Of course, a 4pm biscuit-eating habit is great in the short term, combatting tiredness but it's counter-productive if we're trying to eat more healthily.

We can focus on each component of a habit to make it easier or harder for us to repeat. I talked about that in this blog post. But I want to draw your attention to one element present in both the desire and reward components of habits. And that is pleasure. Pleasure, or the anticipation of pleasure is a crucial factor between successfully forming a habit and failing.

Neuroscientists discovered the importance of the brain chemical dopamine in the 1950s and since then they have been charting its involvement in a whole range of functions, including voluntary movement, learning, memory and motivation. Here we are interested in two key discoveries about dopamine: it is released when we experience pleasure and when we anticipate pleasure. Once we experience pleasure, our brains pay particular attention to the details of the trigger or action that led us to the experience. Why? Because we want to repeat it. Next time we encounter that trigger, our brain will release dopamine, both boosting our memory and prompting us to act in the same way to get a similar reward.

In fact, our brains have far more neural circuitry allocated for desiring pleasure than for experiencing it. Remember that 4pm biscuit craving? It's the desire of a rewarding experience that motivates us to act. We've practised it so often, it has become automatic. So, if we look to adopt and maintain new learning behaviours, we need to make them pleasurable so that we want to repeat them again and again. Our brains are designed to help us repeat them if the reward is sufficient.

We also need to find ways to give ourselves frequent dopamine hits because humans respond better to instant gratification than to delayed gratification. In his excellent book "Atomic Habits" the writer and habit expert James Clear explains that we're hard-wired to choose instant gratification over delayed gratification for reasons of basic survival. As opportunist hunter-gatherers, we didn't know where our next meal was coming from or how safe we were from a predator. In this context, taking advantage of something pleasurable the instant it presented itself made sense. As the threat from immediate danger subsided and the advantages of being able to produce and store food stuffs increased, mankind learned to delay gratification. Nevertheless, the basic physiological pull of pleasure still has a profound effect on our ability to maintain modern habits.

So, if you're struggling to practise language learning regularly, look for ways in which you can increase the frequency of your rewards. This is a key element in each Neurolanguage Coaching® session: the coach works with you to help you review and recognise your progress frequently, so you can celebrate each step. This keeps your motivation topped up and your memory functioning at an optimum.

This post is modified from my podcast featured in the "Enhancing Learning" series on www.englishwaves.fr

Coskin suggests using a monkey (der Affe) as a symbol for the article der. A baby (das Baby) is a symbol for the article das. The singer Beyoncé (!) is a symbol for the article die. When I try to learn a noun with a neutral article, I picture a baby with the object. If I want to remember that a noun is feminine, I picture Beyoncé with the object, and so on. This technique works really well for me! This morning, I wanted to remember that "garten" is a masculine noun so I spent a minute or so picturing a monkey in a garden. He was picking flowers, rolling on the grass and examining the barbecue!

Of course, we don't have the possibility to choose the vocabulary we want to learn in our own time with an application like Duolingo. The app chooses when to introduce the vocabulary to us. This can mean that we are asked to learn vocabulary that isn't directly relevant to us and it's less likely that our brain will store the information for any meaningful length of time. In contrast, if we understand the importance of something, rather than simply trying to memorise a list of facts, then the information will be stored better and for longer.

Duolingo's sister app, Tinycards, is one way around this problem. I can choose what vocabulary sets to learn and when. Of course, I used it to help me learn food vocabulary because that is a keypriority! As well as using these two applications, I bought an indexed pocket notebook where I update my vocabulary. I write each word twice: the German word first with its English translation, and then vice-versa. I also note words that I want to learn, writing them in English and then, when I have time and energy, checking and translatingthem on www.wordreference.com and adding them to my notebook.

What I want to do over the next couple of weeks is the following :

Watch Youtube videos about basic German pronunciation to see how I can use the spellings to help me pronounce new words. I liked this video because it focuses on the differences from English and gives me visual examples. It's important to find a presenter and a format that is personally appealing - it helps us concentrate – therefore, what works for me won't necessarily work for you.

I'll also search for German learning videos on what language teachers and coaches call functional language, those common, repeated phrases that we use in specific situations, for example when we order food in a restaurant. This video looks great for my purposes.

As you can see, I'm always trying to link back to why I want to learn German... namely, to be able to order food in a restaurant! I need to be able to understand what the waiter says to me, as well as to respond.

This month, I also started a language learning Facebook group, accessible from the clare.language facebook page. This is a small but beautifully-formed group of language learners: some of whom are learning English, some Spanish and some German. We share ideas and give support to each other. Feel free to contact me on Facebook to be added to the group.

I wanted to sit down with coffee and a delicious-looking piece of German cake in a quaint café near the park but my natural reserve stopped me. What if the counter assistant didn't speak English? I was tired and suddenly it seemed that just having enough German to avoid using my miming skills would be wonderful. And so my next project was born.

Whereas I want to become fluent in French, I'm not nearly so ambitious for German. What I want to be able to do in German is the following: order food and drink in a restaurant (I still want that cake), ask for recommendations and directions for things like cash distributors, train platforms and train stations, bus stops and chemists; buy items of clothing for myself and my partner; ask about opening and closing hours and be able to navigate street maps.

So here's my plan. I'm going to learn how to do it. And I'm going to document how I do it here. It's not a priority for me to take German lessons with a teacher at the moment so it will be all self study. It normally takes around 60 - 100 hours to move from complete beginner to A1 level. I can realistically dedicate 2 hours per week to doing this. So if I plan to go to Germany for a weekend to test all my skills in one go, I could reasonably hope to do it by this time next year i.e., in 50 weeks. Hurrah, I can go for the Christmas markets in 2018!

As you can see, I have specific objectives of what I want to be able to do with German. Now what I need to do is to decide how to do it. And that will be the subject of a future post!

The thing is, my desire to write the wonderful post got in the way of my overall objective which was, and is, consistency in posting a blog. I set myself up for failure because my objective was too big for me to handle at that moment. So what could I have done differently? I could have made that objective easier to achieve.

So here is my 3-step guide to overcoming resistance to your own objectives.

Say, for example, you want to improve your listening comprehension skills. You've decided that the best way to do this is to listen to a podcast like 6 minute English. You find that the best way to do this is to listen to each podcast twice, the first time without the transcript and the second time while reading the transcript. Now you need to do this regularly. Firstly, ask yourself how often you feel you need to do this to make progress. Secondly, ask youself how easy that will be to do in the next week or fortnight, on a scale of one to ten, one being impossible and ten being so easy you don't have to think about doing it, it will happen almost automatically! Here's the trick. If you get a number lower than 9, think about how you can improve your chances of success. How can you make it super-easy to do this? Take our earlier objective: if you decide that listening to five podcasts a week would get a score of 7, you'll make it easier to achieve if you reduce the number of podcasts to, say, three if that gives you a score of 10. If you manage 5, that's phenomenal and it's a bonus. What you're doing is setting yourself the minimum necessary to feel good about your new habit. If it's only one podcast a week, set one podcast as your minimum!

Once you have decided a very manageable frequency, you can help yourself even more by a little bit of preparation. It's easier to go on that 5km run if you have your running shoes, mp3 player, and waterproof all together in one place so that you can change and go. Similarly, taking time on Sunday to download the podcasts you want to listen to that week means that all you need to do afterwards is switch on your phone or PC and start.

It's also a good idea to fix a time when you are going do your habit. Some people write it in their planners or add it to their phones the same way as they would an appointment with someone else. This is an appointment with yourself! If you need to reschedule, do it but fix another specific time, not just « sometime tomorrow» and set yourself a reminder. What if we've made our objective super-easy to achieve, we gathered all the materials we need for it, we've added it to our diary... and it still doesn't happen? Well, sure, we can allow ourselves a moment of "Wah! Why can't I do this!?" despair and then we need to identify what it was that made it impossible. Was it lack of motivation? Was it something in the task that was more difficult than we anticipated? With this information we can try to boost our motivation or we can see if we can again reduce the difficulty. Failure is just information.

You can jump to the end of the article for tips on how to find an authentic language coach here.


Yes, a language coach is an expert practician of your target language. And yes, it's very probable that they have a lot of experience as a language teacher. In fact, what often makes experienced language teachers become language coaches is their experience: they know the limits of traditional teaching methods and approaches. They know the limits of the position of expert too: with the best will in the world, an expert talks and their listeners do just that, listen passively. Passive listening, however, doesn't often develop active skills. In the coaching approach the learning journey is centred on and led by the learner, not the expert. The coach takes care to find out what the learner wants and needs and how that individual learns and practises best, and then works with them to make progress towards their personally-chosen goals, not the expert's goals, nor the goals of a prescribed textbook nor a pre-determined curriculum.


To recap:

• If the language coach decides the objectives, it's not coaching.
• If the language coach relies on textbook exercises during your session, it's not coaching.
• If the learner is not actively engaged in choosing how they learn and practise the language at every step, it's not coaching.

Additionally, if the self-proclaimed language coach insists that a coaching session is essentially a freeform conversation with no structure, it's not coaching. It's not good teaching either. For me, the coach is an alpine guide who knows the terrain thoroughly, they prepare carefully and they carry the maps and tools necessary for any situation that may arise. Then they let the learner lead the way.



Teaching works for someone who is totally comfortable in a traditional classroom setting and who learns well from traditional teaching methods. It can seem the cheaper option too. As traditional group courses are easy to staff and administrate, public institutions can offer them relatively cheaply. Group lessons can be highly rewarding socially too.

But for many adult language learners, traditional classroom methods and teaching approaches don't work. Learners find themselves frustrated because their role as a learner seems very passive: they don't get to choose what they learn, when and for how long. For time-poor professionals, this lack of choice and autonomy has a negative impact on motivation. Learners may be very motivated at the start of their course but after a few weeks of being a passenger on the language journey, they find other things to do with their time. Making progress in language learning is a relatively slow process (sometimes a frustrating one) so being able to stay motivated is key. At this point a good language teacher will use coaching strategies to help the learner rekindle their motivation. A language coach, however, continually stokes the learner's motivation, reminding them of their progress towards their chosen goals and the reasons behind them. The language learner is in the driving seat all along the language learning journey.

Furthermore, language coaching can be used to make targeted improvement in highly specific areas of language use. You need to work on presentation skills? You can work with a language coach to improve those skills pertinent to your role and situation. You're working towards a written entrance examination? The coaching schedule that you create with your language coach will target and practise the skills and language knowledge that you will need on the big day. This is where language coaching becomes efficient and cost-effective in comparison to standard teaching practice.

• Do you have an accredited coaching qualification?
  Look for qualifications accredited by a professional body such as the ICF.
• Who makes the decisions during the coaching session? (Answer: you, the client!)
• How will you structure our sessions together to help me achieve my objectives? (Answer: after an initial session where the coach ascertains your objectives and your current skills in your target language, they will often propose a written short-term plan, outlining how they plan to address the agreed objectives in each session.)

• languagecoachnetwork is an international network of over 200 certified and accredited language coaches.

Time Out is a weekly online magazine that lists all the event and places to see in London. They have a great mobile phone app featuring reviews from the Time Out staff and readers.

Another free smartphone app is VisitaCity which proposes 1-5 day itineraries for major cities across the globe. You can download maps and itineraries to use offline too.
The official Visit London website is a treasure trove of information. The VisitLondon podcasts are particularly useful, both for planning your trip and practising your listening skills.



Go on a tour. The excellent Cityguide tours start from St Paul's cathedral. The City Information Centre, also at the cathedral, carries a wealth of information about cultural, historical and architectural tours.
Take a guided museum tour in English. If you use one of the headsets provided, you can go at your own pace. Similarly, search out guided bus or river tours offering tours in English as well as in French.
Shop for a picnic at Borough Market. The market has its own podcasts about food-related subjects and its thriving community. Alternatively, have Sunday brunch in Brick Lane before exploring the street stalls and galleries of a vibrant and fascinating part of London.
Indulge in afternoon tea at one of the capital's luxury hotels or department stores. Here you're going to have to speak to the waiter as well as negotiate a very British menu!
Visit the theatre. You're in what many people regard as the theatre capital of the world. Londoners are justly proud of the 240-plus theatre spaces their city has to offer. You could make the most of the chance to see Shakespeare performed in a replica of his very own theatre The Globe or plunge into the diverse theatrical universe of the National Theatre complex. With the web, it's easy to find the plot summary of the play beforehand so that you can allow yourself to swept up in the sound and the energy of the action. If two hours of talking heads is too daunting then West End musicals are a wonderful alternative. There are songs, there's dancing, there's spectacle! The "tkts" booth in Leicester Square is a non-profit organisation run by the Society of London Theatre and it's a great place to get discounted tickets for shows.


A word on package tours.
I'm always envious of the perks offered by the work committees in French companies. These committees often organise trips to discover London from the comfort of a luxury coach and with people you usually see in the office. Usually the coach comes complete with a bi-lingual guide. They take care of any possible misunderstandings with the natives. The package tour organisation means that you may eat only at establishments that cater for groups, so menu choices (fish and chips, anyone?) will be made beforehand and served with the minimum of exchange with the waiting staff. And of course, if everyone speaks French, it's super easy to only speak French.
You can still make the most of these types of package tours. If your travelling companions also want to practise English, make a pact to speak only in English. Some ground rules are necessary to help this work. Decide when the English-only rule will operate, for example, when eating or shopping, or in a museum or attraction. Establish what to do about correcting each other's use of English. Ask each other's permission to correct, for example "Would it be useful to talk about formulating questions?" and be ready for a "No."


Ways to consolidate what you learn.
If you're a social media maven, you could update your followers on your London experience by posting bilingually on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. This is a great way to build the links between your vocabulary in both languages.

If social media is not your thing, you could keep a travel and/or language learning journal. Taking 10 or 15 minutes at the end of your day to review the vocabulary you discovered helps that vocabulary to stick. Repetition is the key. Of course, if you're travelling in a group, this consolidation exercise can be a shared evening routine, especially over a pint of beer! When in London...

I've listed some of my favourite children's books below but of course you could use a reader website such as www.goodreads.com to search for books that interest you:


Louis Sachar, "Holes"
Marlorie Blackman, "Noughts and Crosses"
John Boyne, "The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas"
Michael Morpurgo, "Private Peaceful" or "The War Horse"


Of course, you could also try graphic novels or comics for adults. Here, learners of French are really spoilt for choice as les BDs (bandes dessinées) have a huge following in the French-speaking world.

Go with your preferences. You might be a fan of police procedural novels or travel diaries, romantic comedies or historical fiction. If this is the case, you can rely on your knowledge of the genre to read these in your target language. My partner got tired of waiting for the newest translation of Michael Connelly to be released so he started to read them in English. Similarly, I really wanted to read "Eat, Pray, Love" by Elizabeth Gilbert. I bought it in translation to encourage me to practise reading in French.

Try bi-lingual editions. Here you have the original text on one page and the corresponding translation on the other. When I was starting to read French texts, I tried bi-lingual editions of short stories. I abandoned the experiment quickly because I kept stopping my reading to check the translation. The repeated interruption was frustrating. If this is the case for you, try to read the original text by itself. Don't stop to check every new word. Where you can, make a guess about its meaning. If you encounter the word multiple times, you will have lots of opportunities to test your hypothesis. If your guess isn't right you can underline or note the word and check it out later. In fact, this is one of the ways readers expand their vocabulary in their native language.

Use an e-reader. E-readers are fantastic for language learners. You can try the free chapter samples from sites such as Amazon or Fnac to see if you want to read on. There are also the free sites for classic novels, such as Bibliomania and Project Gutenberg. E-readers also have the benefit of built-in dictionaries, so that you can check the word immediately without losing your place. You can start with a bilingual dictionary and later set your preferences to a monolingual dictionary in your target language.

Read newspapers in English. Journalistic language isn't straightforward. Space in printed newspapers costs money, so journalists developed a writing style to communicate more in fewer words. This writing style still exists despite the internet news revolution. Moreover, editors still use wordplay and shortened sentence structures to grab attention in their headlines. These factors combine to make newspaper articles a challenge even for intermediate and advanced students.

So what can you do? Choose wisely. Not all newspapers are created equal. I have found the writing styles of www.nytimes.com and www.theguardian.com great for news reports and articles and The Economist has a great magazine website, www.1843magazine.com which focuses on culture, style and technology.

The trick is to work with this phenomena. If you are working on a film or a TV series, hit the pause button on the DVD or video stream and go do something else: drink a glass or water, walk around, unload the dishwasher -anything that allows your brain the time it needs to reboot. You might find that when you return to the TV, your brain reaches shutdown point even faster. This would suggest that the rest period wasn't long enough so you may need to experiment to find what length of time you need to recover. With practice, you can identify your own concentration patterns and adapt the rhythm of film/tv watching to suit your brain!


Possible approaches

Watch a film that you have already watched in a dubbed or subtitled version. As you already know the characters and plot, you can concentrate more on what the characters say to each other. You could go a step further and choose one character to follow or even a couple of scenes on which to focus.

You could also try a TV series you know and love. Again, you know the characters and plots already. If you feel your concentration weakening and you can change easily from one language version to another, switch back to the dubbed version for 5 minutes. If not, hit the pause button and take a brain break.

Play around with different modalities. For example, you could watch an episode in the original version with subtitles in your native language, or watch it in English with English subtitles, or watch it without subtitles. Then, with an episode you really like, try all three! With one 25 minute episode of Friends or The Big Bang Theory, you have 1 hour 15 minutes of English practice!

Personally, I don't enjoy using films to improve my French. Films mean relaxation for me, and I need to watch them in near-to-total darkness and silence with no breaks. I do love vlogs – video blogs - on Youtube as a way to practise listening skills and to increase my French vocabulary. The subtitle feature on Youtube has a long way to go to reach the accuracy of the subtitling found on TV programmes or DVDs.

Finally, you can make use of the wondrous resource that is www.ted.com to find scripted and well-presented talks on topics that interest you. TED's excellent subtitling software means that the subtitles are actually what the speakers say. And there are often interactive transcripts so you can read a specific part of the presentation before and after watching.

Do what makes your heart sing.
Not everyone wants to pump iron. So some people run, some people hit the pool, some people get on their bikes. Just as there is more than one way to increase your level of fitness, there are lots of ways to improve your language skills. If you try something a couple of times and it doesn't float your boat, try something else. Don't fall into the trap of thinking that the problem is with you and that you and language learning aren't meant to be. It's just that you haven't found the right combination of activity and level of difficulty for you. When you find that sweet spot, it's motivating. You want to keep doing it.

Just do it.
There are days, however, when even the most dedicated athlete doesn't want to work out. But without work, there are no results. One trick is to make a deal with yourself: get into your workout clothes and go and start your warm up. Chances are, once you're in there you'll keep going. In language learning, it's the same: make it easy to do even when you're not in the mood. Even better, work it into your routine. Get up, get coffee and read or listen to some news stories in English. Every morning. Get in your car, turn on the bluetooth connection, find the podcast you downloaded onto your phone. Every morning. This is the equivalent of getting into your gym clothes first thing. Once you're doing it, it's easier to keep doing it.

Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.
If you can't get to that aerobics class, you can jump around in your living room with an instructor, courtesy of the internet. Not so long ago, learning a foreign language meant going and buying a book or a cd or dvd to practise. Now it's as simple as turning on your smartphone to have translation tools, language apps or access to videos made by language teachers and learners. And yes, watching a 5 minute youtube vlog on a topic that interests you counts as practice. You don't have to suffer to learn.

Know your preferences.
Some people like to work out in company. Others like to work out alone. Personally, I like working out alone rather than in a class. I work at my own pace. I change the activity if I feel tired or bored. Other people like accountability and the sense of community and interaction that a class gives. Of course, language is a social thing so even if you can do a lot of the work on your own, there will come a time when you have to try out your skills with others. But this doesn't have to be in a class setting and you can control the duration of that interaction, to fit in with what works for you.

We celebrate small wins.
Rather than looking for validation from the final outcome, we look to celebrate the little victories to be found in each training session. Did I lift a half kilo more in this exercise? Did I do an extra set? Did I exercise even when it was much more attractive to lie on the coach? Same thing with language learning. What new words did I learn this session? Did I do something that gets me closer to my goal of speaking with confidence?

We ride out the plateaus, knowing that we're in it for the long haul.
Knowing why we exercise helps us to this.

We tweak.
If something isn't working, in spite of our consistent efforts - and in weight training terms, that means showing up 3 times a week without fail over three months – we experiment, changing an element of the workout or the nutrition and seeing if that works.

When we need to, we call in expert help.
In both physical training and language learning, working on form with a trainer or coach can be invaluable. They can help you identify the best strategies to achieve your specific goals. They can help establish your starting point and identify the tools, processes and rhythm you need in order to make progress. Remember, receiving coaching doesn't have to be a long-term weekly engagement. As the client, you can decide what form you want the coaching to take and how and when you'll reach out for support. Changing my idea of what a physical trainer could do for me was another transformation but it freed me from thinking that there were things I should do in order to progress. Instead I could focus on what I wanted to do consistently. And consistency is everything when we want to progress.

Question 1: Why do I want to improve my Spanish?
Answer 1: I want to feel more confident when I am speaking to Spanish friends and family about their lives and their interests.

Question 2: Why is it important to me to be able to do speak to Spanish friends and family about their lives and interests?
Answer 2 : I want to be able to start and continue conversations with them about things that really matter to them.

Question 3: Why is it important to be able to start and continue conversations with native Spanish speakers about things that really matter to them?
Answer 3: I want to be able to build relationships with them, particularly my Spanish daughter-in-law and her family.

Question 4: Why do I want to be able to build relationships with them, particularly my Spanish daughter -in-law and her family?
It might be tempting to respond "Duh" here  or to one of your own questions. But keep going, because articulating our reasons aloud, and especially in writing, helps to crystallize the reasoning behind our intentions. And these strengthened reasons can help us when we're fighting the urge to do something other than stick to our intentions.
Answer 4: It will help me feel as if I am making an effort to be part of my daughter-in-law's family, especially as she and my son hope to start a family of their own.

Question 5: Why do I need or want to make an effort to be part of my daughter-in-law's family especially as she and my son hope to start a family of their own?
Answer 5: Because it will help a lot with our relationship if she sees that I'm making the effort to learn and speak her language to communicate with her. Hey, and I will be able to speak with my future grandchildren in Spanish as well as English!