S4E12: What’s breaking your connection with your language?

Full transcript:

Good morning, happy Tuesday, and welcome to the Language Confidence Project, the daily dose of language courage for people who love languages, and those who really don’t, but have to learn one anyway. And today, if you started your language with a bang, , and now you’re feeling a definite sense of dread when you need to even think about going to study, this is the episode for you.  

I think we all have stories of finding something that inspires us and we so desperately want to have it our lives, that for while, we jump at any opportunity to play with it. It might be a topic of fascination that we want to watch every single video about in our spare time. It might be starting a blog or a sport, or learning a craft. Or maybe it was just such a great opportunity that you couldn’t resist it, because its promise was addictive.

 And then one day, that feeling goes away. Instead of the excitement and the curiosity, you’re just left feeling either a bit flat and uninspired by the thing or downright resentful of it. And if this is you today, I want to invite you to really think about… well.. what’s happened? And this might be something that you want to journal, too.

And of course it’s fine to genuinely lose interest in something and want to move on. It’s also normal that if we find something new and better, we’d want to jump ship.

But if this is you, before you do move onto the next thing, I just want to make sure that you genuinely are moving towards this new thing, rather than running away from an old thing which has become poisonous in some way. So, in my experience of the people I’ve worled with who were moving away from their language rather than towards something else, these are some of the most common themes I’ve found in the reasons that the language lost its spark for them.

1)    They decided they were going to get serious about it. 

They took all the freedom that they had in our new playground of fascination and they replaced it with rigid routines. They stopped thinking about what seemed interesting to them, and started telling themselves that the only way to get this right was to focus on curricula set by other people. They fixates on grades or social media metrics or app streaks, painstakingly measuring their perceived progress against any and every number available to them. And around the smae time, they suddenly decided that they are deathly behind and will need to be playing catchup every single time they come back to this thing.  

2)    They turned it into an obligation.

Oliver Burkeman, in his newsletter The Imperfectionist from last week hit the nail on the head when he said and I have abridged a bit here:

One of my special talents, looking at my life so far, has been the amazing ability to turn any activity or opportunity – no matter how potentially delightful or exciting – into a burdensome obligation that I wish I didn’t have to fulfill. For years, there was no professional opportunity so promising I couldn’t turn it into an oppressive chore, simply by agreeing to a deadline or signing a contract; suddenly, now it was real and I’d agreed to do it, I’d start hating the fact that I had to. (-The Imperfectionist, Thursday 18th May 2023)

Before, it was play. Before, it was dreaming. Now, it’s a duty. It has expectations and deadlines attached to it and maybe they seem daunting or constricting. All of a sudden, there’s been a shift in focus from following the next interesting thing to making sure we get the right outcome within the set timeframe. And then people start to feel boxed in, and they look around for an escape.  

3)    Perfectionism kicked in

They decided that if they were going to do this, they need to be doing it at the highest possible level. Their everyday goals didn’t look ambitious enough any more so they need to raise the bar, hugely. Everything we produce is embarrassing and amateur, and it’s a disappointment every time. Everyone else seems to find this easy. Nothing we do is good enough any more. Playful exploration of our subject has pretty much given way to targets we’ll never reach and criticism we’ll never satisfy. So we leave feeling drained, and a bit hopeless, and like we have nothing much to offer. Of course we don’t want to come back the next day.  

So, what’s happening for you, language learners? What’s breaking your connection with your language?

And if you like what I do, please support me! The Language Confidence project is growing and all sorts of exciting things are happening in the next few months, and I need your help to make all of this happen. There are so many ways that you could lend a hand right now. If you know someone who would benefit from listening to this podcast, send them a quick message with the episode attached. If you work in or know someone in a language school or a university language department, please suggest this podcast for both them and their students. If you can and you want to, support me on Patreon, because I have a Patreon now, and the link is in my bio! And finally, if you’re new around here or I haven’t met you yet, or come and talk to me! Leave a comment on today’s episode on a positit on Instagram, send me a DM, or even better, book a call as part of the 100 Conversations Project with me! The link to that is also in my Instagram bio at @teawithemily. I would love to hear from you.

Have a wonderful day, and I will see you tomorrow.