S6E11: What if it’s all…just…normal?
Full transcript:
Good morning, happy Monday and welcome to the Language Confidence Project, 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 want to ask you one really simple question. What if all the things that you’re embarrassed about right now, what if all the things you think are failures in your language learning, what if they’re just …normal? What if it’s just that you don’t really see them in anyone else?
The thing is, so much of the pursuits of our big goals happens in private, the good and the bad. But the good, people are more likely to share in the moment. They’ll send a picture, in the moment, of their acceptance letter or that paper that got 100% or they’ll post a story at the end of the day with them with a hot drink in the garden like “relaxing after a really productive day, party emoji.” But the bad, people are more like to skim over it later or never at all. They wait til they’re successful and then they might slip into the conversation “I got hundreds of rejections before I finally got the go-ahead” or “it took me forever to learn this thing that so many other people just seemed to get.” They casually slip into the conversation “it took me three years of grind to make money” but as listeners, we don’t linger there. We don’t zoom in on the thousand days of financial instability, fear of unexpected bills, of “why am I doing work that’s not valued?” or “how am I getting this so wrong?” before their tangible results started coming. And the constancy of the multiple-times-a-day pings of good news and success and productive days, versus that rare summary of a hundred disappointments in one casual sentence, it makes us think that success is all around us, that constant success is normal while failure is a rare peril that somehow befalls us, just us, far, far too often.
What if the single biggest difference between the amateurs and the masters in any given field is simply that the masters know what’s normal? They know when to panic, and they know that that time is almost never, and everything else is so pedestrian that, with a bit of searching, it has its own protocol? That almost everything we encounter has a solutions and that other options than what isn’t working are available. The ability to fix our own work, to recalibrate our methods or reorient our own paths comes from recognising that the answer isn’t in turning on ourselves, asking why we can’t just do what we said or do it like everyone else, and that actually, we can navigate this better. It’s the path that needs to change, not us that needs to be forced to fit.
You’re not doing this wrong, language learners. Every problem you encounter in your language learning today, whether it’s technical or grammar stuff, difficulty memorising, difficulty concentrating, a difficult conversation, any issue you can possibly imagine, is normal for language learners. It’s nothing to be afraid of and it doesn’t say anything about you, your abilities or your potential to learn this language. Languages are hard, language learning is a whole tangled maze of highs and lows but my goodness, it’s worth it! So keep going, keep being kind to yourself, and keep focusing on how your language can give back to you and make your life better.
Have a wonderful day, and I will see you tomorrow.