Beating a Language Study Slump

Most of my posts to this Language Lover's Blog are filled with enthusiasm about studying other languages. I have published 155 posts over the past five years extolling the virtues of foreign language acquisition.  I promised readers they would fall in love with languages, develop a lifelong fascinating hobby, and perhaps even ward off dementia for a few years.  

Now I find myself in the embarrassing position of not being excited about languages anymore. Yes, I have said it.  Just like my favorite major league baseball team, the Los Angeles Dodgers, I am in a slump.

 And just like the hitters who can't connect with the ball like they used to or the pitchers who can no longer throw strikes, I can't put my finger on what the problem is or how to solve it. I wish I had Yogi Berra's philosophy.

The problem of maintaining motivation looms large in the field of foreign language acquisition. You may have experienced it yourself.  As you start to learn a new language, you are on an uphill trajectory.  You promise yourself to study every day, sign up for a course, use online apps, and plan a trip to use your new language.  Ah, I remember those innocent days! Reality soon makes hash of your good intentions, and to paraphrase Yogi Berra, you aren't in a slump, you just aren't acquiring the language of your choice.

Take my desire to learn Italian, for example.  With plans for a summer trip to Tuscany with friends and family, I felt fairly confident that I could learn a lot of Italian before the trip.  After all, I have degrees in foreign languages, I have taught foreign languages, and Italian is a Romance language similar to Spanish and Portuguese, which I know fairly well.  What could go wrong?

I signed up for a six-week Italian class at an institute on a local university campus.  The details are irrelevant, but suffice it to say that the only thing I learned about Italian was that "ci,","ce," "gi," and "ge" were going to give me lots of trouble.  I did not sign up for the second six weeks.

My next effort was to sign up for Italian on Duolingo, a popular online language learning course, available on the web or as an app on mobile devices.  I had been using Duolingo for several years to study a variety of other languages and thought it was great fun.  About this time, though, Duolingo made a significant change in the program.  In the old version, you were allowed to make mistakes and keep trying to answer correctly with no penalty.  It was a relaxing way to learn.

The new version of Duolingo allows only a certain numbers of errors before your "health meter" runs out of segments.

Note health meter in top right hand corner

Unless you can buy back your "health," you have to wait more than four hours to regain it and continue practicing.  Needless to say, I found nothing motivational about the new rules.

Another change in Duolingo that I missed was the absence of "bots."  At one time, you could hold an actual conversation with a bot by typing or saying your answer.  I loved talking to the bots and learned a lot about conversational language in Spanish, Portuguese and French.  Sadly, though, I did not have this opportunity in Italian.

You probably know where all of this complaining is going.  We had a great trip to Italy, but I spoke virtually no Italian and understood less.  I found myself gesturing and pointing like a first year language student to even order a gelato.  

What do baseball players do when they hit a slump?  They keep on swinging and pitching.  I'll keep studying languages on Duolingo because I have a 1561 day streak going, and I hate to be a quitter.  Maybe, just maybe,  the thrill of language learning will return to me one of these days.