Language learning can be fun and exciting! It opens up doors to entire countries and cultures, and new experiences. There’s so much joy and excitement when you begin learning a new language but then, you reach a plateau. You’re no longer a beginner, but you’re not quite perfect yet. In fact, I am not sure if there is ever a time where we feel perfect in our target language. However, what I am sure of is at some point you will likely lose confidence along your language learning journey.
At the best of times, I am aware of my imperfections and what I need to work on. At the worst of times, I feel like a failure. I wonder, will I ever truly master this language? Deep down, I know that in the past five years I have made strong, noticeable advances in my Korean. At the same time, a negative, and self-sabotaging inner dialog is brewing in my mind. I want to say “I suck” , “I am nowhere near where I want to be in this language”, “Why don’t I just give up?”
While these thoughts are destructive, and rooted in self-doubt they also seem to be a common experience in the language learning community. Why is it that so many of us experience so much self-doubt in our language learning? After considering my experiences studying language, particularly here in South Korea I came up with a few reasons. By calling attention to these reasons hopefully we can all manage to reclaim some of the confidence we lost.
False Claims About Language Learning
One of the first things I noticed is that we are bombarded with too many false advertisements. How to learn a language in one month. Learn Italian in three months! How you can learn any language in six months. The internet is rifled with blog posts, and YouTube content with these sorts of titles. Even in Korea, language academies claim they can make you fluent in a relatively short period of time.
These claims are both heavily misleading and destructive for the language learning community. You cannot go from zero background in a language to fluent in three months. You can perhaps, go from a B1 level to a B2 level in three months. The point is that you can make a lot of progress in three months but, you won’t learn a language from scratch. (The language coach does an amazing job of explaining this in her video.)
This type of advertising is misleading. When you encounter it over and over, you start to internalize the faulty message. It’s not realistic to think you can learn a language from start to finish in such a short amount of time. Unfortunately, the more you come across these advertisements the easier it becomes to believe them and feel disappointed in yourself. I don’t buy too easily into this content, but I think over time it’s hard to resist the thought that everyone else is learning faster than us. Which leads to the next point!
Comparing Ourselves to Others
Why does everyone else seem to be learning faster than us? What are they doing differently? Why does it come so easily to them but not to me? This is another HUGE issue in language learning. The more we compare ourselves to someone else the more we feel bad about ourselves. What we fail to realize is that to adequately measure our progress in a language – we must compare ourselves not to other people but to our former self.
I began self-studying Korean back in 2014 and when I came to Korea in 2015 I could just barely string a sentence together. I remember riding the bus for the first time and finding it hard to hear or read the stop names in real speed to the extent that I kept getting off the bus too early. When I remember how terrible my Korean was back then, I feel so proud of where I am now. The issue is that we see someone else who’s just farther ahead of us and we feel like we aren’t progressing at all.
No matter what we do, there will always be someone better than us and farther ahead of us. Understand that there are people who started this journey before us, and therefore they will always be ahead of us. It does not mean that we are by comparison less, or worse at something than them. The best way to avoid this trap, is to keep track of your own progress. Make it easy for yourself to stop and look back at where you were a few months or a year ago. That way you can genuinely see the improvements you made. Then, and only then, if you feel disappointed in your progress maybe you should consider the next point.
Sticking to Language Learning Methods that Don’t Work
This is a hard pill to swallow for some but sometimes, what you think is effective, just isn’t. Over the years I have seen some of the strangest approaches to language learning. I’ve seen people constantly translate into their native language, people who delay speaking until they can reach an “intermediate level”, and a wide array of things that just don’t make any sense. I also noticed something else these folks had in common – they all seemed to be quite disappointed with their progress.
Sometimes we get so fixated on a certain method that even as we feel we are getting nowhere, we are reluctant to change. I think that in school we are more or less taught that to learn a language you must study grammar and vocabulary. This in turn I think leads us to focus on memorizing grammatical rules and word lists which isn’t super effective, and creates many gaps in our learning.
Language learning is dynamic. Consider it like the muscles in your body. When we exercise we try to design workouts that will target individual muscle groups, in order to improve our overall strength. You wouldn’t skip leg day would you? If you never make time for speaking practice, you’re never going to be good at speaking. You will always struggle with listening if you don’t take time to develop your listening skills. If you feel you aren’t making significant progress, consider whether your methods are actually targeting the specific skills you want to improve. There’s no shame in realizing what you’re doing doesn’t work. It’s better to admit that and move on, than to waste your time.
Unwanted Feedback From Others
While there are numerous reasons we struggle internally with self-confidence, I think we often overlook the effect others have on us too. When we use our target language around native speakers we receive constant and indirect feedback that can help us improve our target language. But what can become an issue, is when native speakers offer unwanted negative feedback.
When we study languages, we expect to learn and adjust to another culture in the process. However, every culture has it’s own assumptions and attitudes towards language learning – which they then direct at us. In Korea there is so much competition around learning English and still not a whole lot of foreigners that can speak Korean well. These two things coupled together I think has led people to feel a pressure that they must speak English (perfectly) when they encounter foreigners.
Often when I speak to someone in Korean, they either respond in English, or they mime at me. Basically those who feel confident to speak English do, and those who don’t just don’t. I think it’s safe to say that these people probably have good intentions. The issue is that after experiencing this over and over it becomes hard not to believe that the problem is us. Surely if this situation keeps happening I must be doing something wrong right? Well, actually, I think that this is happening because of a shared attitude that Koreans have.
It’s easy to feel hurt in these situations or confused. Why are they speaking English to me? Am I difficult to understand? But the best way to react I think – as my friend put it – is just keep speaking your target language. We can’t always control how people react to us, but we can control how we respond.
Self Reflect and Relax
When it comes to learning a language, like any other task, we can easily get swept up in self-doubt. Sometimes the best thing to do when you feel you’ve lost confidence in something is to take a break and reflect. Try to remember what drew you to your target language in the first place. Revisit the parts of language learning that excite and motivate you. Try to find something to feel positive and confident about and focus on that. We all lose confidence at times but we can easily find it again!
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