S5E19: Find where the struggle is

Full transcript:

Good morning, happy Thursday 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, I’m here to just share one piece of advice that is really helping me at the moment, and I wanted to pass it onto you.

And that is, find where the struggle is.

When you’re doing something new and scary, and we’re in that space of can’t see the wood for the trees, it’s so confusing and so tangled that we just kind of come to the conclusion that everything is hard. Either because all of it is intrinsically hard, or because we as incompetent humans are doing it all wrong.

And so struggle just overlays everything. A blanket of struggle over everything you’re doing, making it dark, making it almost suffocating, and we just assume that that’s what language learning is like. That we’re going to have to get used to it or densensitise ourselves to it somehow, or learn to live with it, if we’re ever going to progress in our language. 

But don’t let that be true, language learners. Don’t accept what it’s telling you.

And that’s why my advice for you today is, find where the struggle is.

Sometimes, it’s just one thing that’s hard. And not just that, but that one thing is harder right now than it needs to be. It’s not that the whole path is dark, it’s that this one thing has become big and so overpowering that it can cast a shadow over everything else.  

So if that’s where you’re at in your language learning right now, don’t just accept it as the way it’s going to be. Don’t just resign yourself to this being part and parcel of learning new things. Really look at what’s hard. Isolate it. It might be that you can make it easier on yourself. It might be that you can fix it.

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