Are you a collector too?

Collecting stuff for language learning can sometimes be as satisfying as learning the language.

Books, cards and kits for learning Chinese, Esperanto, French, German, Latin, Māori, Polish, Russian and Spanish take up 5 shelves in my bookcases. Plus, there’s another shelf with bilingual, learner and visual dictionaries.

I also bookmarked a bunch of websites on my laptop, downloaded an array of apps on my iPad and subscribed to a stream of podcasts on my phone.

All these materials from different eras promote a variety of language learning methods and approaches. Several promise success in just 21 days.

Sure, some of my purchases remained untouched.

But I continued to add to my collection.

In the hope I’d finally find the one perfect learning resource.

Even though I knew it didn’t exist.

Take action

I read somewhere that pursuing more knowledge is a great way to avoid action.

Accumulating more books and apps to learn a language is perhaps a form of procrastination too.

One day, I’d like to be able to get by in all the 9 languages sitting on my shelves and dwelling in my devices.

But for now, I’m polishing the 2 that I speak well and improving the 2 that I know a bit.

I’m taking action.

To become fluent in a language, it’s the learning, repeating and revising that count.

Not the searching, collecting and storing.

Starting is hard – but once you begin, you’ll enjoy the doing.

At first, do 5 minutes a day.

And snowball from there.

Not sure how to start?

I can help you set up and stick to your DIY language project.

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