Why Learn French or Spanish

Bottom line of this post: learning French and/or Spanish will benefit you for the rest of your life.

You’ve probably heard people tell you about different benefits of learning a foreign language. Some of these benefits might include learning more about the world or improving your cognitive function. Of course, learning a foreign language also can come in handy if you travel to a place that speaks it.

While those are all notable benefits of learning a foreign language that can make it worthwhile, in this post, I will share some thoughts what I think are very good reasons for learning two specific languages as a native English speaker: French and Spanish.  In future posts for this series, I will share several techniques that can be used to learn these languages effectively and free of charge.

Before sharing about how you can learn these two languages effectively as a native English speaker, let’s start with why you should learn these languages. Learning any language is a challenge that requires lasting, sustained motivation to be successful, and if you are aware of specific purposes for taking on this challenge, that will help you to stick with it longer and increase your likelihood of mastering at least one of these languages.

Without further ado, here’s why you should learn French and/or Spanish:

-            Both languages have lots of common word roots with English, which means studying these languages can help you to develop a bigger English vocabulary

-            Mastering a foreign language will raise other people’s esteem of you and could create social connections that create opportunities you wouldn’t otherwise have

-            Learning a foreign language takes a while – the advantage of this is that it’s a great way to develop self-discipline of performing daily processes to develop good habits that last

If you try learning a language but run out of motivation for a while, don’t despair! You can always take it up another time and it gets easier the more times you try to learn it. Plus, the next several posts will reveal different ways of leveraging knowledge you already have to help you learn these languages.

Strengthen your English

A great reason for learning French or Spanish as a native English speaker is to enhance your English vocabulary. That’s right – you can benefit from learning French or Spanish without any plan to ever use them! All the better if you do use them, but the point here is that studying these languages will help you to recognize the meaning of more English words, and that’s a skill you absolutely will benefit from.

How is it that you can recognize more English words by learning French or Spanish? Simply put, the languages are full of cognates, which are words that look similar and mean similar things. Here is a small table of examples:

French word	English word		Spanish word	English word
utiliser	use (utilize)		montaña	mountain
rarement	rarely		rápidamente	rapidly

An important disclaimer here is to beware of some false cognates between these languages and English. A false cognate is a word that looks like a word in English but has a significantly different meaning from the English word. These are not very common, but here are some examples:

French word	English word		Spanish word	English word
formidable	terrific, wonderful, not formidable or scary		embarazada	pregnant, not embarrassed
blesser	to wound or hurt, not bless		fábrica	factory, not fabric

 Raise People’s Esteem of You

When are you not impressed when you discover that another person skillfully speaks a foreign language? French and Spanish are two of the easiest languages for a native English speaker to learn, but their being easier won’t make you seem less sophisticated or worldly to other people. By enhancing how others regard you, learning either or both of these languages will not only strengthen your English, but by making you more impressive to others, it could also create new social connections leading to opportunities you might not otherwise have access to.

As an aside, not only are French and Spanish practical languages because of their use in North America and elsewhere, but they are both considered pleasant to listen to by most people. Someone else who can speak either of those languages might want to converse in them with you, and someone who can’t may want you to teach them what you know!

Find Success in Daily Process Habit Building

Learning French or Spanish is a great way to get in the habit of completing short daily processes, and unlike many foreign languages, they’re easy enough to start seeing meaningful results in a few months’ time. They offer the right balance of enough challenge to be meaningful but not taking so long to get results that all but the most determined people eventually decide it’s not worth the effort.

Be sure to set realistic expectations for learning French or Spanish. As you listen to the language, you might notice very small increases in how much you understand at specific intervals; for me, I found my ability to first hear new words, then phrases, sentences and eventually entire ideas to slightly increase about once a month. Plan on taking at least a year to feel comfortable reading and listening to either of these languages and maybe longer speaking and writing in them; the key is to learn with short but effective processes that you can sustain nearly every day to the point where missing a day actually feels uncomfortable.

Conclusion

This post informed you about three good reasons to learn French and Spanish. First, use it to improve your English and thereby your ability to make the most of every day and seize opportunities that might otherwise remain out of reach. Additionally, learning French and Spanish can cause others to hold you in higher regard and increase opportunities presented to you through social connections. Finally, learning French and Spanish is a great way to develop personal discipline for pursuing daily process goals, which I wrote about the value of in an earlier post.

Bottom line of this post: learning French and/or Spanish will benefit you for the rest of your life.

Maximizing Success with Good Focus

Getting good at something is often harder than it looks. It usually takes more time and effort than you initially think, but one word that stands out from nearly all others to describe what it really takes to get somewhere: focus. Focus is a state of mind that allows you to achieve mental clarity on how to do something. You can clearly see how to get something done and the path of action you need to take is clear, making you much more likely to take that action and succeed. To maximize your ability to achieve success through good focus, this article offers three fundamental rules of thumb:

-            Block out distractions: be able to focus in the first place

-            Slow down to speed up: harness focus to get started doing something the right way

-            Build mind and muscle memory: use focused practice to make the right way natural

Block out distractions

Focusing means doing one thing at a time and doing it well. The key is to do one thing at a time. If you’re trying to do two things, you’re not focused on at least one of them. Getting rid of distractions allows you to pay all of your attention to doing something new the right way, and that quality effort will make it a little easier to do it the next time.

Distractions can come in the form of surroundings or something within you. If you’re in a noisy place and can’t concentrate, do something you can do easily despite the noise and wait to practice the new thing when it’s quiet. On the inside, you need to take care of yourself to prevent distractions; if you constantly think about how hungry or sleepy you are because you didn’t eat or sleep enough recently, that makes it very difficult to learn and practice something new.

Slow down to speed up

Going slower and doing a more careful job, up to a point, can actually help you accomplish more than rushing. Making careless mistakes, not paying close attention (not focusing), or overconfidence can all cause your effort to be poor enough quality that you have to do it over again. And if you have to do something twice, that takes longer than going a little slower but completing your task gracefully.

Be happy making consistent progress by working the right way on one thing at a time. Think of trying to do two things at once this way: it’s better to throw one ball at a time and hit your target than to try throwing two balls at a target at once, only to have both miss.

“Speed is fine, accuracy is final.”

                                                                           ~Jeff Cooper

Build mind and muscle memory

When you’re first learning to do something new, the first few times are slow, but then getting the hang of your processes and tools allows you to speed up. Spend the first few repetitions getting used to how to do something and ensuring you’re getting the right result. It’s very important to stay focused during practice to ensure the practice iterations are high quality and they reinforce learning to do something new the right way.

Once you repeat the same steps a few times, you begin developing muscle memory to get faster and better, and you remember the steps better. It will start to feel a little less awkward, and when you take a break and return to practice, it often feels more natural resuming from the break than when you stopped! Not only will your effort feel more natural in your movements, but it will also feel more intuitive in your mind.

Accept that getting good at something new takes time and don’t overwhelm yourself with unreasonable expectations.

An extra benefit of developing the new ability is that you also slowly discover ways of doing the process better. You’ll feel like you’re already a natural at something you recently learned and suddenly, something unexpected happens that makes you noticeably better!

Conclusion

Getting good at anything meaningful takes focus, patiently applied as you work through what you’re doing the first handful of times. It is essential to be clear on how to do something before you can make effective progress with your effort. Not only will your effort better take you in the right direction, but knowing in advance what steps to take and how to apply that effort effectively will make you feel more emboldened to act in the first place.

Go slow at first and focus on doing things right. Going fast with poor quality just builds bad habits and makes it harder to get good results and eventually master your pursuit. As you practice with good quality, you will build mind and muscle memory that makes you faster both because your body is used to the movements and because the practice makes what you’re doing more intuitive and automatic in your mind.

To maximize success at anything you want to do in life, focus is a key ingredient every time.

Constructiveness Categories

Do you want to make the most of your time? Work a little harder now so you can relax for a lot longer later? Everybody only has 24 hours in a day, but what you do now can make a big difference in how much time you can spend on things you want to do later. Or you might want to spend the same amount of time on something but get more out of it. Either way, this post will share a good way to sort how you can spend your time into three categories: wasting, maintaining, and building.

Let’s build up to the best part by starting with wasting – wasting time and wasting money. Wasting not only doesn’t help you gain anything in life, but it instead drains away opportunities and resources that you could otherwise use to make your life better. Sitting in a meeting you aren’t relevant to and have no interest in? There went an hour you won’t get back. Did you just let an old subscription that you’re not using auto-renew because you weren’t paying attention to it? That’s $100 out the window! Did you really have to lose those things?

One important caveat about waste is that a treat here and there in moderation is not a waste, and rest time is for recharging, so such things should be viewed more as maintaining than wasting; you have to take care of yourself, too! 😊

Maintaining is activity that is necessary to preserve what you have that doesn’t create anything new for you. You have to cook meals and clean up after yourself, and while that takes a lot of time and effort, it sure beats the alternative of going hungry. Sleep doesn’t get anything done, but try to get anything done without it!

Since it generally costs a lot less (in either time or money) to spend the time and effort to care for what you have instead of neglecting and then having to replace something, maintaining is usually a good use of your time and energy. In addition to caring for things around you instead of letting them go to waste, maintaining is important for enabling the third category your time and effort can go to, building.

Building is when you create or acquire something that allows you to do more. Buy a bicycle and you can travel further than on foot. Investing your money instead of keeping it under your mattress will (usually) cause you to become wealthier instead of slowly getting poorer from inflation. Paying for a training program that lands you a higher paying job is an example of building that will almost surely pay for itself and lots more. Come up with a slick studying technique and learn twice as much in an hour as you used to.

Building is where not wasting your time really becomes worthwhile. Do enough building for a long enough time and eventually, you’ll be able to waste as much time as you want. But by then you’ll be in enough of a habit of building that you probably won’t want to slow down very much of the time. If you want to be a builder and accomplish a lot in your life, take comfort in knowing that building will eventually become natural if you make it a habit (start small, as explained in Process Goals vs Progress Goals and The Value of To-Do Lists), and the more you improve at building and the more you build, the more joy you find in doing it!

Don’t put so much pressure on yourself to constantly build that you end up burning out. Be fine with some waste and plenty of maintaining along with some building. The best way to build the most over time is to gradually form an intentional habit of it here and there, slowly working to achieve more and more. Take your time. But by being mindful of these three categories for spending your time, you can more easily take charge of moving your life forward in whatever direction you want to go!