Mini-project planning (Pigeon holing)

Hello everybody,

When we learn a language we often say to people: "I would like to speak this language well in the future". This type of statement is fine, but doesn't help us plan.

As a different idea for language learning, we could try "mini-project planning". This means breaking up our ambitions into small "mini-projects"

We can imagine ourselves at a point in time in the future where we are doing something we want to do:

Chatting with friends

Ordering a meal 

Visiting a doctor

By breaking down our ambitions into small ideas and thinking of us doing these things in the future, we will be able to understand better what we need to do. We can then concentrate our efforts on each "mini-project".

Chatting with friends: we need casual language and plenty of friendly phrases: "nice to see you!" "how's it going?" > lots of happy words, sport, leisure, music, holidays...

Ordering a meal:  words for different dishes, drinks, how to ask for the bill.

Visiting the doctor: names for parts of the body, how to explain what is wrong, how to ask the right questions. 

This way, we can concentrate our efforts by thinking of smaller projects.

In English we called this "pigeon-holing" which makes us think of a very large project "learning a language" as a series of smaller projects all linked together.