When you're disheartened

Hello everyone! How are you doing with your language learning? I hope it's going well.

Have you ever felt tired or fed up with learning a foreign language? I have, repeatedly. In my inexperience I made several mistakes that I want you to avoid; for this reason, I am writing this post. I have already told you that I have started to learn several languages in recent years (becoming fluent is something else). To put things in perspective: I speak Spanish and English, I learn German and Japanese; however, I know a bit of French, Italian, Russian and Greek, I can read the Cyrillic (Russian), Greek, Japanese Hiragana and Hebrew Alephbet. To be honest, I'm not giving you the full list :(

This, as you may figure out, is totally unproductive. Imagine that I had continued with French eight years ago when I started studying it. One or two well-learned languages sound better than several unfinished projects, n'est-ce pas?

Certainly, life is not enough to finish learning English / Japanese / German / etc, but hey, many people have already achieved the level of fluency we are looking for. If they could, why couldn't we? We have become used to knowing "a little bit" of our target language, but how would we feel if we had disciplined ourselves one year ago?

The trick is to imagine how much you'll have improved a year from now if you keep studying

Try to imagine how well you would speak English, Japanese, French, or whatever language you are learning if you had studied diligently since September last year. It is likely that to date you have already seen your first film in English, or read your first manga in Japanese, or even have forged friendships with native French speakers.

Great progress is the result of constant small efforts. It's for this reason that I urge you to join the challenges that I will be launching each week. I promise to make them fruitful and challenging, the next one starts on Sunday!

Today is a good day to set an annual goal. Stop thirty seconds to let your mind fly and imagine the level you will reach in your target language if you are partially constant (study 50% of the total days). Now, how good would you be if you study all year?

I still lack a few words to meet my daily goal in German, and I still have to review the haiku I shared with you these days. I will return to this post in September 2021 to recall how little I knew today and compare it to how much I will know then. The constant study has been dropping the anchor deeper into the seabed, I can't wait to see my progress in the future.

In this post, I talked about how to have a language learner mindset. Tomorrow I'll pass on practical strategies to keep the learning flame burning. I'll be waiting for you!

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