Well, it's the end of the year. We're nearing the end of the year and I'm going to make a video about my New Year's resolutions. I did make a video last week where I talked about how the brain evolves during our lives. Some of the psychological inputs or background to how we react to activities, including the decision on a New Year's resolution. So the first thing I would say is that there's nothing special about the new year. Apparently the ancient Babylonians had new year's resolutions, which were more like a commitment and other people throughout history have also done so. But the new year, I think for the Babylonians was March for the Romans was March 15th. For the Iranians, for Nourous is around March sometime. I think Chinese new year falls somewhere between January and February. So there's nothing special about this time of year. And even in so far as making a New Year's resolution, not every culture does this. Although many do, but you can nudge yourself to get active anytime you want. It doesn't have to be around New Year. And the thing about the New Year's resolution, my view is that it's not sort of a goal. It's not a goal setting thing. It's not, I'm going to make a million dollars. I'm going to get the body of a Greek God. I'm going to reach, you know, C1 in my Spanish. Those are not commitments to actions. Those are simply goals. You may or may not achieve those goals. Those things are outside of your control. The new year's resolution in my mind would be, I'm going to go to the gym three times a week. So you either do that or you don't do that. Uh, I'm going to be active in language learning. For example, I can go to LingQ, like as I did with Turkish, I want to increase my known words total six months prior to going to Turkey. I want to increase my known words total from 8,000 to 15,000. I know I can do that on the system. So that was an action that I could control. I want to read so many words. I want to listen to so many hours of whatever language I'm learning. It's actions that you can control that should be basically what you are committing to do with your new year's resolution. I'll show you this lengthy dictionary definition of resolution. There's all kinds of meanings of the word resolution. I prefer the word commitment. And I gather that throughout history, whether in ancient Babylon or in middle ages in Europe, these were more like pledges, pledges to the church, pledges to people, commitments, rather than sort of some vague goal of what you hope to achieve, which is not to my mind, what a new year's resolution is. And probably to most people. However, you know, having a distant goal is, is certainly motivating and motivation is a big part of actually carrying through on your new year's resolutions. Now, apparently a high percentage of people do carry through on their resolutions, at least for quite a period into the new year. Of course, we all want to be amongst those who do carry out their pledges, their new year's resolutions. And I think there it's important to make it easy on ourselves. In the case of language learning, find content of interest to you. Make sure you think that spending time with the language is valuable to you. Have a positive attitude towards the process and the language. Vary the type of activity you're doing. So you don't just sit there like reviewing Anki decks. You listen, you read, you review words, you talk to people, the greater the variety of activity, the easier it is to stay with the language. Remembering that the essential elements of language learning are your attitude towards the language, towards the process and the amount of time you spent. So in order to make sure that your commitment is fulfilled, try to make it easy on yourself. Don't get frustrated if you don't see immediate results, because as long as you are active, you are improving. And it's important to be aware of that and remind yourself of that. You

might find it interesting to see how I spent my year in language learning in 2024. We have this year in review feature at LINK, and it shows that Turkish was my main area of concentration. Not surprising, as I was preparing to go to Turkey. But I did also spend a fair amount of time on Arabic and Persian and dabbled in a few other languages. Arabic was the number one language that I listened to, at least according to my link statistics. But of course, this doesn't reflect the fact that I did most of my listening, or at least not necessarily most, but a lot of my listening on an app like Storytel, which is not reflected in the statistics at link because I'm not able to download the mp3 file to convert it into a text or to get at any kind of a digital text that I could read. On the other hand, when it comes to reading, Turkish was my main area of concentration, more than double my Arabic and a lot more than my Persian, and I was active for, you know, 366 days. Baha, which is a course put together by my Turkish tutor, which is very interesting, was my favorite course in Turkish or in any language of the material that I did on LingQ. And I completed this many lessons, most of which were imported, met a number of milestones and participated in challenges. And I added a total of 36,000 known words. Most of that was in Turkish.