How to stay motivated when learning a language at an advanced level

Remember how exciting learning languages used to feel?

The key to staying motivated is to make your learning routine engaging, challenging, and relevant to your interests.

When you first start learning a language it is incredibly exciting. You want to soak up any and every single possible thing. You are ready to learn the whole dictionary in one week and can’t wait to learn past simple. But what do you do when the initial excitement wears off and studying and practicing feel like a chore?

Same routine. Same resources. Same results. Sound familiar? Time to switch things up.

To stay motivated as an advanced language learner, change your study habits including when you study and the resources you use. You need to actively seek out new challenges and impulses.

Change your study habits to beat boredom

By the time you reach an advanced level, you may have settled into a routine, and started learning on autopilot. It can cause disinterest and can result in burnout.

Change up your study routine: If you keep using the same book and doing the same things to practice it is easy to get bored.

In order to beat this, change your regular learning schedule, try practicing at a different time of day, and try out new methods and channels. Do you always practice listening by watching a certain channel on YouTube? Switch to podcasts! Instead of always studying in the morning, study randomly throughout the day. Do you hate books and only read them to practice a language? Forget books, try reading a blog about a topic you are interested in! Have you been studying on your own? Maybe it’s time to join a group or hire a teacher.

Try to switch up one (or all) of these things:

• Resources (ex: podcast instead of YouTube, blog instead of books)
• Time (ex: varying learning schedule instead of rigid set time/ or set time instead of sporadic practice)
• Method (ex: learning with a teacher or group instead of self-teaching/ or independent learning instead of school lessons)

Make learning languages interesting again by finding new impulses

When you start learning a language everything seems super interesting and you are bombarded with new things all the time. Once you become more advanced the novelty wears off and it can become very tedious to study. To bring some novelty back into your learning, try the following:

• Meeting new people (through Facebook groups, websites, and apps)
• Going to events held in that language
• By learning slang
• By learning about the culture and history of the country

Reward yourself from time to time: Buy a nice book in your target language, or go to a restaurant where they serve food of the country you want to learn the language of.

Practical things to lift you up

• Create a motivational mood board using pictures and photos that represent your motivations to learn the language. Hang it on your wall or save it in your phone, so you can take a look at it when you feel too lazy to practice.
• Open your old vocabulary books and tests, even messages and texts you’ve sent. Seeing how far you’ve come can keep you going.
• Watch videos of polyglots to get you in the language learning spirit.
• Watch YouTube videos of countries or cities where they speak your target language, or go on Google Earth and “take a walk”.
• Go to a restaurant where they serve food of the country, or prepare a meal at home and enjoy it while you are studying.

Challenge yourself beyond your current level and set new goals

A lack of challenges can also become an issue. Once you reach B2, C1, or C2, progress can feel slower because you already understand much of the language and encounter fewer obvious challenges. It can get boring when you always do exercises that are on your current level or below. In Overcome the intermediate language learning plateau I talk about it in detail but basically, you have to adjust your resources and the way you practice to your level.

Check your improvement regularly and set new goals: Dust off your old language book, check an old dictionary or test you wrote. It can make the fruit of your hard work visible so you can be motivated to keep going. Here is how: How to check your language development and why it is important. You might need to also set new goals for yourself that reflect the new level you are at. Check out some Advanced language learning goals.

• Instead of trying to understand a text despite a few unknown words make it a goal to understand each and every word. Remember when you didn’t learn a word because it was too specific to a topic or it was too formal? Time to learn and use those words!
• Instead of focusing only on being understandable and pronuncing words clearly aim for more natural, native-like pronunciation with the help of an audio resource and recorder app on your phone. Record yourself repeating sentences and compare your recording with the original audio . You can also ask a native speaker friend for feedback.
• Challenge yourself by writing texts about more advanced, complicated, abstract topics, and try to avoid repeating words by using synonyms.
• Are there any situations you were afraid of when you were a beginner? Challenge yourself to try them now! Have that telephone conversation, take that online course in your target language, apply for that job where it is a requirement to speak that language.

I hope that by putting these strategies into practice, you’ll continue to enjoy learning and using your target language!

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