How to Increase Your Language-Learning Stamina

The Power of the “5 More” Rule

Learning anything new is a demanding task for the brain. There’s a reason why you feel tired physically when you haven’t done hard labour; learning a new language is changing your mental structure, and mental fatigue quickly becomes physical fatigue.

But if you quit when you’re feeling tired and defeated, you’re training yourself to dislike learning this new language. You’re increasing resistance to the language-learning goals you have set, which is why you’re not making the progress you had expected or hoped for. As resistance goes up, you’re more discouraged every time something goes wrong — eventually you’ll give up and abandon the journey to reach your destination.

There’s one simple trick to train yourself to last longer:

Just promise yourself “five more”. That can be 5 more minutes, 5 more words, 5 more exercises, 5 more anything.

The beauty of this technique is that even if you are tired (or sleepy, frustrated, bored), you are tricking your brain and yourself to do just a little bit more. It feels like “5 more” will not really get you anywhere, which is true. The point of the exercise is not to make a lot of progress. The point is to build just a tiny bit more endurance — the capacity to persevere and withstand difficulty and…