Controlling Wanderlust

General discussion about learning languages
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fresh_air
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Re: Controlling Wanderlust

Postby fresh_air » Tue Nov 06, 2018 9:48 pm

reineke wrote:You can't cut soup.


You can let it sit in the fridge and cut it after it's gelatinous.
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Re: Controlling Wanderlust

Postby David1917 » Tue Nov 06, 2018 11:53 pm

Right now it's pretty easy because I'm limiting myself to French & German until I can use those two to learn 35 other languages :lol:
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Re: Controlling Wanderlust

Postby rdearman » Wed Nov 07, 2018 10:42 am

fresh_air wrote:
reineke wrote:You can't cut soup.


You can let it sit in the fridge and cut it after it's gelatinous.

You can cut hot soup. It just doesn't stay cut.
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Re: Controlling Wanderlust

Postby tarvos » Wed Nov 07, 2018 8:22 pm

I have given in to Wanderlust. Wanderlust owns me. The results have been... surprising.
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Re: Controlling Wanderlust

Postby zjones » Wed Nov 07, 2018 10:00 pm

My wanderlust is controlled by fear. I'm terrified of going back to the person I was for the first 24 years of my life, because that person was constantly quitting her 1-week-old hobbies and habits to start new, exciting activities, which she would then quit for even newer and more exciting activities. I never got anywhere with any of them except with fiddle (violin), which is something my parents enforced. I started and stopped French in the A0 phase about four or five different times.

Sometimes I wonder if the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction, though. The idea of getting caught in another wave of "committing then quitting" is enough to keep me from starting new things. I live vicariously through others on the forum who are always learning cool and exciting languages.
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Re: Controlling Wanderlust

Postby StringerBell » Thu Nov 08, 2018 3:38 am

I don't experience wanderlust in terms of languages. I've also not been a successful language learner for very long. In order for me to want to learn a language, I have to have a really, really strong reason. Italian is because I'm married to an Italian whose family and friends only speak Italian. And Polish is because my family is Polish, they speak it but I don't and that has bothered me all my life. Aside from those two languages, I can't think of any other language that I'd be willing to dedicate thousands of hours of my life learning. Maybe I'll feel differently once I've reached a higher level with these two languages, but in the meantime, the idea of learning other languages just feels like an unnecessary distraction.

Learning a new language to a high level of proficiency is a massive undertaking. My guess is that wanderlust sets in when the novelty of the current language wears off and reality sets in.
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Re: Controlling Wanderlust

Postby Elsa Maria » Thu Nov 08, 2018 9:35 pm

I guess you could say that I have wanderlust, but I am motivated by opportunities. When the opportunities change, I change my languages without feeling guilty about it. When I lived in Denmark, Danish was all that mattered. I no longer live there, and I am still aiming higher in Danish. I won't be satisfied until I can read anything and everything. But I have a loved one in the Netherlands, and by my way of thinking I would be silly not to shift my priority to Dutch. For the foreseeable future, I'll be spending far more time in the Netherlands than in Denmark.

I have some other long-term travel plans, and I don't mind giving a bit of my language time to the language of those places.
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Re: Controlling Wanderlust

Postby PeterMollenburg » Sat Nov 10, 2018 5:13 am

zjones wrote:My wanderlust is controlled by fear. I'm terrified of going back to the person I was for the first 24 years of my life, because that person was constantly quitting her 1-week-old hobbies and habits to start new, exciting activities, which she would then quit for even newer and more exciting activities. I never got anywhere with any of them except with fiddle (violin), which is something my parents enforced. I started and stopped French in the A0 phase about four or five different times.

Sometimes I wonder if the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction, though. The idea of getting caught in another wave of "committing then quitting" is enough to keep me from starting new things. I live vicariously through others on the forum who are always learning cool and exciting languages.


Yes, and this was me too. I spent so much time juggling various languages, stopping and starting, I didn't get that far in any of them, except Dutch a little further since I lived there for a bit. But once I started French I would not under any circumstances give in to wanderlust. Yet I did, I went back to Dutch and Spanish for a tiny bit, then said no, stop this, continue with French! I didn't reach my goal officially of C1/C2, though I'd argue I am there (at C1) anyway (without taking the test). So now that I've made it, I feel it's reasonable to learn some other languages, and so I'm taking somewhat similar approach to Elsa maria below-

Elsa Maria wrote:I guess you could say that I have wanderlust, but I am motivated by opportunities. When the opportunities change, I change my languages without feeling guilty about it. When I lived in Denmark, Danish was all that mattered. I no longer live there, and I am still aiming higher in Danish. I won't be satisfied until I can read anything and everything. But my son lives in the Netherlands, and by my way of thinking I would be silly not to shift my priority to Dutch. For the foreseeable future, I'll be spending far more time in the Netherlands than in Denmark.

I have some other long-term travel plans, and I don't mind giving a bit of my language time to the language of those places.


Since I'm going to Saudi, I'll be learning some Arabic. And since Belgium is a strong chance after Saudi, and because I was at least B1 in the past in Dutch, Dutch is back in the mix too, all the while slowly improving my French.

Finally, I agree with iguanamon:

iguanamon wrote:Wanderlust is mostly a problem for learners who have yet to learn a second language. They often get excited by all the activity here and many of our members who do amazing things with languages that they want to have that fun too. That's fine as long as that's all they expect.


iguanamon wrote:So, give into it then. Unfortunately, it's something that they must work through themselves. I can understand it but to me there's so much I can get out of a language once I put in the effort to learn it, that's what motivates me and keeps me from going for "shiny things"... but maybe that's too boring ;)


I learned the hard way. So for those beginners out there in several languages at once. I'd advise stick to one, take it to an advanced level and you'll see what iguanamon's talking about (above) that you really do get a lot of enjoyment out of taking the first foreign language to a high level. Afterwards, adding more will be more manageable with the wisdom and experience learning the first has brought with it.
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Re: Controlling Wanderlust

Postby devilyoudont » Sat Nov 10, 2018 1:33 pm

I've been doing a lot of thinking about why I had wanderlust in the first place and I think it comes down to two things:

1) Lack of Native/Near Native Japanese speakers in my city (Native Japanese speakers make up 0.058% of the city I live in). So for years after I came back home from Japan, I just did not know how to find people to use the language with, especially given that LINE and Mixi are basically closed networks, unlike stuff like Twitter

2) Incredibly burnout inducing approach to learning kanji. I realized at some point, I would need to learn to read in order to keep my Japanese alive, but basically all approaches I attempted to learn kanji would ultimately result in me taking month long breaks from the language. I'm still kind of at a loss for what to do here, but am not planning to do work on it until next year. But these periods where I burned out from Japanese are often where I would start looking into other languages.

So being exposed to better study methods thru things like the Actual Fluency podcast and having better access to Japanese speakers due to discovering apps like HelloTalk has been pretty big for me overcoming wanderlust.
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Re: Controlling Wanderlust

Postby jeff_lindqvist » Sat Nov 10, 2018 4:30 pm

I usally add more languages. 8-) Apparently, I'm not the only one.
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