2 Types of Life Skills
Language Tip of the Week:
Spaced Repetition. It works.
If you've ever researched techniques or strategies that help with language learning, you've probably stumbled across the term "spaced repetition..." for a good reason: it works.
This often refers to a feature that many apps implement by prompting you to study specific digital flashcards, but only when you need to. For instance, out of a deck of 500 cards, you might only have 7 (or less) "due" on any given day. When you see a card, you select a rating based on how well you know it, and your rating dictates how soon you will see that same card again and how frequently thereafter.
The idea is to study more frequently as opposed to long durations in one sitting. The repetitions are spaced.
Using a software for this, at the very least for vocab, is very helpful because it saves time and mental energy of deciding what you need to be reviewing each day.
I've used various programs in the past, such as Quizlet and the Repetitions App (this one very extensively), but I recently switched to Anki to mix things up, and I'm happy with it so far. I'm currently building three separate decks: Russian, Spanish, and English (yes, I still occasionally encounter words in my native language I don't recognize right away—anyone who says they never do is probably lying or doesn't read that much).
A helpful approach is to apply this same principle to all modalities and skills within your target language. When planning out your week or month, for example, it's good to identify what exactly you'll be doing and how often; listening, reading, writing, and speaking (and different exercises for each)—spaced out and each with an appropriate allocation of time based on your individual goals and current weaknesses.
Today I wanted to briefly touch on two types of skills that Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi refers to in his book Flow: instrumental skills and expressive skills. Csikszentmihalyi classifies instrumental skills, either physical (such as hunting or commercial craftsmanship) or mental (such as reading or writing), as those that one needs to survive and move through life. Expressive skills, however, are those that integrate our subjective experiences and feelings—writing or singing something from the heart, for example, or playing a sport from a place of individual passion and spontaneity. Of course, a skill can start out as solely instrumental and later evolve into a form of expression.
Everyone needs both instrumental and expressive skills, but the expressive skills in particular show us who we really are.
When a person only utilizes instrumental skills, a part of them is likely dying inside.
One of the things I like about language learning is that it develops both instrumental and expressive skills.
Acquiring a foreign language means acquiring practical skills for communication with more people, across more cultures, and in more situations. This extension of one’s ability to communicate also means the ability to express one’s creative side in a variety of ways, with more people.
More importantly, however, the uncomfortable yet rewarding process of learning a foreign language is an adventure that informs us how to develop new instrumental and expressive skills at any time.
–Thomas