Hello! My name is Abigail and welcome back to Polyglot Progress.
Today is September 15th, we are exactly halfway through the month,
and I think I've studied two days total out of the month so far.
I had honestly just resigned myself to the fact that I probably
couldn't make a September vlog at this point because I'd recorded one clip
and it wasn't even a study related clip and just how things seemed to be
going it kind of felt like I just wasn't going to do any study at all this month.
I was pretty busy at the end of August and so some of that kind of carried into the start of
September which got in my way a little bit, but honestly for the last almost two weeks it has just
been a slump type thing. This has been an overall problem in my life for like three to four weeks
now, but one of the problems with being in this slump is that I've noticed that I feel
bad because I'm not doing things that I enjoy and that I love doing, whether that's because I feel
guilty that I'm not doing them or just, you know, that I'm not feeling enjoyment because I'm not
doing things that I enjoy and then I don't feel great because I'm not doing things that I like,
so then I don't want to do the things that I like or things that I need to do. However, today I had
a little bit of a sit-down reflection time and kind of tried to figure out what changes I can
make right now to, hopefully, make myself feel a bit better, but at the very least encourage me to
get the things done that I need to get done and just do things that I would like to do and that
make me happy until I feel better. So today is day one of trying to get my language learning back on
track. Hopefully it will just have been split half and half this month, where the first half
of September is nothing and then the second half of September is getting myself back on track with
language learning and with the rest of my life. So I made myself a little bit of a plan today
in my bullet journal. I basically just listed out anything that I felt like I was currently
dissatisfied with or might currently kind of be stressing me out in the back of my head,
as well as anything that I felt like might improve my spirits-- Things that I feel like I
should be doing every day or frequently that I'm not currently. So yeah, I just
outlined those little steps that I can take to make myself feel a little bit better,
and I think a lot of these are going to directly or indirectly impact my language learning as
well. For example, one thing that I've noticed is that I have been on my phone way too much,
so I'm going to try to cut my phone time down by a lot, which, hopefully, will just open up
some time that I can use to read books (which I can do in other languages), study languages,
watch movies in other languages, all of those kinds of things. I also found that I have not been
keeping to the sleep schedule that I started back in July, and I feel like that sleep schedule is
part of what made August so good for me. My mental health is severely impacted by my sleep schedule.
If I don't get enough sleep I am super anxious the whole day for literally no reason. But also,
I had specifically decided to start waking up much earlier than I needed to before work
so that way I could have at least 45 minutes, sometimes closer to an hour, to just sit and
study Bulgarian in the mornings, and it was great! I was making great progress with my Bulgarian,
I was doing way more language-wise because that hour was already done in the mornings and then
I could study other languages in the evening, it made my Friday morning Bulgarian lessons go a lot
smoother because I was used to waking up that much earlier before work, but the past few weeks I have
not been doing that and what do you know, I don't feel great. So that's my number one biggest step.
I need to get back to waking up at 6:30, or at least 6:45, so then I can have some time
to myself in the morning, have some time with Bulgarian. It'll help my language learning,
it'll help me. And so then my other hope is that tonight I can have kind of a very relaxed chill
study session. I would like to do some Bulgarian. Today's Wednesday, I have a lesson on Friday
morning, so I would like to get myself moving in that direction but I think I'm just gonna
maybe review what we did in my last lesson or go over something like that instead of really
intense study. I also may only study for like 30 minutes instead of my usual hour. I really just
have not been doing very much and I don't want to overwhelm and basically fry myself out right away
and hopefully this will be a good start for getting me back on track in the next two weeks.
[Acoustic Guitar]
So I did end up getting up early yesterday, but I ended up using that time to take a
shower and finish the book that I was reading instead of doing language stuff
and I also did not do any language stuff after work. My friend came over and we watched a movie,
so I was just kind of busy with other things and that's totally fine! Yesterday just wasn't a day
where language learning kind of naturally fit into my day and I think one of the really important
things when you are coming out of a rut is not forcing it. Really just making it an easy process
and a natural process helps a lot more than forcing myself to do it and creating more of a
resistance. Plus, yesterday I was spending my time reading a book and watching a movie and being with
my friend which are all things that I'm trying to do more of and things that I feel like will
help me find balance a little bit better, which in turn will help my language learning as well.
Then today I had a Bulgarian lesson. It didn't go super well, I honestly should have canceled this
lesson. I, this whole day, have had a really really bad migraine, probably the worst one
I have had in a while. Getting through the work day was hard enough and honestly I feel like
doing that Bulgarian lesson made it a little bit worse. I really had just been hoping that
it was just kind of like me being groggy when I woke up and that it would go away, but looking
back now that I know that it was a migraine, I really should have you know not taken a language
lesson bright and early in the morning before work. I also was just a little bit disappointed
in it. Some of it definitely can be blamed on the fact that my head feels awful right now,
but a lot of it's just my place with Bulgarian that I had so much trouble today and it's just
sometimes very frustrating for me that I go over the exact same thing and sometimes I know that I,
you know, have seen that word a hundred times and I still don't know it or I know that we've
gone over how to form a certain grammatical construction a million times and I still just
can't seem to get it right. And obviously the only way out of that is to keep practicing,
keep using the language, keep learning more and eventually I'll get it. There's been lots of other
things in Bulgarian that I felt this way about and now I feel comfortable doing, so it's really just
continuing that on. It's just such a long and slow process for me with that language and I just...
I do feel kind of dumb during my lessons and I I wish that I didn't. I wish that I could feel
it more inside of me that I am just working on those things, but it's just a little hard.
I also don't think I'm going to be doing much more language wise tonight. It is Friday, so usually on
Fridays I watch a French TV show with my friend but we are not doing that tonight because I don't
want to look at a screen for the rest of the night if it's possible. Since I am probably not going to
do a lot of language stuff tonight I'm just trying to figure out other ways that I can kind of relax
and get myself back on track in other aspects of my life. I feel like that is such a huge
thing. I think every time I've kind of talked about getting back on track with languages on
this channel I've always just focused on language learning, but I have realized the longer I've been
learning languages and the more I've kind of figured out my life and my relationship with
language learning and how I can be a better language learner the more I've realized that
your personal life matters so much when it comes to languages and you cannot just completely divide
your mental health and your personal life and everything else in your life, every other hobby,
your job, etc from language learning. Even if you don't want to tie languages into your job,
you don't want to use them at work and, you know, even if you never want to connect your
other hobbies with language learning, they are definitely going to impact your language learning
routine, how you feel about your languages, all of that. So hopefully I can work on some
other things tonight, help my language learning in that respect, so that when I feel well enough to
study again I can do that in the best way possible and, I don't know, maybe I'll get
lucky. Maybe I'll be able to do something in a language tonight, but it's all up to my brain.
[Acoustic Guitar]
Good morning! So I think today instead of studying Bulgarian this morning,
I'll do that a little bit later, but this morning I think I'm actually gonna go and book some
italki lessons. I have not been taking Spanish lessons, have not been taking German lessons,
for like a month now and I really don't like that because I was doing really well with it and really
was planning to start adding in French lessons and then I would add in Italian lessons and I had been
planning to register for the next ASL cycle, so now that I'm only consistently taking lessons in
Bulgarian I have a lot more work to do before I'm in the place that I ultimately want to be in with
my lesson schedule. And I would like, if possible, to kind of get myself in that place by the end of
this year. Maybe not perfectly, but at least sort of solidly there so that way I can really just
be consistent with it next year and build upon it maybe if I feel like I can. So with that it's time
to plan October. I think this will be a really good thing because it'll get me back to taking
lessons, but I think it will also feel nice just to have October kind of planned out lesson wise.
[Acoustic Guitar]
I am so much more back on track than I was when I started this vlog. I have a streak
going again for doing something every day. I had a Bulgarian lesson on Friday morning which felt like
my best lesson in a while. I feel like I was noticing the patterns of issues that I was having
and correcting them a lot a lot faster than I usually do. Granted, some of them are things
that I've been struggling with for a while, like, for example, the masculine definite ending on an
adjective has been something that I make like a silly little teeny-tiny mistake on every single
time, but I'm starting to recognize that and catch it before I make it and correct it on my own,
which is great. Hopefully soon I'll be at the point where I don't have to catch it, I can just,
you know, say it and have it be correct immediately instead of going, “ah remember it's
going to be this instead”. And then Friday evening is also the time of the week when I call my friend
on zoom and we watch some French reality TV together, so I did quite a bit on Friday and both
things were really fun and went really well. I feel like when you're in a slump just saying “I'm
gonna do things I really love” alone doesn't get you out of the slump. At least for me usually it's
tied into something with my mental health, so I kind of have that lack of enthusiasm when it comes
to things that I like. But once I've found that I'm a little bit out of the slump, I'm ready to
do things but I just need to make it this path of least resistance. So I do things that I really
enjoy so I don't have to be like “Yeah I guess I can review this grammar point that I hate” or “I
guess I can do this activity that I don't really want to do.” I save those for once I'm really back
into it and can discipline myself a bit more or find the fun in those things a little bit more.
And so when I'm at that kind of earlier stage of coming back to it I really just focus on things
that I really really like, just things that really keep that momentum going and get me more and more
back into that routine so that I don't have to really think about it so much. So I'm really
feeling good about gaining momentum. I have all those language lessons coming up, which I'm a tad
nervous about. I've just been feeling really quite busy the past week and this is without necessarily
having been uploading to Polyglot Progress because I took a little bit of a break and now that that
upload schedule that I usually have is returning I've got a little bit more to do there. Plus I'm
going from one language lesson a week to multiple again. Plus I have recently started speed skating
practices, so I have those. It is all kind of happening all at once, which was definitely
not my intention, but here we are. But like I said at the start of this video, I think
me doing the things that I care about and that I enjoy doing will in turn make me want to do
those things and make me be at the point where I can do those things. So I think my next step
for kind of getting out of this slump, my final step, is going to be some just planning for the
future using all of that momentum that I now have to kind of direct myself in the direction that I
need to be going in. It’s quite convenient that I actually got myself out of the slump when I did
because it is the end of quarter three, so I do need to kind of reflect on my quarter three
goals and do some quarter four planning, which is absolutely wild. I can't believe that I'm doing
quarter three/ quarter four stuff right now, both in the sense that it feels like the year just
started but also in the sense that it feels like the start of this year was like 10 years ago. I'm
really excited to look back at my quarter three goals and look back at my goals for the whole year
and just see how far I've come. I feel like this quarter I really made a lot of progress in some
of my overall year goals. I'm excited to plan out the last quarter this year and plan out the final
push towards getting as many of my year goals done as I can. So I'm gonna go do a little planning.
[Acoustic Guitar]
I just realized I never actually filmed an ending to this video, so I just wanted to
pop on here really quickly and say thank you so much for watching this video and I hope that
you enjoyed getting to see a little bit of my September and that maybe some of these things
help you the next time you feel like you're in a language learning slump. I will be back next month
with another recap video, hopefully with a little bit more language learning and just a little bit
more motivation. I'm definitely feeling a lot better after doing these things, so hopefully that
is the case and until then: I will see you next wednesday and remember practice makes progress.