If your head doesn't hurt, you're doing something wrong
Leave your comfort zone and make sure it hurts.
I stayed in my comfort zone for quite some time and because of that I missed out on a lot of progress I could have made earlier.
For months I’d been studying the same way I usually do: finish my Anki reviews, listen to podcasts, add words I don’t know to my Anki deck, rinse and repeat.
In theory, there was nothing wrong with my study method. I’m using active recall when reviewing vocab, I’m consuming native content, and I’m consistent.
But I always had this lingering feeling that I wasn’t really learning anything.
The things I were doing were too passive and I couldn’t feel myself progressing.
Recently, I started reading the fourth book in the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, which featured a letter Harry wrote to Sirius Black.
Harry Potter is a young teen by this point in the series and writes in a fairly simple and straightforward way. I found this letter perfect for some language learning practice so I took on the challenge of translating the letter into Persian.
It took me a lot of effort and time to finish this and I could tell because my head was literally hurting.
Embarrassingly, this was the first time that I’d written anything of this length in Persian since I started studying it. For someone who always spoke about pushing yourself and testing your limits, I stayed in my comfort zone for quite some time and because of that I missed out on a lot of progress I could have made earlier.
I posted my finished translation to my story and some of my lovely Persian-speaking followers were kind enough to give me corrections, and boy did I get a lot of them.
One thing I noticed, though, was that I barely learned any new words while I was doing this but still seemed to get a correction in every single sentence.
Why was that?
I could understand more than I could produce. I focused too much on increasing my passive knowledge of Persian and forgot to turn any of it into active knowledge. That’s why as I was sentence mining those Persian podcasts I felt like I wasn’t progressing; what I was actually doing was piling up even more passive vocabulary to turn into active vocabulary without working on my foundations.
There are a few things I want you to take from this:
If you don’t feel like you’re progressing, you probably aren’t.
My brain was probably screaming at me during those few months that my study methods were off. I really felt like I wasn’t getting better in my target languages the way I wanted and I completely ignored that feeling.
If I had stopped earlier and thought about what I can change to not feel that way, I think I would have progressed a lot quicker than I did.
Pushing yourself means doing things you don’t feel like doing.
Writing is hard. Writing in your target language is harder. It seems like you can’t express anything in your target language the way you can in your native language, and that’s if you even know what to write about at all.
But if you’re reading this and nodding your head, it likely means that you would benefit so much more from writing in your target language than you think.
The only way to get better at something is to start
Your first attempt at anything will be bad, so get it out of the way as soon as you can.
Just look at how many corrections I got on my Persian text. I could have avoided this frustration by putting this task off, but that would have just kept me at that level for even longer.
Your first attempt at anything will be bad, so get it out of the way as soon as you can.
I remember my English teacher in middle school said that writing is like opening a really old faucet. When you first turn it on the only thing that’s going to come out is brown sewage, but after a few seconds clean water will start to flow.
Happy practicing,
langstudies
I completely agree! Every time I've started learning a new language I get really bad headaches. After I reach the point where I have some understanding, the headaches go away. They come back again when I'm doing something active.
It's a sign that your brain is trying to make sense.