S6E6: I crash landed in Language World
Full transcript:
Good morning, happy Monday, and welcome to The Language Confidence Project, the daily dose of language courage for those who love languages, and those who really don’t, but have to learn one anyway. And just a reminder, 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 and share with any language learners you know, and I really hope you enjoy the videos.
And today’s episode is for everyone who feels like a complete outsider in the language world. This isn’t your comfort zone, you don’t understand what’s going on, but you know you need to acclimatise in order to learn your language. And firstly, I just want to tell you, you are not alone. So many of the people that are learning languages around you are doing it because life has pushed them to, not because they are seasoned language lovers who feel completely at home here. A lot of language learners around you also feel dazed, disorientated and a lot like imposters here.
It’s scary to crash land in a world that you don’t understand. Everyone uses strange words, so before you even start speaking your language, you have to learn the language of language learning. Verbs versus adverbs. Preterite. Imperfective. Conjugation and there’s this culture that you have to figure out. You don’t know how to do things. You might not even know how to put into words what you want to do in such a way that you can ask someone else.
It can seem incredibly daunting.
But being a newcomer into any knowledge community has immense advantages that I really don’t want you to overlook.
When you’re deep within a system, you’ve grown up there, you’re fully within it, you can’t see past your conditioning. You don’t know it, but you’re so reliant on the system to tell you how things should be done, how things will work out, how things must never be done. You internalise other people’s stories, words of wisdom, words of warning, as though they were all incontrovertible fact, and it takes a whole load of self-awareness and so much to identify where that’s happened and go back and overwrite it.
Derek Sivers in his book. Anything You Want, he’s talking about entrepreneurship but it 100% stands here too, he says “There’s a benefit to being naïve to the norms of the world – deciding from scratch what seems like the right thing to do, instead of just doing what others do.”
When you develop your language world from the ground up, it’s your learning utopia. It’s a world built for you, by you, that actually works for you. Your language world starts with you.
It’s a blessing.
Consult with the experts on your terms.
How much unhelpful mythology have you not been brought up with? How many stories of failure or disappointment have you not internalised? How many methods that were seen as “verified best practice” have you not felt pressure to partake in, because nobody told you they were compulsory?
As a newcomer into a world, you are in an amazing place to actually see its exotic quirks, its problems, and the things that the people within it just accept as the one true path or the only way.
As a newcomer here, you have so much insight to give, and so much insight to gain. Don’t let the culture shock put you off. You 100% belong here and there is no reason why you cannot thrive here.
Have a wonderful day, and I will see you tomorrow.