Kris Welcome to the actual Fluency podcast. Each week you'll find inspirational, motivational interviews with some of the world's best language learners, industry experts, all trying to help you to learn foreign languages better, faster, and more efficiently. And here we go.
This episode is brought to you by the Italki Goals Competition, where you can win up to $500 of Italki credits and $500 towards a flight ticket of your choice. All you have to do is take a picture or record a video of you saying your language goals for 2019 and sharing them with Italki on social media. For full details on how to enter the competition, go to actualfluency.com/goals.
Hello everybody and welcome to episode 140 of the Actual Fluency podcast. We've got a great show lined up for you today about setting goals and tracking them as well. And also a little bit of a debate on New Year's resolutions. Are they actually useful or should you avoid them at all? Before we get into the episode with Kerstin Cable today, I just wanted to give a quick shout out to a couple of you who wrote to me lately. I really appreciate getting emails and letters sometimes I also received and instant messages. So, I just wanted to thank Ronald, Alan Felipe and Christina Swensen for writing to me this week. I really appreciate all the messages I get.
So today's guest, Kerstin Cable is a long long time friend of the show and myself and she's running her own podcast actually, the Fluent Show. So you might have heard some episodes over there. I've been on the show a couple of times as well. And she and her co-hosts make a really interesting and fun environment over there for anyone who wants to learn languages. As Kerstin often says in the episode today, it's like whatever makes you happy and listening to the Fluent Show is definitely a happy activity. So I highly recommend checking out the Fluent Show. She also has the blog fluentlanguage.co.uk where she talks about some of her own experiences learning languages and she provides a variety of products and resources for you to get better at other languages, like French, German. So, definitely check that out.
She's also organizing a conference called Women in Languages, which is an online only conference. We talk about it a little bit in the episode as well. And that's a very convenient conference to go to because you can do it from your home. It's a purely digital one. So stay tuned for that. And as always, all the links and descriptions, everything will be in the podcast description and on actualfluency.com. So you can easily find the links you want.
As I mentioned, this episode is a lot about goals and goal setting. So I hope you're ready to think about what you want to achieve in 2019. It's a long time, but if you don't manage the goals or your productivity well, you might soon find yourself in 2020 before you realize it. So I hope you enjoyed this episode and let me know if you have any questions or comments. You can email me, Chris@actualfluency.com. I always read every email. I might not respond to everyone, but I certainly try. So, really appreciate it. Have a great episode and have a great January.
Kerstin, it's a wonderful pleasure to have you back. It's apparently been thousands of years since you were on the podcast. So there's a lot to talk about. But why don't you start by giving the listeners who might not be familiar with you, who you are, where you're from, and and what you're working on?
Kerstin Cable Hello, Chris. Well, first of all, thanks for having me on Actual Fluency. I'm very excited to be, to be back. It's been a, it has really been a while.
My name is Kerstin Cable. I am from fluentlanguage.co.uk and like you, I'm a fellow language podcast host. I've been doing this for a few years now and my podcast is called The Fluent Show and it's a show about, as I say every week, loving, living, and learning languages.
I'm German native speaker. I speak English, French, are we doing the list? I'm I seems I'm doing the list. I speak English, French and Welsh, quite well. I speak Spanish and Italian quite okay. Um, and I've sort of dabbled in Russian, and I've done Latin in the past, and at the moment I'm dabbling in Chinese. So, I've got a thing for languages for sure.
Kris Very nice. And you have actually been on the podcast. I think you're up there with the most uh, actual appearances. So, listeners of the show will definitely have heard your voice before. I'm sure there's lots of Fluent Show listeners as well, uh, on as it's a good crossover, um, on the on the listeners there.
So, what we're going to do today is a New Year's Show, a New Year's version. We should almost almost have like funny hats and champagne and and stuff. But since it's a a Monday when we're recording this, I guess it's uh, better just to keep it like this.
But what I want to do is just talk a little bit about the New Year's resolutions of course, but also maybe a little bit more broad goal setting, because a lot of people have no idea how to do it in languages. A lot of people just kind of randomly haphazardly study and they don't seem to get very far. And then there are people like me who have like, let's call them rough ideas and goals of where I want to be and go, but not really good enough to commit. And then you have Kerstin of course, we're brought on as an as an expert of goal setting today. Um, and I was, I was hoping we could do a little bit of a discussion on that today.
So, first of all, I guess the obvious leading question is why should we set goals in language learning? Why can't we just, you know, open a book whenever we feel like it?
Kerstin Cable That's a good question. You know, when I first, when I first started this whole teaching myself a language and I, I had to get organized. I did what a lot of people do, which is I might put in my diary, learn French. Or like learn Polish, or something, learn Russian. You know, and what I found really quickly is if you, if you put something like that down, if your goal is just to learn the language, or to get fluent, you, you very quickly get lost in the, in the day-to-day because both of those goals are, um, they're not really they're not goals in the sense that we, we are taught, let's say, in corporate environments, that goals need to be SMART, right? And that is sensible, so those goals aren't trackable. You essentially just sit down, you go, right, learn Russian, what am I doing? And you, you then have to spend a lot of time worrying about what you're actually doing.
So, goal setting is helpful for many different reasons. Number one, because it gives us an opportunity to break down the very large, very long language learning journey into milestones so we can actually see what's on the horizon and move towards it. So it gives you, it gives you something to aim for that is that is tangible that you can actually reach.
Number two, because it reminds us why we're doing this and it gives us a chance to focus on, on what we're doing. And there's two types of goals, I can talk about them later, that I work with. Um, and I think number three, because it gives us a chance to review and at different stops in the road, so to say, look back and remind ourselves how far we've come because it's very easy to lose that. So it's it's one of the best ways I have found to break down this language learning journey and make it a little bit more manageable so you don't give up.
Kris Right. Because learning a language is a ridiculously long and difficult task for even the best of us really. Like even language experts and top polyglots who've learned 10, 20, 30 languages. For them, it's still a a journey. You know, you have you get it gets easier because you get all the cognates and you know you figure out your method, you figure out how to actually learn, what what parts of the language you should focus on.
But for most people, let's say you sit down, you learn a completely foreign language, like Japanese, if you're an English speaker, you know, that is a big task. And if you just like Kerstin said, put learn Japanese, I mean, first of all, what does that even mean? Is that that's like a that sounds like an end goal, an impossible end goal no less, because how could you ever learn a language fully? Like I I don't know everything of Danish or English for that matter. Uh, so how could I ever expect to do that with a foreign language?
And the other part, like you just touched on the end there, which is the only way to fail learning a language is to stop learning it. But you will, but you will do that if you if it's just too much. You know, you you can't kind of get a an a a good overview of where you're actually progressing. And if you can't see progress, that's when you start to feel like, oh god, I'm burning out. I don't want to do this anymore. Like I've been doing this for years, I don't feel any progress. So, that's where trackable goals really come in. And I don't know what kind of goals you use. Do you want to give any examples of like uh, let's say weekly or monthly or daily study goals, so I can give an example of what how that could look like?
Kerstin Cable Yes. I've I've done a bit of work on the on the goal setting method that that I find works for me and and to helps other people set up a routine. So I've um and I if if anybody's interested, I have put it in um a little it's not a course so much as a toolkit and it's called a toolkit. So it's I've got this thing called the Language Habit Toolkit because I so much focus in everything I I I do around language learning methods. Um, I I focus on habit building, I focus on long-term commitments and I I have to say it it certainly works for me and I know it's worked for for other people as well.
So I am learning from experience and I've been learning like the Welsh language for three years and last week went for a coffee with a lady half an hour and had a a full-on conversation. So it does work. And and but, you know, it works because it's other people's and and uh research and science is good ideas that I've I've crystallized. So I haven't come up with this myself because that'd be stupid.
So anyway, the the idea is that or what I work with is I've got what I call a vision goal, which is your long-term. It's much more of a question of how do you want to feel? What kind of situations do you envision when you're, when you've reached a goal that you really want to reach. So, what's going to make you feel super excited about what you're doing? Who are you going to talk to? How you know, like are you I don't know, are you going to impress a a female or are you going to, you know, um, I was I
