S6E4: You can’t solve problems if you don’t know they exist

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. The Language Confidence Project is now uploading daily videos to YouTube too to give you more colourful and face to face or as close as I can get messages of encouragement and pep. We have more than fifty videos up already and I would so appreciate it if you could subscribe, either by searching TLCP on YT or the link is in the shownotes, and share with any language learners you know. Getting onto YouTube was a battle and I would love to know that my efforts are reaching as many language learners as I can!

 And today, I just want to send a really quick message of encouragement that when the unfamiliar things feel hard and scary, that’s when the good things are happening.

Because one of the unfortunate paradoxes of learning anything is that as soon as we progress, we immediately feel, well… stupider. We don’t feel progress-y because that’s exactly the time when the expectations rise, we encounter all sorts of problems we’ve never seen before, and the increase in mental load from all this new stuff means we start making mistakes we thought we’d eliminated ages ago! In short, progress can feel, in the moment, like regression.

And then, subconsciously, it’s easy to try to protect ourselves from that by fiercely guarding our new comfort zone. And that might look like thinking:

I should play it safe

Stick to what I know

If I experiment, I’ll make too many mistakes

But language learners, that’s an illusion.

It feels like progress because you feel better. Because you are moving through your tasks more easily and because your challenges feel manageable as soon as you hit them.

But remember: 

Real progress, real forward motion can’t really be measured in feelings of cleverness. Acceleration is you finding out where the next challenges are and preparing yourself to face them.

You need to know what the problems are.

You can’t fix anything if you don’t know it exists.

That doesn’t mean you need constant corrections or to be interrupted every time you say something wrong.

But it does mean you need to try stuff. And it does mean you need some way to know what’s working and what’s not.

It might shake your confidence a bit but that is a feeling, not a report on your worth or your ability or your progress.

Have a wonderful day, and I will see you tomorrow.