[hussainbilal]

It sounds like their habits are influenced by your environment. Just tie the habit to a new productive habit. Make it work for you.

Example 1: start learning a new natural language, and also switch all your social media feeds to only provide content in that language. You'll either lose interest in learning the language and start withdrawing from social media, or your unbreakable habit will sustain your new language learning habit.

Example 2: I listen to a lot of music. I don't feel right unless it's running in the background. So I tried learning french and listen to only french pop. It worked for a few months, but then I hit the problem of not being able to pick up spoken (not written) french and parse its grammar while also trying to pick up the phonetics of native speakers. But I then learned about creole and its more flexible and simpler grammars and phonetics. I was able to start thinking in the language using french vocabulary. So I pivoted my habit to learning Haitian Creole and listening to Haitian music.

[hawksprite]

This sounds like a methodology I’d like to try. I’ve not heard of it before. Do you have any suggested Haitian musicians or artists?

Thank you for sharing.

[hussainbilal]

You've probably heard of this: atomic habits.

The idea of an atomic habit is that there is no disconnect between a habit and the objective you're aiming for. So in this case, the habit was not to learn a new language, but just consistently and constantly engaging with French. When I hit a wall, I doubled down my atomic habit to a simpler macro-french where all my past knowledge would still be applicable due to the etymology heavily influenced from french colonization.

I have no suggestion for artists, because the point is to pickup phonetics under variation. If you listen to the same artist, you're only picking up their way of speaking.

i.e. I'm guilty of playing dubmatique and maitre-gims on loop. Did nothing for improving my ability to parse a spoken french sentence in real-time. I just ended up memorizing the lyrics.

I suggest listening to pop music on shuffle, even if it's not your cup of tea. Pop music is usually very good with enunciating words. Additionally in my experience, pop music lyrics align really well with a language's IDF.

[hawksprite]

I have. Didn’t realize that it encompassed this. Thank you.

I’ll give that a shot for sure. It’s always been difficult to be sure if you were learning the right form or vernacular when messing around with language apps.