Hello my name is Abigail and welcome back to Polyglot Progress.
The more time that I spend learning languages and talking about language learning online,
the more that I realize that learning a new language is about so much more than
just vocabulary and grammar and the skills that make up knowing and understanding the language.
And one of those things that I think honestly has one of the biggest impacts on language learning
is confidence. And feeling self-conscious when learning a new language is totally understandable,
like, you're doing this new thing that you're still trying to figure out and you don't totally
understand and you're probably making a lot of mistakes along the way and for a lot of people,
myself definitely included, speaking with new people is already really daunting so
when you add into the mix that it's in a new language that you don't totally
understand/can't totally express yourself in, it just becomes really really nerve-wracking.
But as understandable and totally normal as it is, it also doesn't have to hold your language
learning back. Confidence as a language learner is something that I struggled with for a very,
very long time and it held me back from speaking with new people, sharing my writing and speaking
progress online, and getting feedback and from just putting myself out there in other ways that
ultimately would have benefited my language learning. And while I do still struggle a bit
with my confidence, especially in other areas of my life, because I think it's kind of going
to be something that I'm always working on improving, I have definitely come so
far with this, especially when it comes to my language learning over the last several years,
and I can now really comfortably take lessons with new people, share my progress, try new
methods out, and do things that push the ways that I learn and make mistakes in new languages.
So today I just want to share some of the things that I feel like really helped me
gain confidence as both a language learner and just a person in the
hopes that I can maybe help some of you who are currently struggling with this.
One of my number one tips for building confidence in a new language, especially when it comes to
speaking, is to just do it as much as you possibly can. I've mentioned this in several videos now,
one of them being the video that I made on how to overcome your fear of speaking a target language,
and I feel like a lot of other people mention it too and I know that in the moment when you
are feeling really anxious and insecure about your progress in a new language or you're speaking in a
new language this can feel like the exact opposite of what you want to hear, but I genuinely do feel
like increasing the amount of time you spend end with your target language and specifically
increasing the amount of time you spend doing the things that scare you the most in your target
language is one of the quickest ways to help build your confidence and overcome those fears. Not only
does spending more time with your target language help you get better at your target language,
which then I think helps build confidence because you feel like you're more comfortable in a wider
range of situations, but it also just takes away the pressure of that individual activity. With
2022 coming to an end and 2023 starting and me setting new goals I've talked a lot about this
recently but when I came into 2022 my German confidence was so low. I had a conversational
level and objectively I sort of knew that, but I worried so much going into German calls because I
doubted my abilities and I had really like no confidence in the things that I could do. And
so I put in a really conscious effort last year to fix that and to work all my German confidence
and my confidence in general and, honestly, the number one thing I did last year I think
that helped me to build my confidence and to just stop doubting myself was making speaking German
just a normal thing instead of this big event that I needed to think about and stress about.
And I did this by taking an hour-long German lesson where I had to speak every single day
for a month with Lingoda, who is also, I'm very excited, the sponsor of today's video. If you're
a returning subscriber you already know how much I love Lingoda. I feel like I mention them or this
German challenge in like every video I make now just because it was genuinely that groundbreaking
for my confidence and my overall German abilities. But if you're not already familiar with them,
Lingoda is an online language school that offers 24/7 one-to-one [and] group lessons
taught by certified, native-level instructors in English, business English, Spanish, French, and
German. And beyond just enjoying Lingoda's classes themselves, one of the reasons that I love Lingoda
and mention them so much on this channel is that multiple times a year they offer challenges just
like the one that I did. For 60 days you take either 15 lessons a month for the Language Sprint
or 30 lessons a month for the Super Sprint and if you successfully complete the challenge you
earn 50% of your money back for the Sprint and 100% of your money back for the Super Sprint,
so you get 60 hour long lessons for free. And these challenges are perfect for what I've
been talking about with building confidence through doing. Speaking your target language
every single day with a wide range of people on a wide range of topics really just helps it to
feel so much less nerve-wracking and just like a part of your routine and something that you're
really capable of doing, instead of this big scary thing and that definitely continues to
carry over even after the challenge ends. Plus, another reason I really love Lingoda is that while
all of their classes do offer a lot of speaking practice they're not all focused 100% entirely
on speaking so you can improve your speaking and your listening while also just being a very
well-rounded language learner and also just building your overall confidence in the language,
because I definitely don't think that confidence and self-doubt are just limited to speaking. And,
similarly, I think it's great that Lingoda offers classes on so many different topics because it
means that you're not just comfortable talking about one thing. If you're interested in trying
out Lingoda and maybe building your confidence through a challenge like this, there will be a
link down below to get $25 or 20 euros off of your deposit and then of course if you complete the
Sprint or the Super Sprint you'll also get 50% or 100% of your money back when the challenge ends.
A big reason I think that the Lingoda German challenge helped me to build my confidence not
just as a language learner but also as a person is that it made me get outside of my comfort zone and
made me get outside of my comfort zone very, very often. Everything you do to get outside of your
comfort zone, whether that is doing some public speaking at work or taking those first steps to
initiate a friendship or relationship or anything else that might feel outside of your comfort zone,
will help you build your overall confidence which then will directly correlate to your confidence as
a language learner because the more confident you are in yourself in general and the more
comfortable you are with being okay with how others perceive you and with being vulnerable,
the more you'll be okay with that in your language learning too. But you can also specifically step
outside of your language learning comfort zone and in many ways this looks just like what I just
mentioned of maybe having more conversations in your target language with new people or sharing
some writing online and opening yourself up to feedback and other people's thoughts on it,
but something I don't hear talked about as much is that it also might look like just
focusing on topics that you feel weakest in or doing activities that challenge you the most
or allowing yourself to make mistakes and asking for help while learning. Over the last few years
this has become something that I think a lot about when it comes to my language learning. I
definitely used to avoid speaking with new people because I didn't feel ready and avoided asking for
corrections or asking for help because I worried about whether I was making ‘too many’ mistakes,
but honestly that just made it so much harder for me to get started later on. I had this thought in
my head of like “when I'm intermediate or when I'm advanced it will be easier for me to speak
with new people or easier for me to share things online” but then as I would improve I would almost
wish that I had started as a beginner, because then it felt like there was all this pressure on
me to be a certain way as an intermediate learner or an advanced learner or even an upper beginner
learner. Once I started specifically doing the things that scared me the most and made me the
most uncomfortable in my target languages, I got to see that it wasn't as bad as I had
built it up to me in my head and I also got to see that I was capable of doing a lot more than
I thought that I was and that when I did make mistakes it it wasn't the end of the world,
in fact it was a very beneficial part and a very necessary part of my language learning process. I
touched on this already with the point of doing things more, but confidence is about more than
just having a deep understanding of things and knowing you'll be okay in any situation
because you know so much. You can be confident at any level and I think a huge part of that is
that confidence can be feeling comfortable with your current level and with making mistakes and
unapologetically embracing the learning process and not holding back until you're perfect.
Speaking of which, a great way to work on building your confidence and to work
on embracing where you're at in the process is to regularly check on your progress and to celebrate
your accomplishments, whether they're really big or really small. Progress can come really,
really slowly and with a lot of work and it can be really really easy to lose sight
of any progress you're making in the moment and feel like you're kind of going nowhere,
which can then very easily lead to you feeling like you're not in the place that you want to be
or the place that you should be and create all of these doubts in her head. Doing things like
recording videos of yourself speaking or writing journal entries that you can look back on and see
how far you've come or even just rereading parts of a book that you previously struggled with are
great ways to see that you are progressing and can really help you feel a lot more confident in
yourself and your ability to learn a new language. Even if you're just getting started, there are so
many small successes that you can focus on to really start to believe that you are capable
of learning and using a new target language. Did you remember that vocabulary word on your
flash card immediately when you saw it today? Did you just have a full conversation
about the weather in Spanish? Did you read an article in French without
having to look up as many words as last time? Laughed at a joke in German
because you understood it? Congratulations, those things
are all signs of progress. Progress does not have to just be passing an exam or finishing a textbook
or reaching a new level in your target language and reframing the things that you celebrate and
how often you're celebrating your accomplishments is a really small shift that you can make in your
mindset that will completely change the way that you think and feel about your language
learning. Confidence is defined as “a feeling of self-assurance arising from one's appreciation of
one's own abilities or qualities,” so, again, confidence isn't just about knowing everything
and feeling good because you know everything, it's about appreciating the abilities that you
have right now and embracing where you're at and the skills that you currently have, including the
skills you have to take the mistakes that you're making and turn them into progress later on.
And so, lastly, very tied to appreciating where you're at right, now my final tip is to just avoid
comparing yourself to others. And, yeah, this is probably also something that you have heard
a million times but I honestly think that this has such a huge bearing on confidence. It is so easy,
especially with the internet, to see people speaking your target language
or talking about how they passed an exam in your target language in a certain amount of time and
start to hold yourself to that as a standard, regardless of how different their situation or
history with the language is from your own. And then when you inevitably don't meet that standard,
you'll start to take a hit to your confidence because you'll feel more self-conscious of your
mistakes and just experience more self-doubt in general. Comparing yourself to others is a big
confidence killer in general and I think it is especially important to remember with language
learning that you can't actually accurately compare yourself to anyone. I can guarantee you
that you haven't learned a language exactly the same way as anyone. Even if you started learning
the language on the same day, at the exact same second, using the exact same materials
as this person– which, first off, I doubt you did— you both came into learning a language
with different previous amounts of exposure to the language, different knowledge about the language,
different study habits, and just different skill sets and knowledge in general,
so it's not really fair to ever compare your speaking or writing to someone else's. Plus,
you're only comparing to what you have access to which is a limited part of someone's language
abilities in general. Even if someone sounds like they are speaking on a topic super clearly,
you don't know, they might feel super uncomfortable while doing that, that might
be the only topic they feel comfortable talking about and you might be capable of using some
less advanced vocabulary but talking about more subjects, or maybe the writing that they posted
online is something that they've been working on for months and you're trying to compare that to
something that you've done in a day. I definitely used to get caught up in watching people's videos
of them speaking without actually comparing the whole picture of both of our language learning.
And it was especially hard whenever it was a video that was something like “Me Speaking After One
Year” when I had been learning the language for two years. But once I realized that that was a
big problem that I had and started making myself take a step back every time that it happened and
acknowledging things like, “yeah they've been learning for one year but they've definitely had
more contact with this language than I have in 2 because I took all these long pauses” and things
like that, I definitely started to notice that the comparisons that I was trying to make between
these people and myself were never fair. They were never actual comparisons that I should be making,
because we had had totally different experiences learning and so of course
we would sound different. And they only ever served to make me more self-conscious and to
make me doubt whether I should or shouldn't meet with a tutor or share my own progress.
Once I realized that my abilities are the only abilities that I need to focus on when
I'm working on improving them, I started feeling way more confident in what those abilities were
and in my abilities to work on improving the things that I still struggled with.
Building confidence can definitely be a really long process, it is something that has taken me
years to get to the point that I'm at right now, but focusing on yourself in a positive way and
not comparing yourself to others speeds up this process so much and also just makes it a much
kinder journey to be on. Plus, I think when you stop comparing yourself to other it also makes it
a lot easier for you to deal with other people's comments or judgments because once you start to
know and understand that you cannot accurately compare yourself to someone else, you also
start to know that a stranger on the Internet or a family member who isn't you also can't accurately
make those comparisons to whatever they expected for you or what they have seen other people do.
The great news is learning a language is also a really great way to build your confidence. I
think a lot of the reason that I'm so much more confident now than I was five or ten
years ago is because I put so much time into learning new languages and getting out of my
comfort zone with them and celebrating my progress and just seeing that it is okay to
make mistakes and that I am so much more capable of doing so many more things than I probably ever
thought that I was. If you're just starting to learn your first additional language or you're
just really struggling with confidence, no matter how many languages you've learned,
just know that struggling with confidence is a very normal experience and everything you're
doing right now and all of the effort that you're putting in will pay off,
both for your language learning and also just for building your confidence.
I hope these tips help. If you have any other tips or advice that you feel like I missed
definitely feel free to comment those down below and as I mentioned earlier there will also be a
link down in the description to sign up for the Lingoda Language Sprint or Super Sprint.
If you sign up using that link you'll get $25 or 20 euros off of your initial deposit
and you can also, of course, get up to a hundred percent of that money back,
so it's a great way to get a lot of speaking practice and get a good boost to your confidence
at the start of this year for a really affordable or even absolutely free price.
I will see you in the next one and remember, practice makes progress.