Hello there, it’s been a while.
I’ve been away from language learning and I lost a lot of what I had built this year – the obsession, the ability to speak on language learning stuff (methods, pros and cons, all that fun stuff). Still, as I slowly crawl my way back to where I used to be at, I think I can still point out some good things that came from my experience this year: things I learned about myself, about how my brain works and how that ties to language learning, and how those things can translate into new goals for 2020.
This year was definitely… special. For the first time ever I managed to actually sit down and consistently study languages. I am not going to rant again about the reasons that led me to French and Japanese, but it all started with a spark that was too familiar. A video appeared on my YouTube feed one day and – TADA!!!! I wanna study languages! I can do it!!
It wasn’t the first time that I had decided to try to learn a language. I’ve been meaning to do it for years now, but it was always a failure. I’d have the will to learn, would do it for a week, then never again.
But this time, it was different. I created a twitter account specially for language learning, created my daily threads (for French and Japanese) and things just… started happening. Having something to motivate me made all the difference: being able to interact with people, to talk about languages, and to have my threads show that I was actually doing something. It all kept me going, and it gave me a new mindset: “small progress is better than no progress!”. I would push myself to do something small just to have something to add to the threads, and small progress eventually led to big progress!
At the end of the year, though, I ended up messing up and not doing anything, but the changes were already there: I had learned that I can actually be consistent and learn languages!
I just have to fix some things, like the fact that I thought I’d be able to document my language learning journey from beginning to end – looking back at it, it was pretentious of me to think I would be able to keep a perfect record of it until the day I decided I was fluent. But come on, I keep journals, that’s what I do! Welp, that didn’t work too well. But giving the fact that the threads were a huge help to me, I will start them over. January 1st, day 1.
Pretentious. That’s another thing I realized this year. I tend to bite off more than I can chew. The idiom expresses the fact that I tend to take on more that I am capable of doing – that means making blog posts with advice or reflections about things I have no authority to speak of, impulsively creating masterplans to study languages without giving them much thought (I’m sorry for all the things I said I was going to do and never did), or picking up a third language.
Not that you cannot learn three languages at the same time, but I got too excited and got ahead of myself. Although I would love to take them all at once – Korean, Spanish, Mandarin Chinese – there’s just so much I can balance with college, social life (kind of) and internship (that I really don’t wanna do, someone please help me!). Language learning is fun but for me it can get too much real fast. I need to slow down and accept my own pace.
That also means that I have to accept that I have ADHD and most methods won’t work for me. I won’t be able to do as much in a day as a neurotypical person. Third thing I learned: I need to be extremely clear when setting goals. Whether they’re big ones (like my New Year’s resolutions) or small ones, like my to-do lists. I cannot just say I am going to read a lot in Japanese: I need to know what I am going to read, how I am going to read it and when I am going to read it. That’s something that holds me back a lot. “I’m reading this text, but how should I approach its vocabulary?”. I tend to overthink that A LOT, which takes away time I could be actually studying. So, in 2020 I am gonna try to be very strict when it comes to planning my studies.
Those were the three main lessons I took from this year.
They might seem obvious, or silly, but I needed to do what I did this year in other to reach those conclusions myself. A lot of you have said those things before, a lot of influencers keep repeating them over and over and over. But I needed to learn them on my own. Now I walk into 2020 with three things in mind.
I can learn languages
There’s something I need to do in order to learn languages
There’s something that held me back this year
I am also creating a list of goals for French and Japanese. I don’t know how I am going to approach them or if I am going to keep up with them, but I am thinking about those goals. I am putting a lot of thought into them and I am hoping they’ll be a foundation for my 2020 when it comes to language learning. I don’t want to take another break. I can find a way to make language learning a part of my routine, and I will do it. It’s cheesy to say “new year, new beginnings!”, but that’s exactly what I’m aiming at. Thank you for not giving up on me, and I hope you have a nice year!
Comments