If you’re someone who has been struggling with learning a new language, how does your day look like?

[rosanna80]

The question may sound strange, but as I'm working on a project I am looking for input from people who have been self-learning a foreign language and are struggling with it.

What is your level now and what level would you like to achieve? What are the the things that you struggle with and how do you feel about it?

Thanks to anyone who will help me find out information.

[Uncle Roger]

Good day: I had a plan to spend some time on the language and I pulled it off

Bad day: I had a plan to spend some time on the language and I didn't manage to do it (too much faffing around on facebook, forums, whatever)

In general, I approach the new language as a finite challenge. There is a finite number of sounds, grammar rules, word-specific rules. When it comes to vocabulary, I firmly believe in the Pareto principle and Zipf's law and I work off frequency lists.

I chuck all I can on Anki and work from there. I agree with the "listening is everything" approach proposed by a user here. I wish I had known about it sooner.

I find listening to natives the hardest thing by far, but I guess it'd be writing if I were to study a non European language?

[rosanna80]

Thanks Uncle Roger!

I can see you've a very structured way to approach the language which is good I guess we all have good days and bad days... and yes, for languages with a different alphabet reading and writing would be a real struggle.

Thanks a lot for your insights!

[tarvos]

When I don't feel like sitting behind books and studying (which in my case is nearly always), then I do loads of things in other languages that simply don't involve textbook work. I'm not an Anki or Memrise fanatic, I don't usually spend hours completing textbooks unless I really am in need of grammar improvement at the intermediate stage. And at a more advanced level, this is where you try to find vloggers that cover vegan food in French or something. A Let'sPlay stream in Portuguese. Hell do I know.

In the end, it comes down to this. Everyone struggles, so do I. The thing is, when you're struggling with a concept, you're probably trying to force a square peg into a round hole. Try something else. The older I become, the less patience I have with myself struggling because sitting and moping over stuff I can't yet do is time wasted learning how to actually do them. Do, or do not. There is no try. Every moment spent thinking about whether you can do something is a moment not spent learning to actually do it.

So that's how I cope. I just don't deal with that negative toxicity. And because I know I can achieve my goals, I don't really feel like there's a barrier there, even for stuff like Korean. I just know the road's a little longer. Well, that's why I am climbing Mount Everest. I've already done the hills and the mountains, I can handle your adversity.

And what my day looks like? I don't know, do you really want to know? I don't have routines set in stone precisely because it would make me feel like I'd entered a monastic order (thanks for the expression, Iversen). I change up my languages a lot, precisely because using the same one every day would make me more bored than a prisoner in a cell without a book to read.

Does that make my life hard? Maybe. Do I struggle? Likely. But I'm still here to tell the tale, and that's not because I went around moping. Be pro-active, be prepared, and if something doesn't work, experiment or try another angle.

[Iversen]

I don't really see myself as struggling - I just blame my prolonged learning process for some languages on the limited time I spend on them. Or rather: on certain essential tasks that goes into studying them, like finding somebody to speak to. How can you say that you struggle if you do other things instead of studying? The point is: I now primarily measure my progress in weak languages in terms of their written forms since that's where I put most of my study time - then I can worry about speech once I have booked a flight ticket to a relevant place.

Right now I also spend a lot of time on revising old musical compositions, so my overall study time has gone down for the time being. The irony is that I have much more free time now where I'm retired than while I still had a full time job, but I use it one other things - so it would be bordering on dishonestness to deplore that my Russian or Serbian or - even worse - Polish haven't progressed lately.

Now how does my day look like? Well, my days vary, but my television set is switched on for around 16 hours a day, out of which it has been told to shut up and just show subtitles for maybe 12-14 hours. My computers are now switched on nearly as often, but some of the time they just emit brown noise or splashing rain or waterfall sounds to drown out any sounds from my irritating neighbour(s). And then I can compose or revise music. If I 'just' study languages I like to have classical instrumental music sounding in my ears - it seems to me that this doesn't interfere with linguistic activities in my brain, but I'm aware that the scientists claim that true multitasking is impossible. Well, who am I to dispute the lofty claims of serious scientists in long white frocks?

By the way: why do you think men are supposed not to be able to multitask? I'll tell you: that's because the kind of multitasking their wiwes expect of them includes looking after the kids and hoovering simultaneously. But there is more to multitasking than that: I do it all the time (since I don't have a wife and no kids either), but I acknowledge that it mostly is a question of managing time slices. Or in other words: you switch between different tasks, but what distinguishes a good multitasker from a bad one is that the former chooses situations where you can keep a continuity between each slice of a certain task. Like when you suspend your wordlist studies for a brief moment to kill the terrifying and nauseating sound of the TV commercials, and then return to the lists without having to relearn all the words, or when you watch Morgan Freeman explain why the univers may disappear into a black hole without loosing track of your pizza's descent into another kind of black hole.

So most of the day I have something electronical running without sound, and I study or write music or eat pizza while listening to music or waterfalls or balmy waters (or in some cases: hoovering or preparing the next pizza or taking a bath). Doing more than one thing at any one time during the day is the key to getting things done.

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[Damian]

Hi everybody!
I `m new user. I recently strted improve my English skills. I have exactly specified plane. When i get up, i go to train my grammar and vocabulary or reading/writing (like nowe haha) with texbook "big grammar English laguage", the i have all day to working and do my responsibilities. At the afternoon,like 10 PM i`m talking by Skype with friends from other part of world and repeat the vocabulary.

[Tania_Zanuda97]

At this moment i study English. Often there are difficulties, especially with phonetics alot of time goes on to understand how to make a transcritption of complex words correctly I still do not how fight this someone could have trouble with advice. I am very grateful

[garyb]

I've had my share of language learning frustrations, but I've hardly ever felt like I've "struggled" with my Romance languages. I slowly but surely got my head around the major initial hurdles when I studied French at school (grammatical gender, verbs having different conjugations for each person and number, general sentence structure and word order) but since then I'd hardly say my studies have felt like hard graft. Mastering these languages is a process that takes many years of consistent work, for sure, but each individual day of that isn't arduous in itself.

When I've dabbled in more difficult languages, however, I've definitely struggled: with Russian and Greek, I experienced a kind of mental block where after 30 to 60 minutes of study my brain could simply not take in any more for the rest of the day. That got frustrating because I was quite willing to spend more time, but it simply wasn't productive so I had to accept that it would be a very slow process. After a few months of that I probably would have picked up the basics and been able to put in more time, but I never got that far... I should say that the frustration wasn't my main reason for giving up - both were intentionally short-term projects that I might pick up again in the future - but knowing that I could make much quicker progress in languages that were both easier and more useful to me meant that I wasn't too sad about dropping them!

[renaissancemedici]

A crazy struggle between procrastination and wanderlust, that's what it looks like.

[eido]

I force myself to watch an episode of my favorite show and read an article I may or may not be interested in reading. The only thing that keeps me wanting to do it is the prospect I may improve, and that someone may like my post that I'll do every day. Yes, I'm that shallow. But no one likes them, so...