S4E20: Take that break
Full transcript:
Good morning and welcome to the Language Confidence Project, the daily podcast for people who love languages, and those who really don’t, but have to learn one anyway! You’ve made it to Friday, and I don’t know about you but this week has felt like a really long week for me, so I just wanted to send a quick message to remind you that, no matter where you got to this week, no matter whether you finished everything you wanted to or not, you’re allowed to take a break.
You’re allowed to rest. Even if you can’t take the whole day off, or the whole weekend off, if you need a permission slip to claim some breathing room for yourself, this is it.
The thing with learning a language is, it’s a really big task. It’s not something you can cram, and while you can sprint for certain deadlines or pick up the pace here and there, for the vast majority of us, we can’t maintain momentum the whole time. At some point, we have to stop. We have to recharge. And when we do let ourselves do that, even if everything in our brains is screaming that we have too much to do and the only way to make progress is to keep working every minute that we can, so often, we find that we come back and everything just seems… easier. The grammar is easier to grasp. We make fewer mistakes. We get through stuff faster and we have more interesting, more original ideas, and we have more energy to see them through.
But more than that, when we’ve had a break, we feel like ourselves again. We aren’t just machines that study and sleep, but we’re a whole person with all these facets of ourselves that require nurturing. Keeping that balance between learning our language and doing all the other things in life that we enjoy, whether that’s creative things like art, meeting our friends, listening to or playing music, indulging our other interests and looking after ourselves is the single biggest thing we can do to make sure that we don’t end up just resenting our language. We don’t want our language to take our identity away. We want to feel like it’s adding to our lives, and strengthening rather than weakening all the parts of us that make us who we are. So it's okay to draw a line under our day, our week, or a part of our to-do list and say “actually, it’s time for a break now.”
You can’t keep pushing and pushing. Sometimes, the most productive thing you can do is relax. Even if it’s not for long. Even if you feel guilty for doing it. It really isn’t time wasted. Reclaim some of that time for the rest of you.
I want to wish you the loveliest weekend, and I will see you at 7am UK time on Monday.