Create your Own Language Studies Curriculum Right Now

Whenever I start learning a new language, I like to plan what I will do in the course of that learning journey. I create a schedule and try to follow it so I can improve faster. Having more knowledge makes me feel more motivated to achieve my goals and learning all the time truly makes me feel alive. Creating a plan for my studying process is something I love to do.

If you want to create your own autonomous learning plan, continue reading!

Having a plan for my studies is something that motivates me a lot. When I was at school, I enjoyed seeing the curriculum of different careers and reading all about them. When I was at college I kept searching for new careers and courses to study because I was passionate about seeing curricula. Now, I still do it. Not only makes me feel happy but also motivates me. The first thing I do when I search for information related to a course is to look at its curriculum.

But I am a frugal person, you know? And I hate spending money on courses that I think I can study for myself (shame on me). One of those types of courses are the ones related to languages. A part of me would love to attend Korean or Italian classes, but I simply prioritize other things and don’t like paying big amounts of money. So that is why I think creating my own ‘courses’ is a good idea.

Once, I wanted to be a healthy baker, but I did not find any course about it in my city, so I created a six-month curriculum which was though to help me practice at cooking and baking healthy things. That was the first curriculum I created for myself.

If you don’t like spending a lot of money and you just don’t have the time to go to classes right now, I recommend you make a curriculum with the topics and things you want to learn in your target language (the language you are learning). In this post you will learn the step-to-step process you must follow to create your own curriculum guide to study a language you love in an autonomous way.

Keep reading to know how!

When planning a studies journey you should make sure you have a notebook or journal on which to write and practice. It’s super important you keep one near you because you will always need to write down new vocabulary and grammatical rules. Although you may choose to study with an App or with an online tutor, youtube videos or just listening to music, you will feel the need to write some notes from time to time.

You can buy a notebook in a store near your house or use an old one, which is something I sometimes do. And you can also order some on the internet. Amazon has some really cute journals and notebooks that you can buy.

Write down what are your goals, what do you want to achieve in the course of your study journey? Maybe you have quantitative goals, for example getting a B2 level in an international exam. Or maybe you want to improve your listening skills and be able to understand a movie without subtitles. Whatever is your goal, make sure you write it down so you can have a look at it at any time. Sometimes you may lose your motivation, and in those moments you will need to find again the primary purpose you had to start learning or studying something. You are human, and if you are making an effort you need a reason.

Now it’s time you create a curriculum. Think about the topics you would like to learn, the vocabulary you would like to master and the final goals you have. If one of your goals was to be able to read an entire book in your target language, then you can create an entire curriculum focused on improving your reading skills. For example:

Unit 1: Simple reading skills

• Sentence patterns.
• Simple grammar: Present, future and past.
• Reading simple sentences.
• Reading paragraphs.
• Reading song lyrics.

Unit 2: Intermediate reading skills

• Intermediate grammar: Present continues, past continues, etc.
• Reading short stories (half a page to one page).
• Reading stories (more than one page)
• Reading simple articles.

Unit 3: More complex reading skills

• More complex grammar structures.
• Reading the news.
• Reading chapters of books.
• Reading an entire book.

You can add more subdivisions to each content, but this is a general idea of what you can do. Feel free to create as many units as you want.

When you are preparing yourself to start studying something in a serious way, you should create a schedule to follow. Think about how many times during the week you can dedicate to learn your target language. How many minutes/hours a day? How many times a day? Do you have commuting time that you can spend studying instead of doing nothing? Make a monthly or weekly calendar and write there what are you going to study at determined hours. Try to be reasonable with that. If your Mondays are really intense, you are not obligated to study that day, but maybe you can do it on a more relaxed day for you like a Friday or Saturday. Just make sure your schedule is personalized according to your own life and routines.

You can learn more about how to get organized when learning languages in my post 5 Tips on How to Organize Yourself to Learn a Language.

This is a Practical Workbook that can be used as a notebook for your languages studies. You can use it instead of a regular notebook or together with it.

In this practical workbook of more than 130 pages, you will find a guide to learn any language in an autonomous way.

Are you struggling to learn foreign languages? You can also Check out my language study organization course!

I hope this post was useful for you. I really like this topic and I would love to know if you are currently studying a foreign language or you are planning to do it soon. You can ask me anything or just give me your thoughts about this post in the comment section below.

Have a beautiful day,

Namaste.