Hey there! Welcome back!

Throughout the rest of this module, we’re going to dive into some of the fundamental concepts of language learning. These concepts include how to learn, and specifically how to learn your target language in a highly efficient and highly effective way.

Why is this necessary? Because the intermediate level is where most learners tend to struggle. To succeed at this level—and make it to the next one—you can’t just pick up any resource and expect improvement; you need to apply the right principles, in the right way.

There are other obstacles, as well. Most learners at this level are lacking knowledge in 3 key areas that I believe are essential for reaching fluency in any language:  

Mindset, skill development and organizational strategies.

Let’s take a moment to briefly unpack each of these concepts:

Mindset

This concept has to do with how you approach language learning from a psychological point of view. It’s about how you think about the learning process, and how those thoughts and emotions affect the way you learn. It’s also about your beliefs—what you believe about what  language learners are capable of in general, and what you are capable of as an individual. If you have a poor mindset (that is, you don’t believe you can learn a language, or don’t see any point in trying), you won’t make it very far, even if you have everything else you need to master a language. For this reason, building a healthy and unbreakable language learning mindset is one of the first things we’ll focus on in this course.

Skill development

As you’ll hear me say often in the coming modules, language learning is a skill. More accurately, it’s a network of skills that all work together and influence each other in varying ways. Developing a skill is a completely different type of learning than what you may be used to in school—it requires special forms of practice that most people have never encountered before. If that is the case for you, then this is the course where you’ll finally learn how to make that happen.

Organization

When I say organization, I’m talking about the organization of the language learning process as a whole. Language learning is a long-term process that requires you to invest large amounts of personal resources—specifically your time, your effort, and your attention.

Most language learners never develop strategies for managing these personal resources in an efficient way, so they quickly run out of one (or all) of them, and give up their learning. Throughout this course, I’ll be teaching you organizational strategies so that won’t happen, which will allow you to learn your target language for a long time to come.

These are the three core concepts on which this course is built. We’ll cover each of them in the order I’ve just presented—mindset first, skill development second, and organization third.

How We’ll Explore The Three Core Concepts?

We start with mindset because it is the foundation upon which all your language learning is built. A strong mindset will be your key source of motivation and drive, and will be what keeps you going, even when learning inevitably becomes more challenging. To do this, we’ll help you develop a strong emotional connection to your target language, as well as help you eliminate any limiting beliefs you might have about the language learning process as a whole.

Next, for skill development, we’ll tackle the 7 smart language learning principles, which underlie any and every effective language learning strategy. Once we’ve laid that framework, I’ll teach you the very same methods and strategies I use to grow my language skills beyond the intermediate level.

These strategies cover all major skills of language learning—listening, reading, speaking, and writing—and will be focused on helping you move ever closer to fluency. By the end of this section of the course, you’ll see exactly how these strategies exemplify the core language learning principles, and how both the principles and strategies work together to help you become a smart and flexible language learner who is ready to overcome any challenge.

Lastly, for organization, I’ll show you how to take everything you’ve learned in the course to make it fit into your daily, weekly, and monthly routines, so that you can develop a powerful language learning habit that you can sustain indefinitely.

If you can master all 3 of these core aspects of language learning—which I know you can—then you’ll be well on your way to becoming the best language learner you can possibly be. And the best part is, once you have these skills, you won’t just be able to apply them to one language, but to as many languages as you’d like to learn, for the rest of your life.

Are you ready? Because the next step in your journey towards becoming a master language learner is about to begin.