Hello everybody my name's Andy and today is the 26th of May 2020 and I've set
some goals for May and I'm making progress towards fulfilling those goals
but last week was like £$$^$ so stay tuned to find out what happened
so I had quite a challenging week last week I mean challenging as far as my goals go
not in any other area in my life you know I've got no financial problems
I'm not ill, I don't have any health problems don't have any relationship
problems so last week was a bit challenging. I had a Polish lesson and I've
got an Italkiteacher so I've had three lessons with her so far. The first lesson
was fine it was it was really good I spoke loads of Polish and I felt like
I didn't really realize you know how much I knew, though she set me some
exercises for the second lesson and I found that a bit challenging and a
struggle and it's what took me out of my comfort zone which was fine but I said
to her well I feel like I need to go back to basics
a bit you know I need to go back and do some of the basic verbs and you know the
grammar which I think was a bit of a mistake really because I think there's
acquiring language and learning language and when you're learning a language
you're being taught the grammar and you know all the systematic way you go for
a language but acquiring a language is actually more efficient you know by sort
of absorbing and I don't think you really need to know the grammar until
much later on I mean it's good to know grammar and it's good to know how all
that language works but I don't know if you're the same as me but when I was at
school and we had all those grammar drills and I just felt like sweet I
switched off you know so boring and
I just didn't get it so anyway the same thing happened really basically my
polish lesson the teacher gave me all these verbal tables to go through but
the problem was she did literally go for them systematically one by one so it was
like ja mam and ty masz (I have and you have) I'm not
even gonna say anymore because they're so they're so boring just to repeat them
over and over like that so what happened was um I actually switched off and I
started getting them all wrong and I think the teacher was like oh okay okay
um I think we'll have to do the nominative case this week and the
accusative case next week and I said really I'm not sure if that's a good way
and she said no no you need to go back to basics and it made me realize. Had I
regressed in Polish? No I don't think I had actually regressed I was just
putting the block up to this kind of this kind of teaching and I don't think
she's necessarily a bad teacher you know but actually it left me feeling quite
stressed and quite sort of deflated I was thinking oh my polish has gotten worse
you know I'm supposed to be progressing and getting better so a bit later on in
the week I puts I was trying to do juggling and I was in a bit of a bad
mind I really I was thinking you know I'm not making much progress with these
languages it's all really struggling do I carry on no I just give up now which
isn't very much like me because I'm quite a positive person and I'm quite
determined as well so that only lasted ten seconds actually that feeling no it
was a bit longer than that but so I put some CD on and I just picked up a random
CD I have stockpiles of CDs in my kitchen and there most of them are
language learning CDs but some are actually music as well and so I put on
them a Polish learning language CD as you do and I started trying to juggle
two balls and previously I've been dropping the balls on the floor
I've been dropping them after about three four throws which wasn't very good
and because at some stage I've gotten up to about 20 throws and I suddenly I was
listening to this polish CD and I was in a different time in a different Minds
own I probably wasn't a different time zone as well probably the 70s or
something anyway I started juggling with my left hand which is the weaker hand
and I juggled about 50 throws in one go and I thought oh I've done it this is it
I've done the challenge I just need to put it all together now and as soon as I
thought that all the balls dropped so numb I was out of that mine zone again
so I think that's the language learning process and juggling learning process
and any learning process and it's important to be in that in that mind
space and it's also made me realize that how big apart intuition plays in
language learning as well as you know systematic vocabulary cramming and all
those things that you do so when we talk about an input and output with a
language we're talking about reading and listening that the inputs and writing
and speaking of the outputs but I think also there's something else that's a
process in language learning that's an hour an output and it's some sort of
when all those things come together and you can start thinking in a language
well it's the same with juggling if you can start thinking in this of mindset of
how the juggling works it is it's hard to explain because it's something that's
not tangible but it's something that's like the glue that holds it all together
so basically that was my experience of learning this week and even though at
some stage I felt like I'd regressed and I was putting the block to learning I
think sometimes you have to go for a face like this in order to progress on
and it makes you realise how you know what what you need to do to learn
so on that note as well I think it's important to learn to to change your
routine as well so with juggling being example I was going through
systematically trying to learn how to juggle two balls in this Holmes and then
two balls in this hand and and if it wasn't working I was going back to an
earlier method which was framed just one ball and these two you know so then this
didn't actually work for me because at some stage I'd gone over it so many
times so many times it was actually quite boring and quite sort of tedious
it made me feel like I was regressing in the in the learning process so I went
back to juggling three balls and I started trying to do three balls with
combining with this exercise so sort of intuitively doing my own learning style
if you like so I was watching all these some videos on YouTube of instructional
videos on how to juggle and at first I was thinking they're instructions so I'm
trying to learn bit by bit how they're instructing me and then suddenly with
this intuitive mindset I was thinking actually they're teaching me but I'm
there hopefully they're enabling me to do my own thing to learn how to juggle
if that makes sense and it's the same with languages so when I go back to my
next polish lesson which isn't until next week I'm going to say to her look I
think I would much prefer just to do more of a variety in the lip in the
lesson you know I don't want to just kind of go if I'm going through
something I don't want to just go through ABCDE want to do things in small
chunks and learning efficiently you have to step away from learning sometimes and
come back to it step away and come back so you need that space between and it's
like that with my juggling and things so I've got a bit of space at moments in a
minute I'll be going back to doing a bit of Kurdish learning and
have a bit of space and then I'll have a Kurdish lesson this afternoon and then
I'll probably upload this video later and then I'll probably do a bit of
Chinese learning later on in the evening so I'll be spacing it and pacing it out
as you know through the day so don't get stressed with language learning so I'd
be grateful if you have any comments on this anything I've said in this video
and also if you have subscribed but you haven't yet hit the bell icon please do
that because that will notify you of any future videos I'll be uploading and if
you like my videos and haven't yet subscribed please do so
so by the end of the month I'll just shortly after the end of the month maybe
I'll be posting my three target language videos and I'll just be speaking in
those languages I don't know if I'll hit my goal of being able to do a
five-minute video of each language I probably will in Chinese polish one not
sure and Kurdish probably not but if I can't then I'll be you know making more
goals for next month and will I be able to juggle four balls by the end of the
month I don't know huh let's see ok stay safe
thanks for watching