What do you do when you're feeling frustrated?

[Bex]

One word - Habit. If you keep going, eventually your level will get good enough for your needs....

...Once a habit sets in, it dies hard and you are going to complete your daily goals regardless of your prevailing mood or level of motivation.

This is so, so true, I feel very, very uncomfortable now if I do the ironing without listening to my Spanish

[Bex]

It's classic studying behaviour - you study and practice in the way that feels most comfortable and unconciously avoid the hard stuff (which is your listening comprehension and environmental use).

I have to do plenty of things in Spanish....the last month I've had to get a puncture fixed in my car (twice) and go and get the fittings to adapt a water pump that I bought in the wrong size!

The pump experience was fun, the plumbing merchants spoke NO English whatsoever! I had to get male and female connectors to adapt from 1.5" to 3/4 and also to1 inch. And also connectors to change them from male to female.

I did it, it was painful and I ended up drawing connectors so he could tell me the correct words in Spanish but I definitely learnt those words!

It is uncomfortable but I have to do it sometimes but you're right I do definitely avoid it. And when I heard myself saying "Gracias para su ayuda... " I shuddered but no-one ever says anything when I say things incorrectly!

I did wonder thought if I accidentally said anything really bad/rude when talking about male and female connectors

[Steve]

I think the two questions to keep in mind are these:
1. Do I actually enjoy what I am doing?
2. Is it effective?

This seems a sensible suggestion once you're at a higher level but how would you get through that awful beginners material? I still can't watch TV and understand enough to make it enjoyable yet....any suggestions?

An observation I've made is that most people know many songs simply by having heard them over and over again in various situations. Our brains seem to have a knack for latching onto patterns which are repeated around us. Few people ever set out to memorize the latest songs on the radio, but exposure to songs over and over again causes us to internalize parts of songs without frustrating labor. My opinion is that effective language learning to some extent must utilize our brain's natural ability to do this by listening to things we enjoy over and over.

I think that the enjoyable and effective filters should also apply to beginning materials. My opinion is that a necessary part of beginning materials is having some text and audio that you personally like and don't mind listening to, following along with, and reading over and over again. I use the sound editing software Audacity on my computer both to listen and edit various things into convenient forms for what I want to do.

I started seriously working on Hebrew this year and have made the most rapid progress to date for me on a new language in spite of the relative linguistic distance. I'm using a combination of Assimil and listening/following/reading the book of Genesis. I acquired an old interlinear (originally circa 1885 or so) of Genesis, a printed copy of the OT, and downloaded two different free audio versions of Genesis. I'm spending the majority of my study time listening. I split my time between Assimil and Genesis. I edit together 1 week's worth of Assimil lessons and listen to those as a block. I do various combinations of things like listening and following, listening alone, selecting various phrases and sentences and repeating them over and over. I do this until the sounds and patterns start to feel "familiar" for lack of a better word. I do something similar with Genesis by creating audio files of each "paragraph". I use a combination of listening, following with the interlinear, following with text, studying the interlinear to carefully see each word, and reading the text. As a block of lessons or paragraph becomes somewhat familiar and comfortable, I move to the next block. I then also just grab the written text (both Assimil and Genesis) and read it. I find that as things become familiar, the sound of the words starts to into my head as I see the words. I of course have been reading the grammar notes in Assimil and a few things like that to get a sense of grammar and structure. But, my main focus is on listening and reading so that the language becomes familiar to me similar to the way songs become familiar.

I have a daily routine with some activities I regularly do, but I adapt what I'm doing to how well it's working for me. I don't have a strictly regimented approach to choice of listening, following, and reading activity. I mix them up as needed. The two things I most closely monitor are my attention span and eliminating frustrations. Usually, when I start an activity, I can concentrate on it intently. But at some point, my attention starts to wander. At that point, I move to a different activity. I also find that as I am listening or reading that certain things will be a stumbling block to my understanding or will cause frustration. I'll do something to eliminate the worst stumbling blocks. It might be that I simply don't understand something. This might require more listening to a particular phrase or sentence, switching to a different activity, or it might require reading some grammar notes to figure out what is going on. This combination of staying within my attention span and eliminating stumbling blocks seems to keep things within the enjoyable and effective realm for me.

For right now, my main goal is that the audio and text I am using starts to feel familiar. I've dabbled a bit with watching cartoons on Netflix in Hebrew w/English subtitles on. I was encouraged that some words were jumping out at me. I'm nowhere near being able to do this enjoyably or effectively, but I'll keep checking back on this every few weeks. At some point, watching TV will be an activity that I can add in to my mix of things.

[Flickserve]

. It is uncomfortable but I have to do it sometimes but you're right I do definitely avoid it. And when I heard myself saying "Gracias para su ayuda... " I shuddered but no-one ever says anything when I say things incorrectly!

Great. It’s just an example of how you learn and how things work for you. You probably have the latent vocabulary but it needs to be activated by this situations and by repetition.

No need to be depressed about learning Spanish. You already know lots. You need the real life experience to fine tune using it. And the more local interactions you have and frequently enough, the easier it is going to get. Listen to dialogue more and tease out the meaning of each individual word.

[Elsa Maria]

I feel very emotional about my Spanish, maybe it's because I've invested so much time into it? Maybe because moving to a country where I don't speak the language (at all) is one of the hardest things I've ever done.

I am not great at learning languages, but I know more than a little bit about how hard it can be to be an expat as an adult with school-age children.

It is easy to point out the advantages to the environment, but maybe some of the emotion you mention is similar to what I experienced. Maybe not, but I’ll share

After being there for years and not having the language level that I wanted, there was some shame attached. And I had local people shame me on occasion. That is not fun. Especially if you really are trying, and they are assuming you just don’t really care to learn the language. Sometimes this motivated me, but sometimes it shut me down.

Native speaker friends are great. Of course they are. But I’m an extrovert, and for my mental health I did not limit myself to non-expat friends.


What you are doing is indeed very hard. And the pressure to succeed can be high. I hope you can be kind to yourself during the process.

[coldrainwater]

There may be an opportunity to remold what you find enjoyable to some extent. Since we share a common L2, I'll craft a case. One technique for combatting negative emotion is to replace it by positive emotion. I find it imprecise to anticipate that a penchant in Spanish will mirror the equivalent pursuit in my native English. In fact, they are just as likely to be inverted. When I conceive of learning Spanish, I am definitely not trying to duplicate English. Instead, I am driven in part by novelty and new experience combined with confrontation thorugh challenge. I want what I learn in Spanish to be fundamentally different than English. With this outlook, it sort of does not leave a place for extended frustration. Profound personal changes are almost bound to occur. Afterall, learning a language to an advanced level takes years, and even if the language didn't cause the change something else would within that timeframe. Like it or not, spending your time dating Spanish (and in fact residing in Spain in your case), some of those changes will be processed through the lens of language.

Case to point: In English, I'm a mild to moderate anti-listener. In Spanish, I am quite the opposite and walk around with headphones plastered all day long. What I have learned to do is become very careful with the words hard and easy and to cultivate flexibility. The feeling I get when I listen for hours on end to 'easy Spanish audio' is extended to 'very hard Spanish audio' in almost the same manner. What I have done specifically is make sure that my reaction to hearing unknown language doesn't cause a furrowed brow. Meditation and mindfulness were both helpful in getting to that point, but equally important was this upheaval of redefining hard and easy (and in a sense the difference between enjoyable or frustrating). Despite the fact that I may not have the foggiest idea of what they are saying, it is relaxing, pleasant and 'easy' to listen to many hours of Spanish. As an aside, that sort of stamina is more or less built by habit which is another method of neutralizing frustration (or maybe the same method couched in different dress). In contrast, desk study, though I might be reviewing/learning the simplest of grammar, may be a drag. It is, in a concept, hard. I am very biased toward listening and tend to label it panacea. It rarely gets flagged for encroachment (I do it while I am living all the other aspects of my life alongside it), and like any excellent brute force method, it shows results, yes or yes, often frustratingly faster than any of my planned machinations. I can add to it any amount of more intensive study at will (and sometimes costing willpower). When life, anxiety, depression or emotion xxx hits, the listening record keeps playing. Low effort, high hour investment, great results, short calendar timeframe. Keeping on with the sense of inversion and juxtaposition, it is an entirely possible result that you may end up loving reading Spanish even though you simply don't do it or enjoy it at all in English. 'Tis a minor point that I would not discount.

Long message short, I offer warm encouragement to all, and I hope these thoughts have been helpful.

[golyplot]

This seems a sensible suggestion once you're at a higher level but how would you get through that awful beginners material? I still can't watch TV and understand enough to make it enjoyable yet....any suggestions?

Here are my tips get over the initial hump
1. Use Duolingo to learn the basics
2. Find things aimed at beginners. These can range from educational videos, to children's songs karoke on Youtube, to stuff like Easy Spanish.
3. Dubbed content is usually easier to understand than native content
4. Shows aimed at children are usually easier to understand than adult shows. I'm not talking about Peppa Pig here (I couldn't stand that), but childrens' cartoons like Carmen Sandiego or She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, which are legitimately entertaining for adults, even if they are simplistic. (Speaking of which, Netflix is great for this, since nowadays they dub their original cartoons into dozens of languages)
5. Find things that rely mostly on visuals to a) provide more context and b) not leave you lost when you miss the dialog. Action shows and cartoons tend to work well here.
6. Find things that you are willing to watch even if you don't understand much
7. Use headphones. You can't expect to understand things when the sound quality is low.
8. Lower your expectations. If you get frustrated whenever you miss a line of dialog, you'll never be happy. I think this is the most important rule. The goal should be to understand say, 20% or 30% of a show, because as long as you can watch it without getting bored, you'll be able to just keep going and coast to higher levels of understanding. Eventually, you'll find yourself looking back at the things you used to watch and realize you understand almost all of it.

Note that so far, I've only learned "easy" languages this way that are relatively similar to English like French, Spanish, and Dutch. This makes it a lot faster to get started with listening. I think it took me around a month to get comfortable listening to shows in French and Spanish, and a week or two for Dutch. Note that this is just when I started on "real" shows - I still didn't understand much at first. I haven't tried more distant languages, but I imagine the same process would work, it would just take longer and be harder.

P.S. In the specific case of Spanish, I'd suggest checking out Luisito Comunicaa. He's a Mexican travel vlogger, and he goes to a lot of interesting places, so the videos might be interesting to watch even if you can't quite understand what he's saying. It's my favorite Spanish Youtube channel.

[StringerBell]

When I get frustrated, it is almost always due to having unrealistic expectations (for me). When I start feeling like I should be better than this by now, I generally resort to:

1) reading something on reddit or a duolingo forum where beginners are asking really basic questions about the language I'm learning. Usually they're asking something that I totally take for granted at this point and it reminds me that I've come much further than I give myself credit for.

2) re-evaluating how much time I've actually spent doing the exact thing that I'm sucking at. I spent 1,200+ hours on Italian (at this point, I don't know what I'm up to anymore), but at least 800 of those hours were listening. And, my listening comprehension is really good. But only ~200 hours were speaking. And guess what? My speaking kind of sucks. But when I think about how much more time I sunk into listening, I realize that it's really not fair to expect miracles. I just haven't put enough time into it. Giving myself a reality check really changes my perspective.

3) reminding myself why I started learning the language in the first place. With Italian, I really just wanted to be able to communicate with my in-laws and not have to rely on my husband to translate everything for me when we're in Italy. That goal is accomplished. But, once I reached that goal, suddenly I wanted to actually be good at speaking the language. That changed everything. This meant I started feeling pressure to master the grammar and explain the kinds of complex topics that I would discuss in my native language.

This is where the frustration sets in, because this new goal is really ambitious and will take me many years to reach it. To be honest, I probably will never reach this goal. So I remind myself that I already met my original goals and anything extra is icing on the cake. I try to see any improvements I make as a bonus instead of as something I have to do, or should do, or should be doing better than I am. Whatever I can manage to understand or say or read is much better than where I was at the very beginning, which was being able to do nothing.