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Why do you want to learn your target language?

Growing up as a slacker, in my younger days, a foreign language class was the easiest way to shoot up my grade point average. How would you rather raise your overall average, sacrifice long hours improving your Physics grade, or, within thirty extra minutes per day, increase your Spanish grade without having to perform complex calculations?

If you are a student in school and are being forced to take a language class, your reason for wanting to excel may be a simple matter of just passing the class or getting a reasonable grade, but why stop there? Learning a language is fun, can lead to adventures that broaden your horizons, and make you a more marketable person. Plus, an easy A is supposed to be an easy A. Who wants an easy C?

You have to choose, before you start, which benefit you want for yourself. Something has to lay behind your pulling yourself out of your communicative comfort zone. Your job as a language speaker is to find that reason as quickly as possible and associate with it. Keep it burned into the back of your mind, and never let it go.

Your personal reason, whatever it may be, is important to you. It cannot be something that you allow to just slide. It is your single, personal motivation, for no one else but yourself. You would never sit idly when you hear it, when you are reminded of it and how important it was to you when you made it. This goal, the vision of your newfound abilities is what pushes you on in the hard times of studying conjugations, subjugates, and a bunch of other terms you would simply rather not.

There are many reasons why a person learns a foreign language. Common motives include:

• You have a beloved family member who speaks your target language and not the one that you speak.

• You want to travel to a land where the majority of the people speak your target language.

• There is a job opportunity with your target language that just does not present itself with your native language alone.

• You want to build something that is a surefire conversation starter.

• You have fallen in love, literally or metaphorically, with someone who speaks your target language.

• You want to speak with other people in a language that you do not want others to be able to easily interpret.

• You have to learn the target language for school and want a good grade.

• You have to learn the target language for work and want to impress your boss or supervisor.

• Children laugh at you when you speak the target language (it's a respect thing).

• You want to experience media, like songs or movies, in your target language, in its original form, and not horribly dubbed.

There are plenty more reasons as well, but you will have to take a few minutes and make this analysis for yourself.

No, seriously. Before you read another word in this book, mark the page that you are on and put the book down. Take a few minutes, five to ten, or more if you so choose. Think about exactly why you are learning your new language…

Welcome back.

If you read on without thinking about why you are studying, please go back, bookmark the page (like I suggested) and set the book aside to reflect. This is the heart of your learning experience, the thinking. The why pushes you past the hardships.

If you have reflected and still have not discovered the reason why you are learning your language, I have good news for you. If you continue to reflect as you learn how to properly learn languages, you will eventually find yourself in for a euphoric moment, where you realize exactly why you would put yourself through the extra stress of learning this other way to communicate. At the very least, the benefits will eventually be clear to you. Keep your eyes open and you will find a reason to call your own.

If you have discovered the reason why you are learning your language, good for you! You have taken a very important step that will differentiate you from the average language learners out there.

Goals in language are important because if we do not have goals, if the other you has no way to see how much he has grown through the benchmarks you create, then you will remain unsure about your abilities when you try to communicate with others in your target language.

Like when you were a young child, and you kept looking in the mirror to see if you could finally see yourself like your parents could, or kept returning to that measuring poster, day after day, to see if you finally got an inch taller, the other you needs to do the same.

Language goals let us know that in terms of our target language, we have gotten an inch taller.

Now, let us look at how we write language goals:

Start Backwards to Go Forward

As with other goals, language goals should be long and short - at the same time.

You should have a long-term language goal and various short-term language goals that lead up to you achieving the long-term, overall, more important, language goal.

It would be beneficial if you studied goal setting itself to properly set any goal that you wanted to achieve, (that book is coming soon) but if you do not have the time, I can show you the simplest way to set language goals.

Start with your long-term goal. This is the end of your journey. We create this first, based on the secret that all good writers and storytellers know; you have to start from the ending.

For effectiveness, your long-term goal should have a connection with your main reason for learning your target language in the first place. (It is good that you did not skip this step...)

For example, let’s say that you were studying French via a course offered by your school of choice. Your long term goal will have a time period of the entire year and you will also make multiple short term goals with time lengths of about two or three months for each.

So, our long-term goal for this French course would be as follows:

You start from the end, not from the beginning.

(Note how in the language goal, “survive as a tourist,” is included. You would not just write, “pass the class.” A concrete goal, based on a real “why” is easier to attain.)

Then, with your end clearly in sight, you want to work backwards, making shorter goals until you get to the last goal, which will then be your first point of action, the first thing you actually have to do. From there, you work back up the line, slowly but surely, constantly hitting your short-term goals until you reach your long-term goal.

The timespan you select is set in stone and should be based on what you deem reasonable because you are going to commit to this end date. For example, the course you are taking ends in three months and you want self-acknowledgement that you have achieved something at the end of those three months. Or, if you are studying on your own, you want to have a goal with a deadline to keep you on track. (One year, for example, works just fine, but it could be longer.)

There will be no editing the date of your long-term goal. Commit yourself to this. The smaller goals can be worked around and manipulated, but your long-term goal’s ending date has to remain solid. If you find yourself habitually editing goals or changing dates to

fit the situation, then you have a discipline problem and you probably need to look into ways to improve yourself in that area before attempting anything else. My advice is to keep your dates in tact and be honest with yourself.

After my due date I need to think about the action steps that I need to accomplish such a long-term goal and develop some short-term goals:

Then go backwards: What will lead to that end?Then go back some more…Eventually, you will have gone so far back that all your steps are laid before you.

There is no limit to the number of short-term goals you can create for yourself. Think of them as a trail that will lead you back home, like Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs. As stated above, once you finish writing out your goals, you begin from the highest number (in the case of our example, short term goal #3) and work your way down (to #2) until finally, you get to short-term goal #1. Once you have accomplished that, you are ready to tackle your long-term goal.

Think about it like those classic fighting video games. You start at the bottom of the pile (against the tenth fighter) and work your way up to battling better fighters.

Then, when you defeat the last guy on the top of the totem pole, a special super boss comes that you have to beat to end the game. By the time you get to this super boss, your gaming experience has risen so much that you actually have an excellent chance to win, compared to when you first started the game!

These language goals are similar, and quite honestly the approach to this kind of goal setting can be applied to almost everything.

But again, that is another book altogether.

Once you’ve obtained short-term goal #1, you will have built yourself up to be so capable, that the long-term goal will be easy to achieve. People looking in from the outside will be puzzled and bewildered because people will not understand how you started talking French “all of a sudden.”

From here, you would simply keep going. Provided you correctly created your short-term goals to lead into your long-term goal, when you are finished taking actions and all of your goals have been achieved, the only thing left to do is to test yourself with a real life situation.

Depending on what your long-term goal is, there are many ways for you to test your development - in the case of our French example, hop on a plane to France or French-speaking Canada, and see how you do.

The beauty of this is that other than the details that I explained, you can style and create the actual physical goal-chart any way you like. Let the creative part of you run wild. Draw matching pictures on it of you breaking through every single goal you have written for yourself, if that is what you want to do on it. Or make it clear and easy for you to look at.

Put pictures of the Eiffel Tower, pastries found in France, or whatever else inspires you about the country. Whatever you do, make it pleasing to your eyes, because you have to look at it, at least once a day, until you get to short-term goal #1, and ultimately achieve your long-term goal.

The repetition of looking at your language goals everyday is very important. It is the glue that holds together the foundation of why you want to learn your language. It reminds your native brain why it should take a backseat to this baby target language brain for a few minutes, or even hours at a time, holding back the idea that it does not make sense.

Now, obviously, you could take a language course and sit through it without making long and short-term goals. However, that’s what everybody does. And you do not want to be like everyone else. You want to stand apart, and to excel in your language learning.

Brian Tracy, whom I regard as one of the top success specialists, said something along the lines of a normal person who makes clear goals for himself would easily overachieve against a genius, or someone with talent who makes none and does not know what he wants.

We will depart from this very important chapter with some food for thought. Assuming that you found no particular reason why you should learn a second language, even after heavy contemplation, I thought I should be nice and give you one.

There are clear mental benefits to being bilingual. If you do not believe me, then look up the different articles that have come out in many newspapers and magazines indicating the advantage that bilingual people have over monolingual individuals. Or, simply perform an internet search with they keywords, “bilingual, benefits, advantages,” and see what you find. Some researchers even believe that being bilingual can alleviate or hinder some mental diseases that can strike at an older age, such as dementia or Alzheimer’s. The brain is a muscle to be maintained too after all.

Key Success Factors Review

Have confidence.

Repeat like a baby and celebrate your birthdays.

Create your personal why for success and make goals accordingly.