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….