5 Most Effective Tactics to Stay Motivated to Learn English

Hi there! How’s your motivation today? 😃

Deciding to learn English might be easy, but hard is to be on track after a while.

The point is: How to stay motivated when the initial rush of dopamine from a new beginning fades?

That’s what we’ll talk about today. 😃

Want to know 5 strategies that can help you stay motivated over time? Let me share them with you.

1. Remember your goals

First of all, think of what made you start learning English… Write down it on a piece of paper, a note on your phone, or wherever you can see it frequently. It’ll remind you why you’ve started it.

Don’t deluge yourself into thinking that you’ll be fluent overnight. Learning a language takes time, effort, and dedication.

2. Keep patient, immersed, and consistent

You need to be patient. It sounds cliche, but it’s true. ****We’re human beings, not a machine that inserts information today, and tomorrow you’ll recall it in a block of an eye. Our machine is called BRAIN, it needs time, rest, and repetition to retain the information.

One thing that will help your brain to retain the information is to be surrounded by English, everywhere, every time. We call it immersion. Set the English language on your cellphone, computer, e-mail, and social media; Type personal messages in English (to-do list, shopping list, reminders, journaling, and so on); Type in English to a friend who is also learning English. You may ask: what If I don’t know how to write one word/expression? My short and sweet answer is: write it in your native language, then search for that word in English. Do you really want to be fluent in English? So, overcome your laziness.

Another key point to your progress and keep you motivated is consistency. You need to be in touch with English daily. It doesn’t matter if it’s 10 min or 4h (of course, the more the merrier). The major point is always being in touch with English.

3. Establish a routine

Establishing a routine is powerful for the learning process because even when you’re lazy, you unconsciously get out of your inertia and do what you set out to do.

If you haven’t experienced the power of a routine, you should give it a try. Start small. Pick up a time, place, and device to do the chosen activity repetitively daily. For instance, I love Anki, so I usually review my cards after lunch, at my desk, using my phone. The importance of choosing a time, place, and device is that you’ll do that task on autopilot after a while.

Another gold tip: try to start a new habit, just after one that you already have. This I learned from the book Atomic Habits. For example, I meditate in the first hours of the morning, and I felt the urge to read more, so I started reading after my meditation.

4. Identify your distractions

Maybe you feel demotivated because you’re spending your energy in the wrong place or thing.

Are you the type of person who takes the phone to call someone and see notifications from apps and you don’t resist swiping over them? 😅 (Welcome to the club, you’re not alone.) Then, when you realize, you have spent precious minutes of your day doing nothing but scrolling aimlessly on your phone.

Be honest with yourself. Think about what makes you sidetracked for a while. After identifying your distractions, you can replace them with new tasks you want to tackle to improve your English.

My tip is to schedule a time to browse on social media, check emails, play games, call someone, and so on.

5. Find people with the same purpose

You’re not alone in this journey of learning English. I’m sure that you can make friends with the same goals, share experiences, and learn.

Keeping in touch with someone is important to let you motivated.

That’s it for today.

I hope these 5 strategies are useful to you.

How about you? What do you do to keep motivated? Which strategies shared today you’ll consider making use of? I’m eager to hear from you.