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I’ve already shared with you a lot of potent ideas you can use to improve your language practice. And most if not all of those ideas come from what I actually do in my daily life: flashcards, Concentration, Fighting Flashcards, The Leitner Box, and Othertongue. I also like Scrabble and Bananagrams and so on. But I’d like to let you in under the kimono in this post and share some more details about my habits and routines.

Alright, so, right outta the gate, I gotta tell you: I’m a big believer in the power of mental triggers and habits. A mental trigger is something that tells your brain: Hey! It’s time to start that routine! It’s time to start that habit! So on days when you don’t feel like exercising, if you can at least muster up the courage and the strength to just hit PLAY on your favorite workout album, THAT’S a mental trigger, and just watch as that tiny action changes your brain chemistry and your body will then start to want to work out.

One of my mental triggers in the early afternoon is preparing tea. I’m a tea addict and every afternoon I have a little ritual of preparing gongfu cha which is the Chinese tea ceremony. It’s just a certain way of preparing tea. Anyway, that is my mental trigger to tell my body and mind, yeah, we’re gonna do this now and all other distractions in the mind can just be turned off that way. Because it’s a habit. So I clear off my desk. And on the desk, I put my study material and my tea stuff and that’s it. And I practice BUTT POWER (as Michio Kaku said once) and I stay put in my chair until my eyes bleed. Just kidding! It’s not that bad. But it helps me stay focused to have that habit, that routine, and a distraction-free environment, you see?

Once I’ve flipped the switch on my mental trigger, I start reading. I like to read challenging books on topics that I love in my target language. Probably, I can only understand like 60 – 80% of these books that I’m reading. And whenever I encounter a word that I don’t know, I will mark it down with a little sticky tab and keep going. Then, at a later time, a time I’ve set aside to do this each week, I will look up those words and write them down onto flashcards and remove the sticky notes from my book. That kind of batch processing will save you time and make you more efficient.

You see, I’ve trained myself to not get hung up if there’s a word I don’t know, I press forward, and I don’t interrupt myself to look up definitions and make cards. Because there is a switching cost you will pay every time you switch to different activities, every time you check notifications on your phone or e-mail and then go back to your studies, you’ve lost about 15 to 20 minutes. It honestly could take you up to 20 minutes to get back into that state of flow from an interruption. Something to think about.

So that’s my daily early afternoon routine. Think about what’s your mental trigger that starts your routine? And what is your routine? Do you have a routine? Do you understand how to batch process your tasks? Your big results that you reap later will be based on the little things you do consistently every day.

Alright that’s it for this post! Don’t forget to like and subscribe so that you and other likeminded people can find your way back to my latest and greatest content. You can also head over to the Language Card Games Shop to buy a game, support what I do, and start playing your way to language-learning success today.

In the next post, I will be speculating about the future of language card games, so stay tuned for that!