Meditation For Language Learning

Okay, welcome to Effortless English Today's podcast is titled Meditation for Language Learning Let's get started We have a strong tendency, as both language teachers and language learners, to focus on quantity.

We stress about test score numbers. We stress about the number of words we know. We stress about the number of hours we study each day. There's no doubt that quantity is important.

To learn a language well, you have to put in a lot of hours. You need hundreds, thousands of hours of listening. You need hundreds and thousands of hours of reading. You've got to listen to and read a lot of different material.

But quantity is only half the story. For all study hours are not equal. I see this a lot in my class. Many students dutifully come to class each day. They attend four hours a day, four days a week, for a total of 16 hours.

but some learn a lot faster than others. I found that the speed of their learning has less to do with natural talent and more to do with the quality of their class time.

In other words, some students concentrate and participate during the entire four hours, while others barely pay attention. The latter group text message on their cell phones, stare out the window, chat with each other in their native language, daydream, and do anything else but focus on the English material we are working on.

All the students in my class are getting the same quantity of English hours, but some are getting much higher quality, in other words, much more efficiency, because they have the ability to focus and concentrate.

While many of the bad students are not motivated, some are. What they lack is not so much the desire to learn English as the ability to focus for an extended period of time.

Perhaps this is a result of the TV age, but for whatever reason, many people just can't seem to concentrate on one thing longer than 15 minutes. This is a problem. as concentration is essential for mastering any skill, not just language learning.

The good news is that if you don't have much power of concentration, you can develop it. The best way I know is through meditation. There are many forms of meditation, but all demand increasing powers of concentration.

Daily meditation practice, therefore, will strengthen and lengthen your mental concentration. little by little, day by day, your mind will grow stronger. Do a Google search on meditation or get a book by Thich Nhat Hanh, S. N. Goenka, or another meditation master. Start slow, just a few minutes a day, and then build up gradually.

As your meditation time increases, you'll be able to focus longer and will thus get much more out of your study time. This is vital because in language learning, All hours are not created equal.

Okay, that's the podcast. Let's review some of the vocabulary used in this podcast. Up at the beginning, I mentioned that we have a strong tendency to focus on quantity.

A tendency is something we usually do. So a strong tendency is something we almost always do. And focus on means pay attention to or concentrate on. So, you know, we always worry about quantity, quantity, quantity.

How much, how much, how much. In fact, that's what stress means. Stress is normally used as a noun, but we can also use it as a verb. When we use it as a verb, if you say, I'm stressing about my test, it means to worry.

So in this case, stress means worry when we use it as a verb. So I talk about the fact that we're always stressing about quantity, but we forget about quality. And quality is just as important, maybe more important.

I also mentioned I talk about my class, my normal school class. And most of my students dutifully come to class every day. Dutifully means to do something from a feeling of duty.

And duty means obligation, something you feel you must do. So, they are dutifully coming to class. It means they come to class because they feel they must.

Maybe their parents sent them to America to study English. Maybe they're spending a lot of money. But for some reason, they feel like they should come to class. Maybe they don't enjoy it, but they feel like they should.

So, when you do something for that reason, we say you do it dutifully. Alright, I also mentioned that some of them have higher quality class time than others. Because some of them barely pay attention.

Barely means almost zero. Very little. So they don't pay attention very much. And I mentioned that they stare and they dare daydream. Daydream means to

Think about something else, not where you are, not what you are doing. So you're imagining something in your mind. It's like dreaming, similar to dreaming, but you're awake, you're not asleep. So it's kind of like fantasizing.

Staring, of course, means looking at something without stopping, without looking away. So they stare at the wall. They dream about something. I don't know what they're dreaming about.

But they're not listening to English. They're not paying attention to English. I also mentioned that quality, if you pay attention, if you can concentrate, you will get better efficiency from your study. So efficiency basically means effectiveness.

It means you get the most from your time. If you spend one hour but you don't concentrate, maybe you only learn a little bit. But if you spend one hour and you concentrate the entire time, all of the time, then you will learn much more. So you're more efficient.

I also talk about a lack of concentration. Some students lack concentration. It means they don't have it. If you lack something, it means you don't have it.

All right, I also use the word essential a couple times in the podcast. Essential, of course, means very, very important, super important. Later, towards the end of the podcast, I use the word mastering. I'm using it as a verb.

A master, using it as a noun, a master is someone who is great at something. Michael Jordan was a master of basketball. Mastering or to master, it means to become a master. It means to become very, very, very good at some skill.

In this case, English. Finally, I mentioned that if you don't have good concentration power... You can develop it. If you develop something, you learn it.

You get the skill. Over time, you get better and better and better. And I said one great way to develop meditation. Concentration is through meditation.

And meditation is a mental exercise where you calm your mind and you focus your mind. Some meditation techniques use your breathing. So you focus your mind on your breathing when it goes in and when it goes out. You try to concentrate only on your breathing.

Sounds simple, but not so easy. Try it sometime. See if you can focus only on your breathing for 5 minutes or 10 minutes or 20 or 30 minutes. If you try, I think you might find it's quite difficult, actually.

Anyway, I mentioned that you can do a Google search. A Google search is a little bit of slang. It just means an Internet search. You don't have to use Google.

You can use Yahoo or any search engine. But anyway, type in the word meditation and you will get many results from meditation. I also recommend two different meditation masters that write books and they also have courses. They teach courses about meditation.

One is Thich Nhat Hanh. He is a Vietnamese Buddhist monk currently living in France. He had to leave Vietnam because the Vietnam government didn't like him because he was against the Vietnam War.

And then the other one I mentioned is S. N. Goenka. Goenka originally from Burma, but he's from an Indian family. I think he lives in India now. And Goenka has many courses and many centers around the world.

They're called Vipassana Centers. So anyway, both of these people, they have good books about meditation and good courses. So do a little research. Okay, and I mentioned finally that concentration is vital for language learning.

In fact, it's vital for mastering any skill. you have to be able to concentrate more than 10 or 15 minutes. That's just not enough time. You've got to be able to focus for 30 minutes, for 45 minutes, for an hour.

So you have to develop this ability. Some people have it easily. Some people need to work at it. But either way, you've got to be better at concentrating and focusing.

This will help your language learning and any learning a lot so work on it do what you need to do but build your ability build your power to concentrate

Okay, well, thank you once again for joining me and Effortless English. As I mentioned before, we are not accepting free trial members for EffortlessEnglish.com right now. Probably next month, we'll open for maybe one or two weeks, and we will accept...

free trial members. So you can try the website, try the club for, you know, one month for free and then decide. If you want to join now, if you want to get text and vocabulary lists for each podcast, Unfortunately, you need to pay money.

It's only $9.99 per month, or I believe it's $17.99 for two months. So you can join. Go to EffortlessEnglish.com, www.effortlessenglish.com, and sign up, and then you can get learning guides, the text, and the vocabulary for every podcast.

Okay? Whether you join EffortlessEnglish.com or not, please be sure to listen to English every day. I recommend at least a minimum of one hour each day. One hour a day.

If you enjoy what you are listening to, it should not be painful. In fact, it should even be fun. You should enjoy it. The key to enjoying English is to find material that you like.

If you like Effortless English, listen to the Effortless English podcast. If you don't like it, then don't listen to it. Find something else. Find something you enjoy.

Find something that motivates you, that makes you love English. Hopefully that's this podcast, but if not, find something else. If you love what you listen to, you will enjoy learning English, you will do it more, and one hour a day will seem very easy.

Okay, I will see you next time. Good luck and goodbye.