Little House of Ady

Hello everyone ! Welcome back on the blog ! Today I would like to share with you some advices and tips I’ve collected for myself over the last few years, and especially last few months about learning something by oneself. Who hasn’t tried, even once, to learn something without any teacher ? I think we all did it once in our lives. But most of the times, we fail, we give up, not because we’re not good enough, not intelligent enough, but simply because most of the time we begin to learn as a hobby, which means this is not our priority in our daily lives. And so naturally over things take control of our lives and tend to erase this effort of us to learn by ourselves. Our chores, job and so on take our motivation, time etc away. I’ve experienced it many years ago, when starting to learn Tibetan language. It wasn’t my priority, I was already studying Chinese in college, so expectingly, I slowly gave up even if it was interesting and enjoyable.

More recently, as my studies are over, I started to learn Japanese by myself. To be quite honest with you, it’s been years since it started to itch me. But I always put it off, because I didn’t want it to get into my Chinese learning and I felt that it would be a disaster, I would only lose my time and energy and get late in learning Chinese by doing this. So I never started. Until a few months ago. It seems that even if my languages studies were over, I still had to learn something, I cannot help it. But this time, I won’t give up. Thanks to my studies, I got used to language learning techniques, I know how to learn a language, I know where to start, what to do, what to avoid and so on. Also, teaching, as a part-time job, helped me a lot getting these techniques. I usually had to create lessons for others, now I have to create some for myself. No difference, except that I know my difficulties and advantages.

So here we are, I’ve collected all my tips and techniques for you, hoping it’d encourage some of you who are trying to learn something by themselves. Let’s get started !

Learning Techniques:

#1 Learn by example. This the perfect essence of what learning is really. Children learn to act like human beings by copying their parents and grown-ups around them. This is why your acts and words are so important in front of chidren as they’ll take them as examples, no matter if they’re good or bad examples, they can’t know. Personnaly I learn to draw, just by trying to remaking some drawings I have under my nose, I follow some tutorials and so on. Example is the most effective school, as long as the example followed is good of course.

#2 Learn with quality learning books. This is very important as these books will implement in you the basis. If you start with good basis, the rest will be good as well. If you start with bad basis, the rest will follow the same path. Beginings are very important, so make sure you choose the rights books to help you achieve that.

#3 Exchange with someone whose language you learn/ a professional whose art/technique you learn/ somenone who is already learning and is far more advanced than you. This person would be like a teacher for you as they know better about what you’re learning, for some of them, they went through the learning process you’re going through now, so they know about the difficulties you may encounter and how to address them.

# I wrote a whole post about how to easily learn a language, I’ll link it here for you to read, if you want more details on this subject. How to Easily Learn a Language?

Advices:

#1 Do not be afraid to make mistakes. Mistakes are lessons for you to learn, it’s very natural to make some. Just make sure you learn from them.

“errare humanum est perseverare diabolicum”

#2 Be patient with yourself and your progresses. Good things take time to be made.

“Rome wasn’t built in a day”

#3 Have different learning sources, different books, different video lessons and so on. Having different explanations on one topic helps understanding it more easily and quicker. It also prevents from learning a mistake someone else makes without realizing and teaching it unknowingly.

“Don’t put all your eggs in one basket”

What about the ideal schedule for a usual day when you learn something by yourself?

I’ve would only one advice for you regarding this topic. Choose to study when you’re the most productive in the day. In my case, it’s kind of early in the morning when I wake up. I usually wake up, make some tea and a little snack, then I open my computer, my books and here it goes. When I was preparing my thesis, I would work all morning exactly this way. I would work until lunch time, and sometimes, when I had a lot to do, I would still work a bit after lunch. Obviously, it was easier for me to spend the entire morning just working as my mom was here to take care of the household and she wouldn’t complain about me not helping at this time, because she tought my thesis was more important. Not everyone may have this luch I had, and even I don’t have it now, as I have to take care of the household in her place. Right know, it would rather be one or two hours of work for me. Even if it’s only one hour a day of self-studying, if it’s serious studying, it’s already great. So do not worry about that. Just pick your most productive time in a day and try to do a reasonable amount of work by then, not too much, not too few. And you would be good to go !

What’ll be everything for today’s post. I hope you like it and find it useful. Thank you for passing by and reading my blog, it’s a big encouragement for me.

I’ll talk to you in a next post.

Until then, take care of yourself ❤

Ady ❤