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LL & Loss of Confidence:How to Persevere? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5560 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes  Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 17 of 27 03 April 2014 at 3:01am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Loss of motivation/self-confidence
Those only really affect you when you monitor your actions to a high degree or using strategies which are not helpful at that point in time. You already learnt one second language well enough to be able to work for a living using it. You can learn more languages - if you invest the time. It'll take time, more than anything else. Don't compare yourself to others. Compare your current knowledge to what you knew three months ago. It is more? Great, you've learnt more! It is the same? Great, you haven't forgotten anything, you can rely on your memory not to fail you! It is less? Great, you've already learnt those things once, you'll be able to re-learn them more easily and then not forget many of them. (I'm exaggerating, I wouldn't think 'great' but: the status quo is ...) It does take some practice to think of things that way, and especially when you're exhausted it takes a long time until you can switch to thinking like that, but ... it does help. Edited by Bao on 03 April 2014 at 3:02am 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5185 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 18 of 27 03 April 2014 at 6:15am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Yours is an excellent example of why immersion isn't a magic wand. Some particular challenges you seem to be facing:
Culture shock: It's very real and very demotivating. Language learning is enough of a roller coaster already; culture shock just adds whole new dimensions. And one of the obvious ways to soothe yourself is to retreat to your comfort languages. Your situation also simultaneously is helping you and hurting you. Being with a group of foreigners in the same situation is helping you keep general morale up, but as each of your attempts to branch out into the local culture doesn't go as well as you hoped, you just end up entrenching deeper in the expat community. That's how people can live there for decades without learning the language. related to the above - Self-Esteem: You're spending a lot of time feeling like you're some kind of dumb child because it's suddenly difficult to do things that you mastered in childhood. It's really hard to live like this on a constant basis. To counteract this, try to find some confidence-boosting activities that can let you feel like a badass (or a functioning adult, at least). Working out is a great one if you aren't doing it already (especially if you can work out or practice a sport with a group). Language learning itself offers some confidence boosts but not without low periods and only if you keep your goals modest. Level: A lot of people will say that immersion is best timed for when you're about intermediate (anywhere from A2 to B2). Going in with some background knowledge allows you to hit the ground running rather feel like you're stuck at the starting line trying to figure out how to tie your shoes. It doesn't surprise me that sitting in a class going over very elementary points and then going out to happy hour chat with natives is making you feel really dejected. In a class in your home country your only goal sticks are your classmates and your grades. In France, you're constantly comparing yourself against natives and advanced L2 speakers. It's going to take a while to get to that level so you need to find a way to scale down: First off, a conversation with several/many people in a bar is just about the biggest challenge in a foreign language. There's tons of background noise, tons of informal language a language "play", topics of conversation are constantly changing, people who already know each other make shorthand references to things they've already experienced together, etc. You need lots context and a relaxed setting with a patient interlocutor. I recommend starting to develop a routine and then fit language practice into that routine. The whole classic become a regular at the café/boulangerie, market, etc. Find someone who seems friendly and open to conversation enough (not everyone is, of course), start with some basic pleasantries and build from there. If you find the right person they will probably notice how much progress you make and won't hesitate to tell you. You may find someone who's patient and open to conversation but Tarzan-level language just makes the experience frustrating. You need a bridge to help get your meaning across other than English. Someone I've seen who comes to a local polyglot conversation group carries a sketchpad with him. As he talks about what he did that day or that week, he'll start sketching things out, drawing little maps, etc. Even when he's making tons of mistakes it's easy to see what he wants to say and when he comes to a halt you just offer up the word/phrase he's looking for without either of you having to say it in English. Then he dutifully writes it down. This makes him easy to talk to despite his struggles with the language. You can try other bridges and "set ups" to make communicating more easy: a picture dictionary, gestures, games that limit your conversational scope, etc. Finally, I recommend checking out Des Bishop's In the Name of the Fada. It's a comedian's attempt to spend a year learning Irish through immersion in a Gaeltacht but it's inspiring for any language learner. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5326 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 19 of 27 03 April 2014 at 3:18pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
This is such a real thing. It's frustrating to have all the expressive powers of a three-year-old, though this passes quickly enough under the right circumstances, and you soon have the expressive powers of a 5-year-old. But comparing yourself to natives is always going to be a bit brutal: they've been using this language all day, every day, since they were in diapers, and they've gone through a decade and a half of school. Unless you're emigrating for life, it helps to make peace with the fact that natives are amazingly good at their language. :-) I don't even try to speak French like my wife; all I aim for is to hold up my end of an interesting conversation.
OK, now that I have a few spare minutes, I'm going to be a bit less vague about this. :-) If I had to do it all over again, here's what I'd do, and why. This is carefully adjusted to my personal preferences: I like to learn languages implicitly, with occasional bits of grammar study. I like to read, and I like to watch really good TV series. I like science fiction, and I have a soft spot for really good comics. I strongly dislike speaking until I reach A2 or so. Your personal preferences are different from mine, so please don't follow any of this advice "as is"—use it instead for ideas. 1. First, I'd subscribe to a French cable package, and follow Khatzumoto's advice as much as circumstances permitted:
The goal here wouldn't be to magically learn French by leaving the TV on. My goal would be to get used to French sounds: what sounds exist in the French language? What sounds fit together with other sounds? The idea is that listening to French is a bit like listening to a "classic rock" radio station: After several hundred hours, you'll be able to hum along with all the songs, even if you don't know what the lyrics actually mean. This will help prepare my brain to learn the meaning of those sounds, later (a process for which I need to pay attention). 2. I'd buy two "textbooks": Assimil's New French with Ease, and Dover's Essential French Grammar. I'm personally quite fond of Assimil, because it fits my learning style. And Dover's grammar book hits a sweet spot: It explains all the important stuff, clearly, with nice example sentences, and it covers the most common exceptions. But it doesn't worry about rare exceptions or other depressing complications. Also, it's about $2 on sale. 3. I'd do one Assimil lesson every day, starting with 20 to 30 minutes for the passive wave. I'd go through each lesson 8 to 12 times, listening to the audio and reading the French and English versions of the text. My goal would be to understand 90% of the French text and 80% of the French audio—not to reproduce it myself. If I was too busy to do one lesson per day, I'd commit to at least 4 lessons per week using Beeminder. See also my post on the "Assimil intensity knob". 4. If I had any questions about grammar, I'd look them up in Essential French Grammar or on french.about.com. Assimil's great for building an intuition about how the language works, but they don't necessarily come out and explain stuff. 5. After I got maybe two dozen Assimil lessons under my belt, I'd look for some easy, fun, inexpensive reading. Right now, I suspect the best bargain in French reading is Izneo's unlimited digital comic book subscription for 9,90€/month. I would start out by flipping through and looking at the pictures, and using an electronic dictionary to more-or-less translate anything which looked interesting. 6. I'd set up Anki on my laptop and my phone, and every time I studied an Assimil lesson, I'd manually type in perhaps 5 interesting sentences (with their English translations), and use Anki's "cloze" feature to make a couple of fill-in-the-blank cards from each sentence. The goal would be to make each card as easy as possible—the English and the French would both go on the front, and I'd hide a single French or English word at a time—or maybe only half of a French word. I'd configure Anki to introduce no more than 10 new cards per day, and I'd set the leech threshold to 4, so difficult cards would be automatically deleted. I'd also delete cards manually any time they annoyed or bored me. 7. As I got a bit more advanced, I'd pick out one of my favorite French movies with exact subtitles, and start using subs2srs for listening comprehension. (Here's a sample deck containing 10 minutes of dialog from Amélie.) I'd delete 80% to 90% of the cards on the first revision, and continue deleting on later revisions—only my very favorite cards would survive the first two weeks. The goal here would be to get used to listening to fast, native speech under controlled circumstances. 8. Any time something was boring, unpleasant or overly difficult, I'd look for a more enjoyable way to accomplish the same goal. As rapp wrote:
9. And here's the important part: When my life became completely crazy and overwhelming, I wouldn't stop French. I'd adjust my plans as much as I needed to. If necessary, I'd say, "For the next month, my only goal is to spend 15 minutes per day flipping through French graphic novels from Izneo, and casually looking up anything which interests me." If I couldn't commit to doing even that, I'd go set up a Beeminder goal to spend 15 minutes 4 days per week, and put some money on the line. And if my like was so stressful and unpleasant that I couldn't spend an hour per week flipping through comics, then that would tell me something—I don't actually value knowing French right now, and I should abandon it entirely, and I should be proud of that decision. The reason for always doing something in French? It has worked pretty well for me in the past. For example, I kept my French alive for a couple of years by reading a paragraph a day from Le Monde. I kept my Egyptian alive for over a year with nothing but about 10 Anki card reviews per day. But even that little bit makes a huge difference: It's not enough to make progress, but at least it keeps me from sliding all the way back to "Bonjour." So that's how I'd personally tackle this. But of course, there are many other great ways to get out of the beginner levels. In the long run, I think that what specific learning method you choose is much less important than simply sticking with it. Edited by emk on 03 April 2014 at 4:18pm 7 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4683 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 20 of 27 03 April 2014 at 9:29pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Part of the problem is that people in many Francophone countries don't actually speak
French. They speak some kind of secret conlang & they refuse to tell anyone else the rules. They say it's French, but they're bluffing. I can read Proust. I can read Le Monde. I can understand a lot of the news. I can watch shows dubbed into French without subtitles. And yet I can't understand a single word that anyone says in a bar or cafe in Paris, and am completely lost if I watch any modern French tv show or movie without subtitles. I think it's easy to get discouraged when you live in-country, because you hold yourself to a higher standard, and you're more aware of how little you know. And I think we've all been overwhelmed by the idea of learning a new language. You put 100's of hours into it, and then realize that you have still only just begun. The best advice I got early on was: don't worry about the big picture, or where you stand. Just commit to doing something everyday, and slowly, over time, it will all add up. Personally, I'm a fan of courses. I like the idea of boot-strapping a language, of designing my own course of study, of building my own anki decks ... but I rarely have the time to do this, or maintain it. It's too easy to fall so far behind that you can never catch up. Assimil is great because it will take you around six months to finish, and it's easy to do thirty-minutes a day. It will bring you to a point where you can read independently. I don't find that it helps much with speaking, though. For that, I think you need to get out of your bubble! And I mean out of it ... not just for an evening, but for a long weekend. You say you're gregarious, so that will help. Find a place where they don't speak English. After a day of not being able to talk to anyone you will start to force yourself to speak, just to have some human contact. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4622 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 21 of 27 03 April 2014 at 11:22pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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@Raconteur: There is immersion and there is immersion.
I think there are good arguments in favour of regular doses of "controlled immersion", which could be things like listening to recordings of radio programmes or podcasts over and over (maybe with transcripts if available), or audiobooks or (very popular here, but lowish on my personal list) films/DVDs or TV. Another kind of "controlled immersion" situation might be in a classroom situation where a teacher talks to a small group of learners using only TL, but maybe slowing down or simplifying or carefully explaining meanings using alternative vocabulary, etc. For "teacher" substitute "sympathetic and friendly native speaker" if you wish. And from time to time of course, go out into the wild and engage with some random native speakers and see how you get on. **Joke Alert ** I imagine there must be some friendly random native-speaking strangers, even in France **End of Joke Alert **. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Gemuse Senior Member Germany Joined 3876 days ago 818 posts - 1189 votes Speaks: English Studies: German | Message 22 of 27 04 April 2014 at 12:12am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I actually LOL'd :D That was funny montmorency :) 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Gemuse Senior Member Germany Joined 3876 days ago 818 posts - 1189 votes Speaks: English Studies: German | Message 23 of 27 04 April 2014 at 3:33am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Perhaps of relevance:
http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/tortoises-and-hare s http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/cute-girls-mathema tics-language Edited by Gemuse on 04 April 2014 at 3:40am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Avid Learner Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4456 days ago 100 posts - 156 votes Speaks: French*, English Studies: German | Message 24 of 27 05 April 2014 at 8:32pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Yes, if you can accept that your progress will be slower. On top of my job, I started taking evening classes after I started studying German. The first year, I deliberately took less classes because I wanted to have time for German, but even then, that had an impact on the time I could devote to language learning. This year, I took more classes, and so had even less time remaining. Like you, I am often very tired. These days, the only thing that I will do daily no matter what is 20 to 45 minutes of SRS. I have thousands of isolated words and 605 sentences taken from the FSI drills (a sample from units 6 to 18). Thanks to my smartphone, I don't do it in a single session, but rather find a few minutes here and there throughout the day, so that by the time I come in the evening, I do not have many cards left, if at all. Aside from that, I try to watch TV in German and read online articles. Sometimes I can watch only 15 minutes and I will spend perhaps 5 to 10 minutes on reading. There are times I would have time to do more, but I am so tired that reading or watching TV feels almost useless. When I'm exhausted, I also have to accept that I will miss more (even significantly more) cards in Anki, resulting in more cards to review in the following days. The result? Well, I see people here who started learning German easily a year after I started and who are at a higher level. I haven't had the heart to add new cards to review in Anki (I have perhaps 175 words waiting for their first review), and I am sure I would improve by a lot if I could reply to my pen pals more often in German rather than in French or in English and/or use lang8. It's not that I don't want to, but it requires more energy. So what? I have not gone backwards and I can still feel progress. In fact, just yesterday evening, I was super tired and even if I haven't watched much German TV recently, I was amazed at how much I could understand in the news - I thought it would be less than that. I am definitely better than I was a few months ago. This wasn't what I had planned in the beginning, and it's going to take much more time before I can start learning another language than I wished. However, I still have the motivation, I haven't had a language burn-out, and I don't see why I won't get where I want. 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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