S5E37: What’s rushing you through your journey?
Full transcript:
Good morning and welcome to the Language Confidence Project, the daily podcast to help you get the most out of your language learning, whether you love languages, or you really don’t, but have to learn one anyway. And in today’s episode, if you’re feeling behind in your language learning journey, I have a question for you, and that is, what’s rushing you?
Because here’s the thing. When we know how long something takes, we don’t tend to get frustrated or anxious about the time lapse. We don’t get angry at caterpillars for not becoming a butterfly, right now, nor try to hurry tadpoles into becoming frogs. And on a personal level, we don’t matriculate into university one day and worry after a term that we haven’t graduated yet. Or that our babies don’t seem to be ready to move out and live their own wild and precious lives after a year or two. We might feel impatient excited or impatient inconvenienced, look forward to the next phase, but the anxiety to make things go faster just isn’t there.
And that’s because, for all of those things, we have a clear idea of how long we expect those things to take. So when do we start to get antsy? When our peers do start graduating and we fear we might get left behind. When other children the same age do start to meet milestones and yours aren’t showing the signs yet. When other people who’ve been working for the same time as us get promoted and we don’t.
In short, we get impatient when people around us are starting to cross the finish line. We get impatient, fundamentally, because something in the world around us is telling us that this journey can go faster. We’re seeing or hearing signals that we should be able to see movement now. So now the question is, in your language learning, what’s creating that sense of urgency?
What’s telling you that everyone else is moving faster?
So here are three thoughts about where that message could be coming from:
You’re surrounded by people making claims about how fast they’ve learned their language
It might be in real life or it might be on social media, but is it coming from other people? Maybe they’re outwardly making claims about the fact that they were fluent in a certain number of weeks or months. “Listen to me surprise these street sellers after three weeks in the country. Be impressed by me and my speed learning.” Maybe they’re talking about their clients: Do this thing, buy my course, sign up to my app and you’ll speak like a native in no time. You know the stuff. But sometimes, it’s not just a parade of smug people or an act of showmanship, it can be really normal conversations that just still mean you receive and internalise subtle messages that you’re lagging behind, even if nobody intended that for you. The more you’re surrounded by polyglots, the more it seems like everyone’s a polyglot. The more times they’ve been through the language learning process, as a general tendency, the faster they get. Are the expectations that they’re transmitting, maybe deliberately, maybe not, and maybe directly and maybe not, but are they reasonable?
You’re comparing unfairly – you’re comparing with people who are studying full time when you’re lucky if you can get an hour a day of uninterrupted study. You’re comparing with people who are on a completely different language journey: they’re living and working in the country and you’re following a course book from home, they have completely different goals and skillsets. You might even be comparing with people who are studying completely different languages, or with people who are studying the same one, but starting from a different native language that’s closer to the one you’re both learning.
Your to-do list and your goals aren’t aligned, so the tasks you’re busy with aren’t getting you closer to your goals: so you’re just going round the hamster wheel faster and faster and trying to get more and more done, but your actual workload between here and where you want to be isn’t decreasing?
So my question for you here is, if you’re feeling like you’re behind or that things are going slower than the norm, where’s that coming from? Who or what is inviting you to feel like going faster is an option? And once you’ve identified where it’s coming from, really look carefully at the source. Is it honest? Is it fair? And are they definitely doing the same thing you’re trying to do within the language learning sphere?
And my final message to you today is, feeling behind really isn’t a good indicator that you’re actually behind. I bet you’re doing so much better than you think you are, and that your own timeline is so much more normal than you think it is. And if this episode has really struck a chord today and you’d like to explore this topic in a slightly different way, I’d love to invite you to go back to S3E42 to an episode called “Listen for the tiny time words”, where we explore the importance of really listening critically to the narratives that surround people’s journeys.
And as always, if you know someone who would love this episode, or you were listening and someone in particular came to mind, please send it to them! Let them know that The Language Confidence Project exists, and that they don’t have to do this alone and help me to change the conversations and narratives around language learning and show people that it can be a creative and meaningful process that’s possible for all of us. And if you have a second, I’d love if you could leave a review on whatever podcast app you usually use to help other language learners to find me. Have a wonderful day, and I will see you tomorrow.