S4E3: Our language stories are broken

Full transcript:

Good morning, happy Wednesday, 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, if you’re looking around and wondering why everyone seems to be finding language learning so much easier than you are, this is the episode for you.

So, we talk a lot on the Language Confidence Project about comparing ourselves with others. Back in February, S3, episodes 26-30, I did a whole week on some of the angles that self comparison can take to lead us into thinking the rest of the world has it sorted, while we’re lagging behind. But today, I want to look at the effects that the outside world is having on our tendency to compare ourselves with others and conclude, every time, that we’re the ones that have it wrong. 

For years now, we’ve been surrounded by people saying things like “social media makes everything look perfect” “social media isn’t real life” and “social media is bad for our self esteem”. And the most obvious examples of that are the stereotypical accounts of the rich and famous, the or the digital nomads, the hustle gurus, detailing their glamorous lives and advising the rest of us to follow suit. But it’s not just the actors and the supermodels and lifestyle influencers, is it, that make our own dreams feel far away?

And, it’s not just social media, is it?

The fundamental problem isn’t a social app or a platform. It’s that too many of the language stories we’re fed are broken.

I did this course and then I was fluent

I moved to Spain and then I was fluent

I learned French at school, and I realised I was really good at languages so I learned Italian and Japanese too.

I just talked to people a lot and then I was fluent

I studied really hard and then I was fluent

I went hell for leather for a couple of months and then I was fluent.

None of those are a story. At best, they’re taglines. They’re a vast simplification of what went on behind the scenes. One of two things is wrong. Either the process is being vastly understated or the result is being vastly overstated. But we hear them enough, and we start to believe them.

And then worse, we get so used to the “I wanted to learn a language, so I just did it” narratives, that just the smallest fragment of information sets our brain to work constructing them for ourselves, even when nobody is telling them to us.

We see a TikTok of someone studying, twenty seconds of footage, motivational quote overlayed, and we assume they study all day every day. We catch a fleeting glance of someone we don’t know holding a book with the title “Russian for Beginners” and a little part of us whispers that they’ll be fluent by Christmas. We watch one sentence or two of someone having a conversation that sounds flawless, maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, and maybe we don’t understand a single word they’re saying, and we tell ourselves they must have a unique gift for language learning that we lack. One mention of the phrase “I’m obsessed with Japanese and Arabic” and our brain jumps to tell us they’re probably at near native level in both.

It's almost like we cling onto these half-truths as an opportunity to colour in the blank spaces for ourselves, and make ourselves feel worse.

The stories that you’re comparing yourself and your journey with are just incomplete. And those stories can lead you, deliberately or not, to fill in the gaps with overestimations and assumptions that mean that they are better, faster and more successful than you.

So if there’s one takeaway today, it’s be aware of all the smoke and mirrors around you in the language stories you hear. If there are two takeaways today, it’s beware the language fairy tales AND beware all the blank spaces your brain has set about joining together, entirely creatively, when you try to build a mental picture of someone else’s story. Beware of doodling in the blank spaces.

Don’t stand for it, language learners. Don’t let this stuff permeate your skin and make you feel like you’re slow, or behind, or doing it wrong. Insist on the truth. Ask questions. Probe into the processes. Demand conversations where we don’t just brush the ordinary stuff under the carpet, because this stuff matters.   

You’re doing fine. Your language experience is normal, and if it feels a bit mundane sometimes, know that over time, so much more progress comes from the daily routines and consistent habits than the flashy moments of unboxing a new thing, or instagrammable weekend jaunts abroad. Go at your own pace, do what you think is right for you, and I promise you, all this hard work will pay off.

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