When bad things happen to good language learners

"Into each life some rain must fall."  I'm okay with that, but I wish downturns in life didn't have such an adverse effect on my language study.  So far I have managed to keep a month long bout with bronchitis from ruining a 1223 day streak on my favorite online language learning platform, Duolingo. Many of those days were earned by me lying in bed, bleary-eyed, fumbling for my cell phone and completing a quick set of exercises in Spanish, which I can pretty much do automatically, just to get credit for the day.  Other languages I had been following on Duolingo were left by the wayside like sad unwanted pets.

And I don't think language study necessarily equates to the common wisdom about riding bicycles, for example, that once you learn how to ride, you don't forget.  If languages are not practiced daily, they begin to fade in our brains, until finally, it is just too much trouble to go searching for them. I've got to get back to those other languages, TODAY!

Other bad things can happen to good language learners as well.  Have you ever been stuck at what feels like a plateau of a new language?  

You keep trudging along, but the scenery remains the same.  You don't feel you are making progress in your language. You know a little;  you want to know a lot more.  How good it would feel to finally master a new language.  (Note:  You probably won't!  Once you decide to truly learn another language, it will always be in progress in your life.) 

The Irish language is my plateau at the moment. Shall I study a new grammar topic, practice pronunciation, or try to read a Facebook message in Irish? I need to give serious thought to what efforts I can make to take me across the plateau  so that I can climb the next mountain.

Another pitfall for language learners is the very common phenomenon of loss of interest in a language or culture.  A while back, I got very excited about studying Romanian on Duolingo, partially because it is a Romance language.  I could readily recognize some vocabulary and grammatical features in the beginning exercises.  Then it got difficult.  I got impatient when I couldn't whiz through an exercise.  So I started rationalizing, telling myself I will probably never have the chance to travel to Romania, and that I have other fish to fry.  Now I have left this perfectly lovely language for so long that it will be just a memory, a fleeting moment of a peek into another culture.

Romanian Castle

Then there is the case of Italian. Big plans were being discussed for a family trip to Italy next summer, complete with a rented villa, trains excursions in Switzerland, and an international motorcycle race.  I can do Italian, I thought, and raced through the Duolingo exercises.  Plans change, as life does, so we may now be going to the Netherlands or Germany.  Duolingo makes it so easy to add new languages without deleting old ones, which appear like ghost icons on my start-up page. I'm resisting the urge to click on Dutch or Germany until travel plans become more concrete. but I hear the siren call of a new language. 

We all start out with the best of intentions of being good language learners.  With a little more discipline and a little less complaining about the vicissitudes of life, we can get back on the track and enjoy language study every day of our lives.

Five ways to sabotage your language learning - Ranked

If you are reading this post, you probably have experienced a mind set similar to my present one. I am enthralled with the Irish language.  I want to make it one of the languages I mention with pride that I study.  But I have reached a learning plateau that is starting to feel like Mt. Everest. 

So this post is really me talking to me, not Ms. Fitich, the bossy Spanish teacher you may have had in seventh grade, telling you how you should learn a new language.

Do you sabotage your language study in these ways?

I Only study when you are really in the mood.  After all, you chose to study the new language, right?  It should be on the fun list in your life, not the duty list, right? Why ruin perfectly good leisure time by studying, when you could be checking your email again, browsing a new clothes magazine that just came in the mail, changing the cat's water (you can continue this list).  

With language study, slow and steady wins the race.  A small amount of study every day produces better results than longer, less frequent (and probably guilt-driven) longer sessions.

Doing something, I might say, almost anything with the new language will keep it active in your brain so you don't have to dig so hard to find it again.  You can use any of the language skills, listening, speaking, reading or writing, just as long as you do something that forces your brain to engage in the new language.

II. Give in to the need to master every grammar bit before moving on. My husband, Wayne, whom I have turned into a duoLingo addict, complained recently that he couldn't do the exercise on Spanish adverbs and was feeling discouraged.  My advice was to forget adverbs for a while and move on to something else.  After all, you can do a good bit of language and never encounter an adverb. Just because a program or a book or a teacher thinks it is time for you to master a certain grammar point may not be the right time for you to master it.  

III.  Don't worry about how the new words are pronounced.  Oh my, did I ever sabotage my Irish learning by doing this very thing.  I started Irish on duoLingo several years ago.  I was fascinated with the composition of the language and completely ignored how to pronounce the words.  In my defense, duoLingo does not give as much audio support to Irish as it does to other languages, so I felt no compelling need to know the sound system.

When I traveled to Ireland last year, I could understand a few signs, but I couldn't speak, not one word, of Irish.  I'm now backtracking and working with a program on Udemy to learn Irish sound/letter correspondence.  My hope is if I know what a word sounds like, it will stick better in my brain.  I was making up my own crazy pronunciations for those Irish words!

IV.  Spend too much time accumulating study resources.  Ordering dictionaries and grammar books online, bookmarking web sites, joining Irish Facebook groups, even finding clean notebooks to take notes may all be useful, but these activities don't actually teach you any language.  They just make it possible for you to study.  So study resources are helpful, but they don't substitute for sitting down and putting something about the new language into your brain's memory.

V. Beat yourself up because you will never be a native speaker.  We adults are too hard on ourselves about how much we should be able to accomplish in a new foreign language. We  have to go back and take baby steps and even talk like babies sometimes, which isn't great for the ego.  You are a successful native speaker of the language(s) you were born into.  You will probably never be mistaken for a native speaker of your new language.

I hope this post has given you encouragement if you are bogged down in your current language learning goals.  Writing it has certainly made me reexamine some of my language learning habits. 

Happy Language Learning!  It's worth the effort!