💡How to Build a Habit to Learn Korean Every Day

Sharing the experiment I tried from January this year

안녕하세요!

Hello, everyone!👋🏻

I hope everyone’s having a good weekend (or had a good weekend if your weekend’s over). I was busy building the new website and fortunately I was able to complete the work in time and a lot of people told me that it looks great!

This is how it looks if you haven’t checked it out!

Anyway, many of you have already signed up and I would like to say thank you from the bottom of my heart💙 I’m deeply grateful that you have chosen me as your Korean teacher when they are many other options available elsewhere. I feel truly honored!

While the course is up for registration accepting students, I’m constantly thinking about how to make it as effective as possible. And one thing I wanted to do with soon-to-be my students from the very beginning of building this course was actually not about the Korean language.

What?😱

Yeah! It’s got nothing to do with your Korean and I don’t think any other language teachers do this. But it’s probably something that you need the most to become really good at Korean. I’m not sure if you remember but I challenged myself to wake up at 6:30 in the morning every day which was something I failed miserably for my whole life. But I tried a different method to see if it’d work for me and it worked to a certain degree. The most important thing is that I felt the sense of achievement during the challenge and I really want to share that experience with you. So, I made a template for you and we are all going to challenge ourselves to stay consistent for 66 consecutive days.

Why 66 days?

There was a study done by University College London in 2012 that it takes 66 days to build a habit! (If you want to know more about it, click here.) Well, 66 days are a little more 2 months, so that seems like a pretty good deal if you can build a great habit, right? This is what I tried earlier this year and it was not easy, but it was not terribly difficult either! So based on my experience, I made this template to evaluate your day, write the details, and lastly the good and the bad.

You will fill this out every day before you go to bed

And here is an example after the first 2 days of the challenge.

An example of day 1 and 2 of the challenge

By writing down what and how you did every day, you will know where you need to improve and this will motivate you further to do better as the challenge progresses.

So, before starting the challenge, you will need to set your own goal. Everyone is going to have a different daily goal because each one of us has a different life. Some are going to be extremely busy during the course whereas some might be going through a break so they have relatively more time to invest in the course. The daily goal needs to be at a sweet spot between too easy and too difficult. It needs to be challenging enough but not too overwhelming that will make you give up on your second day. And this is where you are going to write your goal!

After setting your goal, each student will have an access to this page where you choose one of these three ‘stickers’ and stick it every day to see how you are doing. An example after finishing the challenge would be something like this.

As you can see, there will be both good days and bad days, and you can possibly fall into a slump in the middle of the challenge. But that’s all okay and it’s going to happen to many of us including myself. But, I believe it will already be a great achievement as long as you do this every day.

What I hope to achieve with you is not only learning the basic Korean but also training ourselves to have the ability to continue learning even after the course, because that is how I learned different languages. What’s going to be really awesome is that we will be sharing our progress and encourage each other to do better. That’s something I’m really looking forward to because I didn’t have anyone to do this before.

Even if you are not joining the course, you can use this method to build a different habit that you would like to have! So, feel free to utilize this idea if you want.

Thank you very much again for those of you who signed up! I’m getting really excited! And if you are thinking about joining, you have 6 days left until the registration closes so make your decision asap! (Join Team Aigoo now here!)

Let me know if you like this idea and any other thoughts are welcome!

감사합니다!