4 ways of dealing with the tiredness of learning English

Despite how thrilling leaning English can be, we cannot deny that the process can be a bit stressful. After all, learning a foreign language means:

• Finding time in your schedule to study everyday.
• Acquire thousands of new words, grammar structures and cultural concepts.
• Making tons of mistakes, many in front of complete strangers.
• Forget years of habits from your mother tongue.
• Challenge yourself continuously to practice and improve.

The stressful factors mentioned above can sound scary, but in reality they are just part of a process that has more advantages than disadvantages.

 These four tips can help you with this process:

1-Keep studying

When we are stressed because of learning, the first thought that comes to our mind is to have a break. This is a natural response, but it can compromise your goals of learning on the long run if you’re not careful enough.

The most important thing is: keep studying. Change everything related to the way you learn: what you learn, how much, when, where and why, but make sure learning is still part of your life.

2-Vary your learning activities

When you decide to learn a language, it doesn’t magically appear in your brain. It is a set of skills that, in order to learn them, you must practice any number of activities that will help you develop them.

Besides your classes, practice with classmates or friends, listen to songs and watch movies in English, use apps to learn more and above all, go to extracurricular classes offered by schools.

3- Find something you like

Sometimes, the cause of the overload is not the activity that makes you learn, but you are trying to learn too actively.

The best way to reduce the speed without actually reducing the contact with the language is finding a passive activity related to the language of your preference, and do this while you’re not doing the hard stuff.

By doing these activities, don’t worry about trying to get every detail. These are different, so just enjoy and see what you can get from them.

4- Have a break (well planned)

If even after all those activities you feel like having a break from learning, you can do it. However, to avoid falling in the common trap of postponing learning indefinitely, you will have to have a plan.

First, what you will have to split tasks in chunks. How long is it going to last? You break them down and have a long break or short ones?

But don’t forget that you can’t extend it much, because the lack of interest comes back fast.