WHAT I KEEP DOING IN THE THREE HOURS OF ENGLISH LEARNING
It is easy to make up your mind to learn English but find the adequate periods of a day to follow it up. Time is always insufficient for office staff with endless tasks, urgent need of customers to satisfy, and the changeable plan of boss to follow.
To keep learning in a busy day, I make my schedule concerning English practice based on the LALM principle. Limited time, abundant forms, less struggle, more effective.
Break the three hours taken in small sections like 15 mins, 30 mins and 45 mins. Instead of being absent minded during the long duration where I may feel bored and exhausted, I prefer to keep each learning experience short and make each minute count.
Choose to do more tasks instead of keeping the energy and time fixed in a certain item. The more things you do, the less likely that you will get bored and unwilling to go on. But it is also not a good idea to keep too many options on your schedule, since it may break the time available for each task into tiny pieces, which may make you hurry up from this one to the next one, leaving inadequate time to each item, and getting it more likely to be distracted during the process of learning.
Be more goal oriented and initiatively flexible, so you would take it as an enjoyable experience instead of something struggling to finish.
Mark everything useful for later review and make every possible chance of applying it in daily life. An conscious input matching with targeted output makes learning effective. You can do something else when you are with English, such as doing facial care, foot bath and body massage while listening to English program, listening to English music while reading English novel, listening to English audio books while writing Jianshu in English, etc.
Here is how my three hours are distributed to five learning sections on English.
LISTENING PART
45mins
5:40-5:55
Listen to English radio LBC
7:50-8:20
Program on HIMALAYA
Audio book Principles
Pronunciation training by Mr Monster
English Pod
SPOKEN ENGLISH PART
30mins
18:30-18:45
Record my own voice when I am reading English articles
19:00-19:15
Shadow TED speech sentence after sentence
READING PART
30mins
17:15-17:30
English novel The king of torts
21:15-21:30
Origin version in English A subtle art of not giving a f*ck
WRITING PART
30mins
6:00-6:30 Write Jianshu or book review in English
TRANSLATION & INTERPRETATION PART 45mins
20:15-20:30
Listen to HIMALAYA Chinese program and try to interpret what I hear into English
20:30-21:00
Watch English talk show without subtitle