Granted, please take “studying” rather lightly. I’ve never quite understood how to study properly. And I’ve also been struggling with my mental health and motivation, so there’s that. But I’m trying.
But, that aside, about 6 years ago I had an immersive experience learning my current target language. I got up to about a B1 level, through a mixture of massive amounts of exposure, some structured study + self study, and the quiet (but determined) desire to learn another language. I was so psyched that I finally achieved one of my goals, at least to an extent. I also had in my mind that I wanted to maintain what I worked for, and that seemed to be the case for a few years…
Then life brought me to another place where I needed to learn 2 new target languages (please spare me, I already know about learning more than one language at a time. But, due to circumstances and my location, it was necessary). It was a bad experience, I got very burnt out with language learning and barely cracked A1 in either of them (I felt anyway), despite being more or less immersed for about 1.5 years. During this time, I didn’t spend much time maintaining my first target language… because it often overtook any attempts to speak my new target languages.
Within the last few months, I’ve returned to my initial target language (the first one mentioned). I used to be rather proud of how much I could understand/speak, and about 2 years ago I had the opportunity to return to where I learned the language and speak and engage with others using that language. It was wonderful!
But now… I know I know quite a bit. But I can’t access it, at least not fast enough. I hear the language, I recognize many words… but I just can’t make sense of it sometimes. It’s discouraging to try watching dramas/podcasts/etc. in my target language… because often I only pick up the meaning if there are English subtitles. Which, it helps me learn new words, so, yay!🎉, but… yeah. (I’m also aware that this language has different dialects that can vary a bit, and I’m only mostly familiar with two or three of them.)
And I have a friend (who is native in my target language) helping me practice speaking… but I feel like an idiot half the time because my speaking/listening skills vary so wildly all the time. It feels like they think sometimes that I don’t know much, but then they’ll say, “You have the words in your brain, you just need to get them out.” It’s like, “Yes, but no… but yes?” Aghhh, it’s so frustrating.
So… do any of you language learners relate or have any of you had similar experiences in any way? Am I maybe trying too hard/overthinking it…? (I am prone to overthink, if that’s helpful info, haha.) And does anyone have any suggestions for moving past this?
(P.S. If for some reason this is the wrong subreddit for a question like this, please let me know if there is a more appropriate subreddit. I’m fairly new here, and subreddits are many.) (TL)
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via Learn Online English Speaking
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