In today's episode I'm talking about overstimulation and how it affects my language learning. As language learners, I think we often get the message that speaking and listening are the most important skills to work on. I’ve struggled with getting in a significant amount of speaking and listening practice in both of my languages, which comes with a lot of guilt. Lately, though, I’m coming to realize that my struggle is more than the usual fear of making mistakes, not being confident, and feeling uncomfortable when I don’t understand something or can’t find the words I’m looking for. Although all of those things have definitely been true for me, there’s a lot more to unpack here.

Even though I have conversation lessons, speak with friends in my languages, and use one of them almost daily in my community, I feel a lot of guilt when I don't speak to myself in my languages when I’m in the car alone or while getting myself ready in the morning. Even though I listen to Italian music daily and hear German all around me, I feel a lot of guilt when I don't listen to a podcast on my languages on my commute home or while I'm cleaning up after dinner. But ya know what, sometimes I just can’t do it. For my own sanity, I can’t listen to anything in any language. For my own sanity I can’t listen to anyone talk, even if it’s myself, and even if it's a language I absolutely love. Instead, I just need to process my thoughts, reserve my energy for my kids, or just...be.

Some days or weeks, I find joy and comfort in filling the little moments with language time, but other times, I don't. And then I feel guilty. My negative thoughts tell me that I just don't have it in me, I'm not the kind of person who does, and I'm never going to reach the level I want because I’m slacking too much. But instead of giving in to the guilt and the negative thoughts, I'm trying to question them and allow myself to see and believe the bigger picture of me. More often than not, I’m just feeling overstimulated, overwhelmed, and/or completely drained of energy, and I need to seek out silence instead. And that's okay. There's no reason for any of us to feel guilty for taking care of what we need for our mental health, so I really needed to explore that today, and I hope it reaches those who need to hear this message, as well.

Links from this episode:

Where to find me:

In this third episode of "Good Advice Gone Wrong," a segment in which I highlight some really good language learning advice that can also go wrong, I talk about moving to a country where your target language is spoken. I hear (or read on social media) language learners giving this advice almost daily, and I can't deny that it's amazing for immersion and natural input. There are so many benefits to learning a language while abroad, but it isn't a guaranteed path to success. Not only that, but moving abroad isn't possible for everyone, which can create a sense of missing out on some magic key to success. I started learning Italian after we moved to Italy (literally, I looked up the word for "thank you" while I was waiting at baggage claim and realized I didn't know how to say anything!), and most of my German acquisition has been while living in Germany. I can't say that moving to the countries hasn't helped me or that I've completely failed, but I can definitely say that in-country immersion hasn't been the missing piece to my language puzzle that effortlessly gave me the language.

Today I share three ways in which moving to a country of your target language could go wrong. Living abroad is something I wish everyone had the means and opportunity to do. Expanding our horizons, worldviews, mentalities, and experiencing and appreciating other cultures are invaluable. But when it comes to learning a language in a country where it’s spoken, it isn’t always rainbows and butterflies.

There are still challenges, it can still be a long and difficult road, and living abroad isn’t a guarantee that one will learn the local language. Things like culture shock, native-language bubbles, and our own personal roadblocks are just three things that can cause this good advice to go wrong. It’s important not to restrict ourselves to taking advice exactly as-is and putting too much stock into one single method being the magic trick to acquiring and speaking the language of our desires.

I also give some words specifically to those who are living abroad and find that the natural immersion just doesn't seem to be helping them improve their languages. I, too, have this experience, and I completely understand. I share my thoughts on what you can do to overcome the roadblocks you've found (some of which I'm currently trying out myself), and hopefully it sparks some ideas of your own. I also speak to those who want to move or travel abroad but aren't yet able to do so. Moving country takes time, money, and a lot of sacrifice. It really isn't simple advice, even though many toss it around as such. I see you. I know the stranded and frustrated feelings of not being able to be where you want to be. For you, I also spend some time giving my most creative ideas for building an immersive environment right where you are for little-to-no money, and I hope you get some fantastic ideas of your own that allow you to connect with the language and culture of your dreams.

There are countless methods for learning a language, and I believe that all of them are good, but they aren't all good for everyone. Instead of just giving language learning advice, this recurring segment focuses on reasons specific pieces of good advice may not work for everyone. So if this method isn't for you, that's okay. I love sharing this segment in order to spark creative ideas for how we can mold advice and shape it into something that does work for us, if desired, and I hope to inspire you to discover your own creative, personalized language learning journey.

If you like this episode, you can check out Good Advice Gone Wrong from Season 1 here, where I talk about watching kids' TV in your target language, and from Season 2 here, where I go over doing what you love but in your target language.

Where to find me:

In today's episode, I'm speaking with Dr. Veronica Benavides. Veronica is a Harvard-trained doctora of education with several years of experience in creating meaningful learning environments for children. She is also the founder and CEO of The Language Preservation Project and host of Talking to Grandma podcast, both of which were created as resources for other heritage language learners and for building community around reversing the trend of language loss across generations.

Veronica is a heritage Spanish speaker and also a mother raising her children in Spanish as part of a multilingual/multicultural household. In our chat, Veronica shares her story of growing up in the U.S. with Spanish-speaking parents who chose to raise their children in English. While she gained some Spanish in childhood, she walks us through her path to discovering a passion for her heritage language in college. She shares her experiences living in Mexico City as a Fulbright Scholar and raising her children in Spanish even as she herself was still learning so much about the language.

Veronica and her husband maintain three languages with their children, and she tells us what that looks like for their family on a day-to-day basis. Her experiences raising her children in her heritage language is an amazing example of perseverance and strength, rebellion and acceptance, love and grace. She shares inspirational words of advice and encouragement for all parents raising multilingual children, but especially for those passing on their heritage language to their kids. She talks about emotional and technical challenges she's faced in her journey and also about the moments that pushed her forward.

Something really incredible about Veronica’s story is what she and other Latina women are building to help other heritage language speakers on a multilingual/multicultural parenting journey. They've seen and experienced the gaps in resources for cultural and linguistic diversity in Spanish language resources, despite the incredibly diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds of Latinx communities in the United States, and they are actively bridging that gap. Please check out and share The Language Preservation Project and Talking to Grandma podcast, linked below.

Find Veronica's Work Here:

Where to find me:

If you’re like me, you sometimes find yourself listening to a podcast like this about language learning, in your native language or one that’s very advanced, as a way to escape the actual language learning you want to be doing. It sounds crazy to those who don’t experience this feeling, but language avoidance is a real thing for many language learners, and podcasts like this can feel great because we’re improving our general language learning by listening to shows like mine. But, I also want to honor your language time by creating space for you to study. We’re all busy. There are so many things to manage and improve. So today’s episode, after the introduction, is 20 minutes of silence with a 10-minute notification. It’s a place holder for you to do something with your language.

I decided to create this episode to give a little nudge to anyone who comes here and also wants to study, to anyone who comes here to sort of avoid a language thing but still wants to be connected, and also as a placeholder for language time. Any time you have 10 to 20 minutes to study and need some accountability or a bit of a boost, come back to this episode. Download it and keep it in your playlist, and any time you’re having difficulties getting started, come back to this episode, and I will be here with this study time placeholder for you.

Where to find me:

In this epsiode, I share my current situation with German. For a long time I felt like I was at an impasse with the language, and I needed to decide to either commit to pushing forward or circle back around to the beginning to strengthen my abilities. I distinctly remember being at this place with Italian, and that time, I pushed forward. The problem was that I did it out of fear. I was afraid of being behind where I should be. I was afraid I didn't have time to go back and review or pass through old material. I was afraid that going back would reveal too many failures of things I didn't know. I struggled to face those things that I thought I should know by that point. So when I reached this point with German, I decided it would be valuable to do things different. My intuition told me that I had missed several things on my first pass through the beginner level and that it would be beneficial to me to go back through and pick up on more of those things. So I listened.

But what does "starting over" even mean when I can already function in the language in a country where it's spoken? How does one start over when they're already at the cusp of an intermediate level understanding of the language? Listen in to discover all my thoughts and perceptions, including what exactly I've done and how it's going. I promise, it's not quite as boring and crazy as it sounds.

Also, enjoy the sporadic sound of birds chirping in the background. It was such a pleasant day when I recorded this episode, and I couldn't bring myself to shut the windows or hide away from the fresh air and feelings of nature!

Where to find me:

Today I share my list of words and phrases that I often switch to my native for during convo lessons. Kenny of Something Polyglot once pointed out to me that I often switch to English for things like, “How do you say?,” or “What’s the word?” Once he brought this to my attention, I started noticing lots of little phrases that aren’t part of the main conversation, so I habitually leave the conversation language to say them in my native language. Making a list of these words and phrases has been very useful for me to consciously change my habit of switching to English and immediately increase the amount of time I spend in my target languages when speaking them.

Quite literally, the day after Kenny pointed this out, I had a conversation with Sara of Italiano con Saretta, and I spent much more time in Italian because I was actively remembering to say these little phrases in Italian. Immediate boost!

Listen in to hear my list of things that I’m working to stop habitually saying in English, and I hope you’re inspired to create your own list or become mindful of your own native language phrases that peek their heads during your target language conversations. This mindfulness will allow you to spend more time in your new languages, build more confidence, and provide proof that you’re doing this thing!

Thanks, Kenny, for giving me this boost!

Where to find me:

In this episode, I share a fascinating and wonderful chat I had with Urmi Hossain, a polyglot, author, YouTuber, and a woman empowering and inspiring others. Urmi shares her history of language learning, which began in childhood as she grew up in Italy with Bengali heritage. She tells of growing up in Sicily, speaking Bengali at home and Italian in the community and how she often felt in between worlds, neither fully Italian nor fully Bengali. Urmi takes us through her path toward realization that she doesn’t have to choose between cultures and which one she identifies with, and that, in fact, she is of both – Italian by birth and Bengali by blood.

In this chat, we get to hear about Urmi’s journey through other languages, as well, about the challenges she faced moving to Montreal as a French speaker, and about her passion for Spanish. You will hear the love for Spanish in her voice as she takes us through her travel experiences in Mexico and the Dominican Republic! It was such a pleasure to have this chat with Urmi and be given the honor of hearing her personal story of self- and cultural identity and the role languages have played in that. I hope you enjoy her stories as much as I did, and make sure you check out her work linked below.

Find Urmi's Work Here:

Where to find me:

One of the biggest issues language learners have is making comparisons to others. Comparison is part of human nature, though, and I’m not here to tell you to just stop comparing because it’s the thief of joy and no one else is like you so comparisons aren’t even legit to begin with. Even though I believe those things are true, they’re also not exactly practical for everyone, and sometimes I think the more energy we give to avoiding comparisons, the more energy we actually give to making comparisons because we give energy to fighting something, which gives energy to that thing instead of really addressing what’s going on internally. Comparisons by themselves aren’t always bad. Making comparisons is part of how we process the world around us, create identity, make choices, and become inspired.

But comparisons can be a gateway to jealousy, and that’s a dangerous path. When comparisons turn into jealousy, it’s much more difficult to see our progress, to be proud of our accomplishments, or to be content and joyful in our language journey. And when someone has a history like mine that’s overshadowed by years of extreme jealousy, comparisons are even more dangerous. Even as an ex-jealous person, there have been many times when I’ve felt a bit of relapse into that negative mental space of jealousy when I’m not learning as fast as someone else or when I’m reminded that I didn’t have the opportunity to grow up bilingual or do an immersion program at university, for example. I have to acknowledge that jealousy happens for me, especially in language learning because of the nature of language learning, the vulnerability of being a beginner, and the fact that no matter what I do, there will always be someone better with a different path that is seemingly easier than mine.

Thankfully, my jealousy usually stops before getting severe and internally destructive, and that's what I explore today. Listen in to hear about my history as an extremely jealous person, shifting away from jealousy and learning to appreciate and celebrate others' experiences, and how it affects my language learning. I talk about what I do in my language life to protect my mindset when jealousy starts to rise up.

Links from this episode:

Where to find me:

In today's episode, I share my top tips for what to do when you feel stuck in your languages. It's totally normal to reach a point where you don't know what to do next, what to study, or you feel uninspired, your motivation is dipping, and you feel like your learning is getting stagnant. This can happen at any point in your language journey, and I think the strategies I share today are useful at every level. Or at least, learners of all levels can find some inspiration here. Listen in to discover what I do when I'm feeling stuck, and I hope it sparks some ideas for yourself to get creative and build your own strategies that work for you.

There is so much good advice out there for what to do when feeling stuck, and I know my methods aren't for everyone, so I won't leave you hanging on my words. You can find more tips, tricks, and strategies used by other language learners here:

Podcasts: (any episodes that link to Spotify can also be found on any other podcast platform)

YouTube:

Blogs:

Links from this episode:

Where to find me:

Welcome back to Season 3! In this episode, I talk about how we view and use resources with respect to finishing them. In Episode 1, I talked about history of having a strong internal desire to finish every resource I use or language project I begin. I’m a bit of an extreme case, I think, because it’s been more than just wanting to finish what I started or valuing the content of the resources I find and finishing for the sake of learning the things they teach. From the beginning of my language journey, I felt behind and like I needed to catch up, and finishing a resource seemed to be the ultimate marker of progress. Yet, focusing on finishing made every resource feel like a chore. It sucked the fun out of the process, and I found myself avoiding things rather than working on them. This misguided objective of finishing things stayed with me for years, and every time I started something new and didn’t finish it within some arbitrary amount of time, I felt like a failure. Not finishing was clearly an indicator of my inability to learn a language, despite the fact that I was actually learning the language. Ceasing to use a resource, whether I liked that resource or not, validated my core belief that I wasn’t the kind of person who could learn a language, that I was too old, not motivated enough, not dedicated enough or hard-working enough.

Today I dig deep into this history and the mindset I worked under for several years and how it led to burnout, stress, frustration, guilt, shame, and very slow progress with little joy. I share the process I went through to bring myself out of this finishing mentality (beginning with sobriety, which I talk about here in Episode 37) and what my language learning focus looks like today. There have also been some very unexpected benefits to changing up how I view and use resources, helping me tackle other language learning problems I've had as a perfectionist, such as hoarding resources and not using them to their full potential.

I hope you get something out of my story and insights today, and I'm so happy to have you here. Thank you for coming back to Season 3!

Where to find me: