommends you start by aiming to floss just one tooth a day, a very low bar indeed. The point being to establish the tiny habit first (consistency!) then expand upon it.
An example from my own life, many years ago when I was trying to establish a fitness routine, my Tiny Habit was to do ten pushups every day. Just ten, no more, no less, then I could stop. And I repeated that for several weeks until showing up to do my pushups was so habitual that missing it (which admittedly I did once or twice) felt really strange – the hook of the habit was set. Once it was habitual, I gradually started increasing the number, then habit-stacking other exercises onto it.
Similarly with studying, you could start by establishing the Tiny Habit of studying your favorite resource for just two minutes each day, after which you are free to quit with a clear conscience. Once you’ve done that for a suitable time, bump up the duration, then later you can stack on additional process goals like “listen to an audio lesson for five minutes” and on and on.
Implementation Intention
You are more likely to remember to do your soon-to-be habitual action if you can establish the trigger: when and where will you perform it? That’s where implementation intention comes in – think of it like an “If-Then” statement. “If (when) I finish drinking my morning coffee, then I’ll do my ten pushups.”
(German psychologist Peter M. Gollwitzer came up with the original idea and Heidi Grant has also written about it, if you’re curious about the details. According to Dr. Grant’s research, this alone can more than double your chances of following through)
Make It Fun
At the end of the day, you want to make this as enjoyable as possible. Who wants to spend their free time quizzing themselves on verb conjugations? Find some resources and media that you enjoy and incorporate those into your studies. Think of movies, TV shows, YouTubers, online chat, music, your favorite hobby in Japanese and so on.
Action Steps
- What “Tiny Habit” can you begin today that will lead you to consistently making enjoyable progress with Japanese? Write it down.
- When and where will you execute this Tiny Habit daily? What’s your trigger? Write it down.