S4E22: Plan for the real you

Full transcript:

Good morning, happy Tuesday, and welcome to the LCP, 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 and tomorrow, I just wanted to pop in with a quick reminder to plan your studies for the person that you are, not the person you wish you were.

The thing is, whether you attend classes or not, whether you go to university or not, or whether you have a tutor sometimes or self-study full time, you will be teaching yourself at least some of the time. And that is a really freeing position to be in. As your own teacher, you are teaching someone that you know almost everything about. You know all rights and wrongs of your schooldays, all the things that make you happy and motivate you, all your little personality quirks. You know your habits and you know what drives you. You have so so much information about yourself that could help you to teach yourself in a way that’s perfect for you.

So why do so many of us ignore all that, and set about teaching the person we wish we were?

You know you’re a night owl. So why are you trying to wake up at 5am to study vocabulary? You know you hate feeling hemmed in by routine. So why are you making a rigid timetable that makes every day looks pretty much the same, week in, week out? You know you can only concentrate for half an hour at a time, so why are you beating yourself up about the fact that you can’t study through til lunchtime without getting fidgety?

You know who you are. You know what you do.

And that belief that we need to be teaching the ideal student, rather than the one we you know, actually are, comes out in so many ways. We buy textbooks and courses for our fantasy self, even though we know in the back of our minds that the real us won’t use them or will start out of a feeling of obligation and then quickly lose interest. We commit to activities that we won’t be able to keep up with or that we’ll start to dread within a few weeks. Or we prioritise activities that look and sound really learny, that feel like the sorts of things a good student would do, but that actually don’t count towards our own goals in any meaningful way at all.

Language learners, you aren’t teaching the person you wish you were. So don’t plan lessons for your fantasy self. Don’t buy resources for your fantasy self. You are already a student worth teaching. There are resources and study routines and language learning methods out there that work for the person you are right now, and they’ll work for you, and they’ll make you feel more seen and more accepted as a language learner. So plan for the real you, because the real you is amazing and teachable too.

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