When studying a language, or anything else in fact, it’s easy to get distracted as there are often so many other things vying for your attention. If your mind isn’t focused on your studies, you don’t tend to take as much in or to remember it later.

In this interview, Tim Ferriss explains how he does his best studying while on long journeys when there is still else to do. He also suggests that you try to recreate a similar environment at home, or wherever else you study. This could be achieved be switching off televisions, radios, computers and phones, and removing/hiding anything else that you might be tempted to fiddle with or peruse.

On long journeys I tend to take a novel or two in languages I’m studying and/or textbooks for those languages. As I doubt my fellow passengers would appreciate me reading aloud from the novels or textbooks, or repeating the dialogues on the accompanying recordings, I remain silent, which I find less than ideal. I suppose I could pretend to be talking on my phone though. Reading foreign novels without dictionaries, which I don’t usually have with me on such journeys, is a good test of my understanding of the languages, and my powers of determining the meanings of words from the context, and is something I enjoy more then studying.

Do you have any ways for ignoring distractions and maintaining your concentration when studying?