S3E11: Your stories matter
Full transcript:
Good morning, happy Monday and welcome to the Language Confidence Project. I’m your host, Emily Richardson, I’m a tiny and colourful polyglot with a background in language teaching, and language, mind and brain. I’m here every weekday morning to help you get the most out of your language learning, whether you love languages, or you really don’t, but have to learn one anyway. And today, I just want to remind you that you can still be yourself in your new language.
My teens and especially my twenties were about learning how to walk into a room, any room, as my full self. To be able to walk into a room as me, and bring my own stories, narratives, beliefs, thoughts, experiences and to live a life that aligned with my values, knowing that they’d evolve, but so would I. I owe that to myself because all that stuff that makes me.
And then we embark on learning a foreign language. And all of a sudden, we don’t have the words to put to those thoughts and experiences any more. Our life is reorganised into chapters of a textbook, myself, my family my school. My city. We can be an expert in our field and be unable to say a single word about it in our new language. It doesn’t matter how nuaced, how well-redearched our opinions are in our native language, because in our new language, it all comes out of just a few stock phrases for fantastic and boring and not bad. And we just assume, that we need to be patient, to work through the chapters of the textbook or go up the exam levels and one day, much further down the road, Future Us will wake up and feel ready to speak, read, write about the things that really matter to us in our language.
That those stories, those beliefs, that personality, will suddenly just bloom out of us.
But that’s not how it works.
It’s a process to be you in your new language.
And you are ready.
You are ready, right now.
- To start expressing real opinions about things you feel strongly about
- To start working on telling the important stories from your life
- To bring your personality into what you say
But none of those things happen spontaneously. And that’s okay.
So start small. Start just isolating a couple of stories that you’d like to recount. Start getting some key words together, just in a list, even if you don’t really know how to put them together. Write what happened as simply as you can, in bullet points. And then work on translating them into your new language.
Think about some beliefs you hold. You can either go deep, and head for your core beliefs, your most deeply held beliefs that define who you are and what you stand for. Or, you can think about the beliefs that most come up in your social situations and reflect your life or society at the moment. And start the process of figuring out how to express them in your new language. Again, it doesn’t have to be a thesis to defend them, a word cloud of key vocabulary. Some translated quotes by significant public figures. Some news headlines. It doesn’t need to be full sentences, it doesn’t need to be grammat8ically complex. It’s the start of a collage of you.
You aren’t aiming for a perfectly delivered anecdote. You’re not aiming for watertight or perfectly persuasive arguments. Being yourself in a language isn’t a one-time event, it’s a process, and it happens as a result of showing up, as yourself, in your new language over and over again. You’re aiming to get that ball rolling. And the more conversations you have, the more times you tell it, speaking, writing, leaving comments in whatever media you use, the more it will grow.
And sooner than you think, you’ll start to feel like you again.
You don’t have to wait til you’re at an advanced level to tell the stories that matter to you.
I’ve just launched my first project of the year which is to have 100 conversations with listeners of the Language Confidence Project in the next few months, to meet you, to hear about how your language journey is going, and to find out what carving your own path means to you. It’s a really informal 30 minute Skype chat over tea or coffee or whatever beverage you should like to bring, it’s completely free, there won’t be any sales pitches or anything like that, and the hope is that we can chat about the hard bits of learning a language but also to celebrate your wins. If you would like to book a call, I have a calendly link in the shownotes, and it’s also in my Instagram bio at @teawithemily. I can’t wait to hear from you!
Have a wonderful week, and I will see you tomorrow.