Step by step

I've just had two days off, and to be honest, I haven't really felt like studying much. This is not unusual and I've compensated by watching some TV and doing a bit of reading, but it has reinforced a pattern I've noticed in my emotions and motivation with regard to my language study.

It feels like there are a lot of very small steps that I need to climb to progress in a language. Every so often, it feels like I have climbed one of these steps, maybe I notice that I am able to understand something that I had had trouble with a few months previously, or it might just be a general feeling of progress that is hard to define, I just feel like I have improved in some way.

Climbing one of these steps is a good feeling, and may be followed by a few days of positive feelings about the whole thing, but this is, I have begun to notice, followed shortly after by a period of not such positive feelings—it's as if there is a high after the fact, that is, like any good drug addict will tell you, followed by a low.

I think the reason for this is probably pretty easy to work out. It's like the feeling of climbing one of those steps is accompanied by an expectation that the rest will be pretty straightforward—I've moved up a level and my language experience will improve! I can look forward to trouble free conversation anytime soon!—Unfortunately, this is seldom the case, and climbing one of these small steps is usually followed pretty quickly by more frustration and hardwork.

I think this has been the case this week. I'd had some pretty good conversations in the past week, using language I hadn't used before, and felt that I'd kind of found a comfort zone in the language. Of course this was soon followed by some less successful attempts, and this may have resulted in the lack of motivation over the last few days.

What can I learn from this? I guess not to get my hopes up so much might be one way of looking at it, but it seems a bit negative to me. The more positive way to look at it might be to try and remember what it was that had caused this feeling of progression, and try and do more of it in the future. In last weeks case, it was listening to podcasts on LingQ that I believe had given me the added confidence in my conversations that week, so I'm going to try and listen to a few more of them over the coming weeks.