Tag: flow

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Polyglot’s Nemesis: The Anatomy of an Excuse

O OUTRO LADO DO MEDO É A LIBERDADE (The Other Side of the Fear is the Freedom)

“Stop making excuses and get to work.”
“That’s just a bad excuse and you know it.”
Well, do you? How much do you really know about your excuses? Do they really matter to your language study? And if they really tend to upset the work of all language learners – wouldn’t it help to learn more about them?
Let’s do that tonight. No excuses here. Come on, this one won’t hurt 🙂

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Learning Languages at International Conferences

I’m pretty sure that the last five days have been the busiest I’ve had so far in 2012. I spent the entire week in Glasgow, attending the IATEFL Conference – one of the most important conferences for teachers of English.

It was exciting, busy, and fun – I’ve learned and benefited a lot, but only now do I realise how tired I am. This, for me, is one of the best contexts for learning things: out of your comfort zone, surrounded by new and exciting developments. It’s not quite as scary as ski-jumping, but it’s up there!

Here’s the best part: you can use international conferences to learn a foreign language. Sure, its main goal is to network, present and exchange ideas within your business. But with a bit of preparation, this can become a learning experience like no other. How to make it happen? Follow along!

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What a Ski Jumping 10-year-old Girl Can Teach You About Language Learning

1. Watch this:

I’ve been looking for so long to find a video illustration of “flow.” Here it is: a kid’s first big ski jump.

[youtube id=”ebtGRvP3ILg” width=”600″ height=”350″]

2. Consider this:

[checklist]

  • “X is just a bigger / longer Y.” Your skills are often more scalable and transferrable than you think. If you could jump off a 20-meter ski-jump, you’ve got some skills to prepare you for a 65. If you could order a coffee in an airport restaurant, you’ve got a bit of what it takes to get through a dinner party. And if you’ve listened to some podcasts and radio shows, you’ve gone some way towards understanding announcements, lectures and jokes. Not all the way (that’s why the fear is there). Some way.
  • “The longer you wait, you’ll be more scared.” There’s never going to be a perfect time for something big, scary and important. There’s always another piece of preparation to attend to, another excuse to stall and postpone, another day to think about something else instead. But as you’re doing this – avoiding a series of difficult emails to a Spanish client, declining your friend’s invitations to a German evening class, postponing your pronunciation practice before your exams – there’s something else happening. You’re feeding your fear. And it grows. There are people out there who fear every moment of contact with a foreign language. Almost all of them are middle-aged and have been listening to their scared self for too long.
  • “It’s just the suspense…that freaks you out.” The most insecure and fear-inducing moments – in ski-jumping, horror movies and language learning – are those in which nothing happens…yet. Just before your first real conversation in Chinese. Days before your French exam. Hours before your presentation. Doing the thing itself – that’s actually fun, engaging and motivating. Not to mention – memorable. Use this to your advantage. Ski-jumpers have a technique of “playing” the jump mentally in their heads, imagining the motions and stages of a well-performed jump. This allows them to focus on good performance, and not on the trivial facts such as “I’m going to be in the air for 220 friggin’ meters.” You can do it to. Imagine success, visualise your perfect performance – and ignore the doubts.

[/checklist]

Answer this:

What can you do – tomorrow, next week, every day – to feel like that girl, even if for 90 seconds, when learning languages? How can you bring the flow back into your learning- how will you seek out the fear, identify new challenges, pick out new fights?

If you won’t – or don’t want to – watch the video again. You’re missing out on something that could feel just as good.

 

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Flow vs Focus: What Language Learners Can Learn From Parkour

(Wiktor’s note: throughout the text, the terms “parkour” and “free running” are used interchangeably. Yes, I know there’s a difference. No, I don’t care that much. Carry on reading if you’re not gravely offended by now.)

 

Nerds have wet dreams, too. One of them – for many people I know, and for myself, more than once – was to be like a traceur, or “free runner.” If you saw parkour on “Yamakasi” or in the opening scenes of “Casino Royale,” you probably know what I mean.

Parkour as an art of movement has seemingly nothing to do with learning foreign languages. But upon closer inspection, some principles become evident. This post is a very quick introduction to the similarities between parkour and speaking foreign languages.

Get your shoes on and follow me.

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The Pain Of Flow: Learning Till It Hurts

Challenge vs. skill (source: Wikipedia)
Eternal Scream 3 (Alpha Blending)
(joshsommers / Flickr)

I had never been so proud before, and rarely since.

Staring at the result board, I could only see two names with the highest grades – two people who aced the English university entry exam. I was one of them.

(My future wife was the other one, but that’s another story.)

Let me tell you how it felt when I worked towards it. It’s a personal post, but it’s not about bragging – far from it.

It’s about risk and skill, challenge and pain.

Yeah, mostly about the pain.

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