S6E24: It’s a today problem, not a forever problem

Full transcript:

Good morning, happy Thursday, 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 just wanted to pop in and remind you that whatever difficulties you encounter in your language learning, whatever the thing is that you think you’ll never get the hang of, it’s a today problem. It’s probably really annoying today. It’s probably hugely frustrating. Today. But it’s not going to be a problem forever.

I know we’ve talked before on the podcast about the End of History illusion, or the idea that when we look back, we can see that we’ve changed so much throughout time up until this point, in everything, our worldview, our preferences, our skillsets, our circumstances, but then we massively underestimate how much we are going to change from this point forward. We assume we’re doing the whole of the rest of our lives as the person we are now, in the environment we’re in now, and we see the present moment as like the final chapter of our development. It’s really hard for us to imagine any more changes.

But actually, as humans, we aren’t even that great at remembering what progress we’ve made in the last year, the last month, unless we gained something big and tangible like a brand new house or a yacht, or everything changed in one fell swoop. It’s easy for us to remember our favourite band that we thought we’d never tire of when we were 16, and then safely say 10 years later that actually, we’d overestimated how much of an impact they’d had on our adult life and the posters were safely consigned to the loft. But how good are we at remembering how hard or how scary we used to find a thing that’s second nature now? How good are we at judging how well we used to handle social situations compared with now, or how our language level was?

So maybe it’s no wonder that we’re even worse at forecasting how we’re going to progress in the future.

But the fact that you can’t see it in your. Inds eye, you don’t believe it when someone tries to reassure you, that’s not a commentary of how your reality is going to be. That’s an imagination problem, that we all share, and nothing more.

So how do we get past it? Well, we have to actively look through the archives of our history and find those moments of brilliance where we cracked the code before. There is so much evidence in your past, in your school life, your work life, your family life, even if you’ve never set about actively teaching yourself a big new skillset like a language before, that you’re capable of learning things, and you have solved problems before, and you have overcome things that, at the time you wondered if you were going to be stuck with this thing forever.

Remember those things. They don’t have to be big, dramatic things that completely set your life on a new track. They just need to be things that were difficult, until they weren;t.

So don’t lose hope. Stick with this, there’s always that adage to fall back on that if you don’t quit, you can’t fail, and trust that you will figure this out. There are so many people out there who can help you. Keep asking questions. Keep looking for explanations worded in different ways, just in case one of them hits differently and it brings on that epiphany. Keep practising. But most importantly, don’t stall here. Keep this problem active in your mind, keep it on the back burner rather than chucking it off the stove entirely, but keep the momentum up in other aspects of your language learning life. Even with the question mark over this thing, there are still so many places where you can make progress.

Good luck today language learners, and I will see you tomorrow.