The Frustrations of Language Learning
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- Опубліковано 2 лип 2024
- Do you ever get frustrated when learning a language? I know I do. Usually it is a matter of managing expectations. We are learning, however slowly, and the end goal is elusive but still worth it.
How we study and what we expect of ourselves has a great influence on how we view our success and failures in learning a new language.
Learn a new language on LingQ: www.lingq.com
Get my 10 Secrets of Language Learning: www.thelinguist.com
Summary:
1. Frustration happens at all levels. Whether beginner (honeymoon), intermediate or advanced.
The first stage of frustration is not understanding anything and it all appears as noise.
2. The second phase is some recognition and understanding, but still not flow-based comprehension.
In either case, repetitive exposures helps. Having a strong sense of motivation helps. E.g., the prospect of finally understanding a video or article in a foreign language
The second stage of frustration is particularly tantalizing because you might start recognizing the language, but the long tail of the vocabulary is hard, and one is still not comfortable with a language. E.g., You just can’t get enjoyment a podcast.
Here you just have to pound the language into your brain. Look up items you don’t understand and keep at pushing ahead with the content/activities you enjoy
3. The third stage of frustration is good comprehension but inability to understand proper grammar or the inability to naturally put the right grammatical structure together. This advanced stage is all about using your broad knowledge you’ve acquired so far to focus on your weakpoints
Regardless of which stage applies to you - you have to keep going. Press on!
Manage your negative feelings. Be positively motivated, put in the time, and notice how far you have come.
You will never be perfect, but press forward!
The problem with the post-beginner stage is that it gets harder and harder to notice that any progress is occurring whatsoever. Not just that it feels slow, but that it feels like zero. Like you're in a huge swimming pool and you can't see whether you're getting any closer to the other end. While it's true that the only solution is to keep swimming, it would also help to see some markers on the wall that tell you you're getting closer. Tracking your known words, words read, hours of listening, hours of speaking, or some other meaningful metric can help with this.
That is why we have all of these metrics at LingQ. Also the fact that new lessons have fewer and fewer blue or unknown words. The pages get lighter in colour.
There is frustration to be dealt with but there is also anxiety. Mostly for introverts when they are starting to speak.
Don’t change anything. Your videos are always great. But the sound is actually quite amazing. Reading and listening, as you’ve suggested, has helped my language learning tremendously. Thank you. Your interview with Mike Still was great.
Learn American English With This Guy Love your channel, man.
yes, thanks so much for your videos. You inspired me to start my own channel. Good job, Steve!
"The only solution: dont allow the frustration keep your negative feelings" so true
Let's face it: learning a foreign language is a Sisyphean task. The only way we have to improve is what Steve says: keep studying in spite of the frustration.
I just learned a word "Sisyphean". Thanks.
@@JC-by6cl My pleasure. Greek mythology has lots of fascinating characters. Two more words from another Greek myth maybe you already know: "tantalize" and "tantalizing".
I overcame the plateau by being consistent. I learned 20 WORDS/DAY FOR A YEAR, and now, I am fluent
What language? How were you able to remember those 20 words?
@@ineedken5400 you can watch my last video. I explain it all. For Italian :)
@@ineedken5400 She speaks dialects of Latin. I learned 20 words a day for a year, and now I speak Australian. Buy my mixtape
@@KarenVanessaBuitrago good channel, I can see it growing real soon.
@@please.stop.coping Thanks! I appreciate the support :)
I'm currently at a B2 level in my target language. I put in about 1 hour of dedicated time per day, and while I am slowly improving, I consider my progress to be slow. I've never learnt a second language to fluency before, so I just have to keep going and trust in the process.
Tehui This is exactly my situation, too. Like you I’m trusting the process but the very slow progress is frustrating and makes me question the process.
+David Guy Nice one bro. What's your target language?
@@Tehui1974 French
Thanks for this Steve, been learning Turkish for nearly 20 months now and sometimes find myself feeling frustrated. Although my vocab on LingQ is a good 15,000 known words, I still have difficulty understanding native speakers or expressing myself fully. All I can do is tell myself to continue, 1 hour reading and 1 hour listening every single day. Motivation can be hard to come by, but this is what language learning is! Rewarding but difficult.
Bill Smoke i think you should force yourself to speak with natives more
@@95fyken Yeh you may have a point
If you can get the grammar right, Turkish will be a lot easier for you, since words in turkish are not as diverse.
@@johnkar9657 You shouldn't speak for a very long time or you will get bad habits. Its all about input which is how a child learns.
You should switch to 1.5 hours reading and 30 minutes listening, if you only have two hours a day dedicated to it. Try to squeeze listening in while multi-tasking
You have no idea as much you help me I'm a feels so frustrate today. Some times Look like making no progress, the English is a hard language but I'm never give up!
Yes, thank you so much Steve. You even inspired me to start my own channel :)
I’ll never give up
Hi Steve, I've only been an active language learner for two years, but that's long enough for me to discover that the road to language mastery is paved with "reading and listening". I'm now firmly convinced that after one has gotten a firm grasp of the fundamental nuts and bolts of a language, they will already have absorbed the high frequency words. Then, the only way to acquire an understanding of the lower frequency words is to observe them many times in context by through lots of reading and listening. If one reads slowly, say 100 words a minute, then they would still get through 6000 words an hour. So, reading an hour a day would expose one to more than 40000 words a week. With a bit of attention to book selection, reading 40000 words a week can provide enough exposure to the lower frequency words to cement them in one's passive lexicon.
This video summarizes exactly my experience in the language learning process. I’ve been learning French and riding that middle plateau for awhile. Oftentimes I get negative and be like, how is this ever gonna be possible? But like you said, I think about how much progress I made since a year ago (I didn’t know practically anything then 🙂) Now I’m in Québec living amongst francophones talking about what I’m cooking for dinner! There ain’t no way I coulda done that before. Thanks again for the motivation 🙏🙏
یکی از بهترین استاد های زبان شناسی . ممنون استیو من طرفدار پر و پا قرست هستم 😍
Totally agree,
I've been learning Frensh for at least 10 years without even been able to throw some words together until I found the idea of "comrehensible input"......just listening and reading....so funny, amazing and magically effective. Now I'm very happy, car je peux parler le Français, but very sad for those 10 years at school, and so curious about wich thing I keep doing wrong in my life 🤔🙄.
I think you had a very similar experience to me. I took 2 years of high school french, 2 years of college french and got A's in all the classes. But then I studied abroad, got to France and couldn't understand a thing. So incredibly frustrating. I worked extremely hard trying to "Skill-build" my way.. Eventually it dawned on me that I bet I can read 20 pages of a children's book in the same amount of time as it takes me to decipher 2 pages of Le Point, I figured that much more exposure has to be better. So I started watching cartoons on TV (cause I could understand them) and started reading childrens books and my french level took off... If only someone had introduced me to French in Action on day one I wouldn't have wasted the first 4+ years and would have been able to really take advantage of the year abroad.
@@hrmIwonder
Heureusement, vaut mieux tard que jamais 😊
Thanks for this one Steve! I can't believe how on time this video is, it pops out when I needed it the most 😂
Nice to hear you have the same frustrations as a mere mortal such as myself, I have days I feel I’m going backwards but “just keep going” Thanks for your videos 👍🏴
Thank you for this. Recently scored advanced-low for listening and reading, but I've been stuck at intermediate-high with speaking. Extremely frustrating place to be.
I KNOW 13 LANGUAGES. 6 OF THEM ARE ADVANCED LEVEL. Russian and Arabic know at the level native- proficient. Language learning process is requiring constant motivation and comprehensible input in daily based. Then u will not face so called 'stuck' at the some certain level or plateau. But the crucial key is using language and communication. Btw I've already started sharing in my channel about my language learning paths and methods
My biggest frustration is that even though ones say I´m an advanced English speaker I can´t understand movies and audios podcasts. A lot of times I think about giving up.
Thanks a million for your time Steve and for backing us up. I wish you many blessings from Brazil....
This is late, but don’t give up! It is difficult, but not impossible!
I have the same problem! I can speak Spanish at probably a B2 level and can have conversations and understand what people say, and I can communicate with little difficulty (although certainly there are words or phrases I don't recognize). I can understand podcasts, but still have terrible difficulty understanding people on TV programs and movies. But fortunately this doesn't bother me too much because my major focus has always been on being able to talk with people.
@@tobikrutt This is awesome. Thank you for your feedback. I wish you all the best!
How is your english now?
@@qapla5297 I'm rather greatfull, but I'm still facing challanges. AS you can see bu my writting skill. Anyway, thanks for asking... God bless you!!!
Love your videos Steve! Ive definitely felt the plateau with both speaking and comprehension when learning italian. Motivation is key and i need to spend extra time finding and working on the specific areas that i need most improvement on.
Check out RaiDue, Alle Otto Della Sera, great podcasts. www.raiplayradio.it/programmi/alleottodellasera/
@@Thelinguist Thank you very much! I will check that out right now 😁
Yeah man, i think that "mindset " is the word . If you are not able to play in Your own team, even god can not help You. But the problem is, in theory everything is easy. Deal with your own mind is as deal with your worst enemy, it know your weaknesses and the exacle moment to shoot you down . Learn a new language is definitely learn about yourself. You can not avoid that . That is it. It is what I mean about. You should be your best friend .Believe in yourself , really .TMJ Steve! Hi from Brasil!
Thanks so much for sharing your perspective.
Thank you so much for this video, I feel like I just needed it 🤗
Very helpful, thank you. I noticed a while ago the moment I stopped obsessing about getting everything right was when I began to make a lot more progress and enjoyed learning languages a lot more as opposed to it being a chore.
yes, exactly! I had to make tons of mistakes before I was able to speak the language fluently
I always feel frustrated when I learn English, but I feel much better after watching this video. I told myself: I have improved my English quite a lot. Thanks for this soothing video.
For me it’s the rate of progress that is frustrating. I’m still improving but very slowly even though I spend a lot of time with the language. I have to keep reminding myself that getting to an advanced level takes a long time, but I’m impatient.
Patience and the willingness to accept uncertainty and imperfection for a long time, these are the necessary conditions of language learning.
Steve Kaufmann - lingosteve Thanks for the reply. I’m a perfectionist, which is definitely a handicap for language learning.
I think I feel more frustration with the further I have gotten in Spanish because the rate of progress slows down so much as I advance. I understand almost all of what some native speakers say and with others I feel quite lost.
Great video Steve, thanks for sharing!
I’ve been learning Japanese for 3 years on and off and only have gotten serious these last 2 months. What I can say in regards to plateau, it’s weird. I feel that what we have to accept is that l gauge learning is a process. Think of us being kids and using double negatives not knowing words having English words we had to practice up until high school. That’s years and years and years of learning a language in forced immersion. Just shows how long it really can take to actually grasp a language. As someone who has always been able to learn and pick up things fast, not being able to understand things frustrates me. I’m working on dealing with the fact that it’s not as easy as snapping your fingers. It will take time but I’m convinced that if I am able to continue my studies some day I will get a dream job dealing with language. 🙌🏾 your awesome Steve! Not ready for linq quite yet but another half month and I’m going to start👍🏾
Thank you very much, I needed to hear this
There was a workbook for bettering one's vocabulary that I had to do in my high school English class called Word Power Made Easy. There are also vocabulary enhancing apps that have come out recently. But unfortunately all these are for English.
I wish there were more things like those for other languages, which might help with language learners who are past the intermediate stage to advance further in their target language.
The frustration comes from wanting to deal with the target language with false hopes . The solution : real immersion , that is when you use the language for living ( groceries, medical exams, daily news, conversation with friends daily not to learn the language but to live your life. Compare French immersion schools in English Canada with your kids going live and study in Quebec city : a world of differences.
Not sure why anybody is still looking up words in paper dictionaries. For people stuck, in reading anyway, simply reading bbc arabic (or whatever language) news or feature pieces, and copying and pasting into Google translate, for sections not completely clear, is the best way. It's fairly accurate and you can increase volume of new vocab encountered much faster. Save words, phrases into a word file. Review a couple times per week.
i cannot remember more than one spanish word a day.
You can listen more and just read. I have the same problem with Chinese. I still struggle with the vocabulary but regularly reading a text it helps me.
I do not know about Russian, but as a Czech person, we did learn and practice Czech grammar 3 times a week for 45 minutes and the other two school days we were reading and writing, for a decade. I imagine it is hard for foreigners to catch up, as the Slavic languages tend to have quite complicated grammar and a some exceptions or rather rare rules. Though on the upside, even native speakers make a lot of mistakes. And from time to time too many people make the same mistake so the language rules are changed so that it is suddenly the proper language:)
Thank you very much!!💛
Thank you Steve..!!.. From Ecuador..!!!
yes, Steve! thank you so much for inspiring me to start my own youtube language channel
I was going to quit learning portuguese, then this video encouraged me again. I WILL forge ahead despite the frustration.
thank, sooo helpful! 👌
Thank you. It was very helpful😁
I find that I experience two plateaus. The first is about speaking and frustrations are related to that. Then, as my speaking improves I find it transitions into a plateau relates to listening and comprehension, which is also frustrating. So maybe the plateaus are a teeter totter between those two (or more?) areas of language learning. Just an idea. :-). Thanks for the video!
Hi Mr Kaufman,
I am a British Afghan living in Italy. I speak Dari (farsi) as well as English and Italian.
I have been watching your videos and using them as guides in language learning.
If you would like to practice your dari then I would be more than happy to have a conversation with you.
thank you for the kind offer. I spent most of my time on input activities, that is the small amount of time that I have available for language learning. Maybe later on. I would like to hear how Dari differs from Farsi.
yes, Steve! thank you so much for inspiring me to start my own youtube language channel
Great video
This is really what i need now with my Russia.
After 5 months i start to understand Russia but the next step to understand any movie is really big.
Now i know what s it s take to reach my goal.
oh it feels great when you listen to a movie and you actually understand. Best feeling ever
Currently I am learning Japanese and I am terribly frustrated, thank you for the video
Hi Steve. Im learning French, now have been for approx 3-4 years in my spare time. I have half French heritage so you think it would be easy!!!!! No no no. It aint. Anyway, one of my greatest hurdles to overcome so far is the automatic desire to want to translate EVERYTHING directly from English to French, or Vice versa, word for word. This has been SO very difficult to stop doing and it is oinly in the past 12 months that it has finally sunk in to me, not to do that. Thanks
Great video
This is why I don't see how you guys just keep going again and again, it's brutal and impressive in a way but still unfathomable to me. I'm a Lingqer and love the app but it's been a week now with no activity and i dred how much more time i need to spend to get to the good stuff.
You guys seem to almost abandon your acquisition as soon as you've obtained it, moving on to new conquests immediately but never really fortifying your hard gains.
谢谢Kaufmann老师
Thanks
Стив вы очень крутой, спасибо вам за ваши видео :)
Hm, I think there must be some smaller steps between familiarity with the language and being able to understand most of a podcast or movie. Whenever a problem is intimidating it's usually because it hasn't been broken down into smaller problems. You can hit your head against the wall trusting one day you'll break through, and that may work out in the end, but it might be more fun to figure out intermediary goals.
I never broke through that point to be able to understand a movie in a different language, but I can see my progress, I understand my friend's emails more immediately, I hear the sounds of the language better, my self expression is less stiff, I catch more when I do read or listen in the other language...
I feel there's not an easy enough way to talk about how we experience and use the other language. I can't say what level I am in the other language, only that I can't understand a book or movie. To most people that means beginner, but it's not really. I know a lot, almost as much as I do about programming and that's how I make my living. I just haven't necessarily focused on the things you need to understand a movie. It feels like failure because I know that's the projected image, but I use it to maintain friendships with people I like a lot which is more important than understanding a movie, so how can it be failure and how can it be a plateau? Every word I learn I can use to express myself better to my friends. I wish I could read books in the other language one day but that's a mountain I may never climb. Time and energy I have little. I'm happy with what I was able to do so far. I don't want to distress myself that it's pointless because I won't ever have the time, energy and opportunity to really get fluent, whatever fluent means.
The key is to give yourself credit for what you can do, and not fret about things that you can't yet do.
I've always found cases to be easier for me to grasp than getting gender and articles. I'm a native English speaker from the good ole U.S. of A, but Spanish is harder for me than Russian is. I think our brains (left hemisphere) play a big role in the difficulty of some languages and how we naturally phrase things in our head, even if it goes against the rules of our languages.
I was thinking about these frustrations earlier today. I've been learning German for some time now, and struggling a lot to understand the four cases.
yes, I have studied German for 2 years, and I still struggle with them. It's hard, but the way you learn it is not through rote memorization, but through internalization of the language. You have to get comfortable with it as though it's your native language. It will take a long time. Just have fun with the process
It's the awareness of right and wrong that kills the impulse to speak, I find. Going over material and seeing the grammar patterning is easy enough, but in production of it it's a damned slow process. It definitely requires a relaxed approach on the edge of accuracy and fluency. I take heart in hearing Germans correcting each other.
it's funny cause when I was first starting to get fluent in English I thought of English nouns as having gender too(my native language is Russian) like I still had that assumption that doors are feminine in English and that it just doesn't use gendered pronouns for them so they are feminine not in a grammar way but in concept, and that personalizing them for like a children's story with talking doors those doors would be addressed as "she". I think nailing down gender comes down to lots of input so you notice that certain things are feminine or masculine or neuter and then you polish that up with some sort of grammar study that makes it click. I had great teachers in Russian that made using those rules really easy and intuitive, I wish there was a way I could help people with nailing down the concept of gender and those types of things
In the US there are some stuff like boats and trucks that guys refer to them as "she".
yes. most people tend to copy and paste the grammar of their native language onto the target language. Sometimes I can make really funny mistakes
Hi Steve, you often emphasize re-listening to the same stories at a beginner level like with the mini-stories at lingq. Do you think at a B2 and above level I should still be re-listening to content 2 or 3 times? I listen to, for example, a lot of podcasts in my target language those of which can be fairly difficult at times.
Steve Rocks!!!
yes, Steve! thank you so much for inspiring me to start my own youtube language channel
Hi Steve, very good topic! Have you ever considered to do research/survey on these interesting topics?
I don't have the time but would be interested in seeing relevant research.
ahh the lower frequency vocabulary is the worst especially as you advance, it's like you know everything you need to be fluent and you're comfortable so there isn't as much immediate motivation to learn lower frequency, fancy words
I think you are quite ambitious to do both Arabic and Persian at the same time. That’s great Steve.
Yes, thanks so much for your videos. You inspired me to start my own channel. Good job, Steve!
Hey Steve, I can't log on to the app, and yesterday I couldn't log on to the web version, at first The app wouldn't open any of my lessons, so I logged out, now I can't get back in. Thanks
Could you please contact customersupport@lingq.com. They may be able to help.
🐨🇦🇺🇧🇷 *Obrigado. Sou um Australiano Gringo com un Canal no UA-cam▶️ Tambem*
Vc me Ajuda muito melhorar o Meu Portugese
*vc fala muitas linguas, e insperaconal*
Increvil, que um persona quiera fala português,
Eu sou brasileiro. Se precisar de ajuda, só pedir. (I am Brazilian. If you need help, feel free to ask)
Continue assim
Kobe Bryant, David Goggins' mental toughness is useful for all!
English is gramatically and structurally the most similar european language to Persian, it shouldn't be hard to learn Persian, it's genderless and caseless just like English, Persian sound system is a lot simpler than English there are few sound you have to learn to reproduce and that's all, If you already know what subjunctive is in romance languages you'll have no problem applying it in Persian because it's essencially the same thing. the only hurdle is the damn writting system which causes lots of problems even for native speakers like me, I hope one day we start to use avestan alphabet since it suits our needs the best.
My plateau in acquiring French is also in the area of oral comprehension. I am frustrated.
It's hard but keep trying. Make sure you have the text for what you are listening to. If you are on LingQ use the sentence mode. You can train your brain to understand it better. But French comprehension is hard.
It's taking me 5 years to finally make out the words being spoken in Dominican Spanish
it's all about consistency. If you practice every day you will get better in no time
Hey Steve, I have a question. Is your web site a free resource to study? I'm madly in love with languages and I've been searching good material online, now I'm wondering if I can actually do things on LingQ before paying.
yes, you can use Linq without paying for certain things, not everything
Sound is a lot better.
What do you think of Michel thomas stuff as learning materials go, I think it's great
Not for me. I prefer to only listen to the target language.
I would like to hear Stephen Krashen speaking German u_u
MR. Kaufmann would you talk about jobs and careers for linguistics and multilingual, pleaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaase
I really don't know much about the subject. Languages just increase the range of opportunities that will come your way and that you can take advantage of.
Steve - maybe you’ve discussed this before but this topic made me wonder whether people have these frustrations if they’re pursuing only one language. You may study a language for semesters or years, periods of time where you’re continuously engaged and being pushed forward. You don’t have plateaus in these situations, right? Is it only the polyglots pursuing multiple languages with self-imposed goals where you get these roadblocks. Thx
The plateau is unavoidable, specifically the B2-C1 gap and the C1-C2 gap. It will take months or years to overcome these gaps regardless.
I've been trying to learn Russian since 2018. I still can't count to 10.
I think that frustration often comes from false expectations. How long do you think it will take to reach B2 in Arabic and Farsi while you’re learning them simultaneously?
at least 2 more years
@@Thelinguist But B2 requires just 4000 words so shouldn't you be there in 10 days?
Steve Kaufmann - lingosteve how many total study hours is that? Seems fast. FSI says 2000+ hrs for Arabic.
Hiiiii there
My focus is understand one hundred percent of your videos in English... My listening still is bad. Rsrsrsrsrsrrs
This poligrat can speak Spanish?.
The whole point of a good business is to satisfy customer demands. It's not that using Lingq has no value, but it's important to bear in mind that waiting is dangerous in the business world. And what I'm about to describe should be the Lingq team's task yet seems like a lazy and tacky business practice, causing frustration for some language learners. people may come to Lingq if they can't find resources to learn a certain language, if Lingq doesn't have a language they want to learn, what are they supposed to do? Wait? For how long? If you want to charge a subscription fee, fine...fair enough. The thing is, if somebody wants a new language added, that person must either a) wait until it becomes available, or b) which is the smarter but counter-productive move, instead of simply requesting a language, they themselves must take the initiative to use up THEIR time to help search for native speakers willing to translate a bunch of mini stories just to get the new language up and running on YOUR platform. Bear in mind this person, no matter how many people they know personally, is already a paying customer and probably has a fairly busy life most of the time like everyone else. Proactivity is the name of the game in business. Canada is home to many people from different countries, so if I was in charge of Lingq and wanted to get new languages up asap to get ahead of competitors, I'd network with as many speakers of as many languages as possible, and ask the people I know to do the same, and ask those native speakers to translate the mini stories or whatever it is you need prepared before launching a new language and ask them do that on their free time, which everybody has at some point or another, but that's the point of asking as many people as possible; they can't all be busy at the same times and it takes the pressure off their shoulders so they know they're not the only one doing the work. I pointed out a problem and gave a simple solution, and am surprised nobody implemented this strategy. Why is it so hard for you and Lingq management staff to network or just put yourselves out there and start talking with people? Sure, maybe people around you may seem busy, but we all have a life. Use my strategy or not, nobody's problem if competitors overtake Lingq
😹 I'm 2.5 months and 150 hrs into my Portuguese and I sometimes fell like vomiting Portuguese words and phrases! But I keep telling myself that I know more today than yesterday and my goal is to finish 600 hrs of listening, reading and speaking and see what happens after the 600 hrs. I might not be too aggressive after that but right now my commitment is to these 600 hrs. I'm also aware that even after 15 years of Mandarin and over 25 years of Cebuano, Hokkien, and even English there are still a ton of words that I don't know about so this reality does keep me grounded.
Who wants to be my partner 🥺I need someone serious though
Steve let’s be honest, Arabic is a different kind of frustration...almost transcendental compare to other languages. If the goal is to speak with people, MSA simply won’t cut it.
I am the first to comment and view.
Lol, I almost get that.
Great for you.
This is very formal. You could have just said “First!”
@@billsmoke4919 It was to accentuate the solemnity of the moment.
@@ivan-pr1co solemnity huh? I like your style. Are you native English speaker?