I’m Not Talented, I Just Show Up – How I Learned 6 Languages
I am fluent in consistency
Yep, that’s right, consistency is a language. When you meet someone that learned a language in their adult years, I know them pretty well having never met them.
You do too. If you ask someone who is successful in any endeavor,
What they do or speak is not impressive.
What’s impressive is they showed up consistently with an open mind. That’s perhaps the most valuable life skill I’ve gained from learning languages. I learned how to show and open my mind despite being tired, having excuses, not understanding. I learned that overcoming gaps in knowledge is all it is. It requires us to take a step back and look at what gaps in our knowledge we have for what we are exposed to. If we have too many, it’s time to narrow our focus. The knowledge gap has to be traveled by walking and sometimes running every day. Picture it like a destination, try it. I’m currently delving into higher-level Italian. The short story I’m listening to presents gaps in my knowledge, vocabulary, and listening comprehension at higher speeds.
I choose which gap I want to address first. This is not based on ‘best’ practices for language learning, this is what I want to do. If the goal was to understand as quickly as possible, then I’d just translate it immediately. Assessing the vocabulary, I see that they are words I could integrate in the context of the sentences if I was able to identify word boundaries during listening. I look up the vocabulary once. Then start focusing on the gap I want to address first. Listening comprehension. I have my strategies for this as well, but in short, it’s a lot of repetition and shadowing of the audio.
How did I find this works for me? By showing up and failing early and often. I made my own system, obviously with help from other amazing language learners. That advice is not going to help me if I don’t try to apply it with an open mind.
It becomes easier and easier to show up when you know which gap you want to address. The beautiful thing about language learning is your mind almost has no choice but to learn. With enough meaningful and conscious exposure, you will improve. The rate of your improvement depends on how well you can self-assess your learning preferences.
This is why it was so hard to learn Spanish in high school.
You are told which gap to overcome, you weren't given the time to find out what can help you show up with an open mind every day. Start to be critical about how you learn, and be curious. I found how I learn and nothing can stop me from learning more. I found out how to show up every day. I’m not a genius, or talented. What made you show up to learn, how did you make it manageable?
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