S6E15: The information is already out there

Full transcript:

Good morning, happy Friday, 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, to round off this week, I just wanted to share a message that I have on a post it on my own wall in front of my desk.

That brings me so much comfort right now, while I'm navigating the very messy, very foggy work of building my own community with the Language Confidence Project. And that is, the information is already out there. And, weirdly enough, you would think that that message would make me feel more frantic. In the same way that telling someone who's looking for a needle in a haystack, well, it definitely is in there, would actually gee them up more and make them more frustrated.

But no, it brings me a sense of so much calm. And I think it's because when we're trying to fight through completely uncharted territory, it can feel like we are the only ones who are having the problems we're having. Or the data that we're working with can be so confusing, so overwhelming, or so conflicting that it can feel like we can't even pin down the problem that we're trying to find the answer to. Trying to create rules or derive lessons out of the seemingly random can feel kind of like just trying to make animals out of the passing clouds. But this reminds me: other people are asking these questions. Other people are encountering these difficulties, and they're writing about them, and they're creating videos about them, and they're talking about them.

And the answers are out there. And sooner than we think, we will find them. You know, we might be able to google them, or ask on a forum straight away, and get exactly what we need. We might have to spend some time first trying to untangle the root causes of these sort of vague symptoms. And we might have to spend some time, one step back again, learning the language that's going to help us to illustrate the situation and exactly what's going on within it in order to formulate the question.

But the answers are out there. Someone, somewhere, knows what we need to know. And sometimes the solution comes seemingly out of nowhere. Just a chance conversation, a chance article that appears on your social media. And every day we're wrestling with it, no matter how frustrating it seems, we're getting closer to finding out what we need to know.

So don't lose faith, language learners. You will get there. We will get there. We will do this and we can be so patient while we're trying to figure this all out. Don't let it overpower you. Don't let it cast a shadow over everything else that you're doing. This is figureoutable and you will get there.

Have a wonderful day, have a wonderful weekend and I will see you back here on Monday.