Please read Part One of this series here, for help setting achievable goals.
A lot of times, people don’t achieve their language goals because they set really big goals.
Now, this may seem weird. Big goals are good, right? Reach for the moon, even if you don’t get there, you’ll reach the stars?
Sadly, many people don’t even get that far.
They’ll set a big goal, of, say, being able to speak to a native for 5 minutes, and then quickly grow discouraged when they don’t seem to make the amount of progress they would like or if they feel like they have reached a plateau.
There is a simple solution to this. Set mini-goals.
What are mini-goals? Well, it’s pretty self explanatory. Mini-goals are subsections of large goals. They are used to help make a goal achievable.
Taking the above example, say that you want to be able to speak for 5 minutes, to a native speaker, in 6 months. What would some good mini-goals be? Maybe speak to a Spanish speaking friend in only Spanish for a minute? Or finish a Colloquial Spanish book in a month (which can be further reduced to, say, finish and understand a chapter every 2 days)?
Then, focus on those mini-goals, and before you know it, you will be able to speak to a native for 5 minutes, or maybe even more. You may find that it took more time than you thought it would to get there, but in many instances it’ll take less time simply because you are setting a more achievable goal, and you will put more effort into something that is easier and more achievable.
Finishing a chapter of a book seems much more achievable than talking to a native. It is, and therefore is a good starting point (though it is important to take the initiative and talk to a native eventually).
A way of setting a mini-goal would be to simply think of the next step towards your goal. Have trouble dedicating time to study? Picking up a book would be a good start, or even listening to your target language’s music in the background.
You need to build up, incrementally, to the level that you want to be. You aren’t just going to get up one day and be an expert. Just like any skill, you need to work on it, you need to practice.
My suggestion would be to take another step towards your goal every day.
As an example, I’ll post my primary goal and some mini-goals for that:
Discuss with a native Russian speaker basic discussion topics such as weather, sports, and school, for at least 5 minutes without any real hesitancy.
- Listen to Russian radio (Dobrie Pesni or Radio Mayak, for example) in the background while doing homework, to get a feel of the flow of the language.
- Learn 10 new terms related to common discussion topics daily (and input them in sentence format into Anki, reviewing those at least 2x a week).
- Speak only Russian in Russian class, asking “Как по-русски…..?” when I’m not sure how to say something in Russian.
If I continue on this track, and continue setting mini-goals as I further, I will achieve my goal of basic conversational skills in no time. Mini-goals have been great for me, and have really spurred my language studies.
How many of you use mini-goals?
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