How do you keep studying when you lose your motivators?

[Exasperated]

It's a decision that's very much rooted in the priorities and values you have for yourself - in the wake of a breakup and work setback it can be very difficult to objectively decide what those are - especially when it feels like your world has been turned upside down.

I'll share my experience in the hope that it's useful - I lived in Germany for about 2.5 years, my partner was German, my future was German - and then one day it wasn't anymore.

After things ended between us I did take probably 2-3 months without really touching the language - because even the partial association was painful. More broadly though, I never stopped loving the language, or linking it with incredible memories and growth for me personally. Once the mourning period for the relationship stopped being so acute, I slowly reintroduced it to where it has now been for the last year - purely purely pleasurable contact - socialising, reading, listening to audiobooks etc (I appreciate more it might be a little more of a grind at that A2-B1 level). I've even been back to Germany since, and had a spectacular time.

I don't harbour any ambitions of reaching C2, I'm very happy with my current level and intend to enjoy the richness it continues to bring to my life.

If your path is similar, I hope that you'll find your way there because the culture and language are incredible - but if you decide you'd rather invest your energies elsewhere that's okay too!

Good luck my friend!

[smallwhite]

When my non-language-nerd friends say they want to learn a language, I usually suggest they take classes from a proper school (like Goethe Institut), because students in those classes seem to love the social aspect or maybe the regularity and seem to manage to continue even though they may not all be language nerds.

Myself I tell all my friends about my language studies and achievements and they praise me and I love it which motivates me.

[Soclydeza]

Sorry to hear about your troubles man, when it rains it pours but you'll eventually look back at all this in the future as a memory and learning experience and you'll have moved on to become someone stronger, so hang in there.

Right now all your use of German is tied to this girl and the job, so what you have to do is re-associate it by continuing to learn for your own reasons. Build new experiences with the language so that this whole phase just becomes a drop in the pond in terms of what you think of when you think of German. If anything, try and look at it in a positive way as something that kick-started your learning and got the momentum going, now you just have to keep the ball rolling. It takes some time to get to the A2 level and you're well on your way to checking learning a second language off your bucket list, you just have to keep working at it. In terms of using the language for work, I was in the market for a new job about a year and a half ago and I was surprised at how many employers were looking for someone who could speak German (I live on the east coast), so there will be further opportunities to use your German professionally if you go and try to seek them out. Germany is the largest economy in Europe and there are 6 or so countries that have German as an official language, so there are plenty of reasons to keep learning and plenty of opportunities to use it.

Create a new routine and start a new language program, if you're not doing that already. Try to visit this site as often as possible; seeing all the talk about language learning is a huge motivation, at least it is for me. If you can afford it, plan a vacation to a German speaking country to take some time for yourself. If that's not in the cards at the moment, start saving for a trip in the future, it will be motivating.

Being bilingual as an American is a valuable (and cool) thing, so don't let this fall away. I love German and am still working my way through it myself, so if you ever want to chat about the learning process or anything, just shoot me a PM. Hang in there bud, du kannst es schaffen!

[WildGinger10]

Thank you to everyone who's chimed in. If I wasn't sure whether or not this was the right forum for me before, I certainly am sure of it now.

[leosmith]

I'd drop it at least for the time being.

Something similar but not as intense happened to me with Russian. I was just a few months short of my goal, and the winds were let out of my sail. So not wanting to quit, I slugged through a couple more months and realized how futile it all was. It felt really good to stop, and a year or so later I regained my appreciation for the language. My level was B2 though, so the situation was a bit different, but when something major like that happens quitting is the correct answer for me. Those couple months were no fun.

[白田龍]

Why would anyone do anything at all in the absence of motivators?

[eido]

Why would anyone do anything at all in the absence of motivators?

To see if they can find motivators. Otherwise, well, people would be jumping off buildings all the time. Keep calm and carry on, I suppose.

[tarvos]

Why would anyone do anything at all in the absence of motivators?

To see if they can find motivators. Otherwise, well, people would be jumping off buildings all the time. Keep calm and carry on, I suppose.

Too many people still jump off buildings so there's that...(Says the person with an avatar of a woman jumping off a cliff.)

As for me; I dropped the language for a while in this circumstance and returned to it later on. (Been through all this too). Not German, but French in my case. But either way, since you're not living in Germany, you have the luxury of doing this. Normally, when you have life events such as these, my instinct would be to deal with them first and figure out hobbies and extracurricular activities and such later on.

[languist]

I'm so sorry to hear you're going through all this at the moment. It just so happens that my current situation is on paper very similar to yours... and it's incredibly difficult to deal with, so I really want to share my sympathies with you.

As for my answer to the topic; it depends. I went through this experience before with Slovak and Abkhaz. To prove to myself that I wasn't learning these languages for anyone but myself, I powered through and started a daily study routine which I'd never managed before. Sometimes it was still painful, and I was hit with the overwhelming feeling of pointlessness in the endeavour on many occasions, but after a month of being blindly committed to the language (both, on different occasions), I started to see new opportunities open up and make new social connections in the language... I'm not going to lie, heartbreak is heartbreak (especially combined with losing your job/future plans), and there is definitely a lot to say for taking a long pause from exposure to reminders, but feeling new roots take hold where you thought everything was rotten is quite therapeutic.

This time round, I'm going through it with Spanish (and kind of, Arabic, a language I just started but felt passion for, for the first time in ages), and it's not easy. The experience has been tremendously, traumatically painful for me, and my instinct is to run away from the language, lock the door and throw away the key. However, that is just adding weight to the idea that an entire facet of your life must be closed off due to your current negative situation. So I'm trying to do the opposite - I am signed up for a Spanish class, am reminding myself of all the Spanish speakers I've met, meeting with my other friends who want to learn Spanish and forcing them to make a study plan. With Arabic it's a little more complex, but I'm trying to motivate myself in a similar way; just diving in.

My personality is not at all one which naturally lends itself to shrugging off heartbreak or misery and just getting on with things. So I'm not advising this from a stony-hearted position of internal strength. The exact reason I suggest committing to studying precisely without any clear motivation at this time, is because it's the only way to learn to push aside the unfortunate associations you now have with the language and then actually create new motivations and connections. It's really "fake it til you make it". This argument won't work for every language (for example, learning your ex partner's village-specific dialect to speak to their granny? and now you're afraid to even look that way on the map? Probably best to just drop it), but German has so many applications outside of your personal experience thusfar.

Anyway, more than anything I want to say good luck to you. For all of my philosophising on this, I'm struggling every day to mine motivation out of loss, but I believe that it is possible - and probably in a way helpful in the healing process.

[eido]

Too many people still jump off buildings so there's that...(Says the person with an avatar of a woman jumping off a cliff.)

I mean, you're right. But I thought the original question I quoted was flawed, so. I didn't know how to articulate it.