Getting unstuck: how to recover after hitting a plateau in language learning
On your way to fluency in a foreign language you’re absolutely destined to hit a plateau. Multiple plateaus, in fact. Getting stuck is a natural part of the process. Your ability to get unstuck, however, is what determines whether you’ll hit a higher proficiency plateau level or fall off the cliff (all metaphorically speaking, of course). So, the next time you find yourself on the edge, rapidly losing motivation and about to let go, you might want to pause and ask yourself what brought you there in the first place.
There are three possible reasons for hitting a plateau in language learning:
Lack of insight.
—You don’t know any better. You don’t realize that what you’re doing is unproductive because you have no point of comparison—and, frankly, you don’t care;
Lack of experience.
—You haven’t tried anything better. You realize that you’re pursuing a suboptimal strategy but don’t know what a better strategy would look like;
Discomfort.
—You’re deliberately stalling. You know, damn well, that what you’re doing is unproductive and know—damn well—what you should be doing instead but you are too uncomfortable taking the next step.
In the first case, there’s nothing anyone can really do until the dissatisfaction with the current course of action settles in. Shaking core beliefs requires a paradigm shift. A person needs to get frustrated enough with his current approach to start looking for alternatives.
The problem is, as usual, two-fold. To get frustrated one needs to give a damn care first. To care, one needs to be invested in the outcome—the right outcome. But for every learner who is absolutely not invested in any outcome whatsoever (think millions of unwilling victims imprisoned, for years, in their weekly language classes by the school system, their parents, or their bosses) there are two who are very invested—but in the wrong thing.
How?
Language learning is a USD 61.5+ billion dollar industry. Brilliant people with advanced degrees worked long hours to engineer an elaborate system with artificial learning goals just to keep you in this market for as long as possible. Here’s how it works:
Wanna learn a language?—Just download our award-winning app. We won’t define what “learn” means and what “done” looks like, but do not despair—you’ll make just enough headway to keep trying, instead of straying away to explore methods that might actually work. Actually, you don’t even have to make any headway because we’ll make it very easy for you to feel accomplished regardless—learn just 5 new words and you’re done for the day! We’ll even gamify it for you so that, God forbid, you aren’t bored for a moment. You’ll also get points and achieve new ranks along the way! They will have no correlation whatsoever with your actual learning progress but it will keep you distracted—so that you’re less likely to go to another app where you’d have to start from zero (😱). We’ll add new levels for you every week or so (here’s today’s special: “50 Italian words you’ll absolutely need for shopping in Milan”), so that there is always another dragon to slay whenever you open the app. In fact, the more time you spend “learning” your target language on our app the better—because you’ll pay a subscription fee all along (or you won’t—whatever—we’ll just make sure you spend 20% of your “learning time” watching ads). By the way, our annual membership is 40% off right now—and only for the next 16 h 38 minutes—so you better hurry!
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You end up invested in wrong outcomes when your learning method (or tool) of choice becomes an end in itself, rather than a means to an end. That’s how people end up spending years on Duolingo “learning” Italian without pausing for a moment to realize that they could perhaps take their massive 9000 words vocabulary and… I don’t know, use it in real life? To do things language enables us all to do? Read a book? Listen to a podcast? Talk to another human being? Or perhaps simply consider whether, at this point, there is any need to learn vocabulary deliberately? But no. Because it’s very reassuring to know that so long as you’re learning new words every day, you’re “making progress” towards your goal of learning Italian—especially if you haven’t tried anything else for years now and, frankly, don’t know what else might be out there. And is it even surprising that after years of orthodox language instruction—which most of us have been subjected to from a very young age—that, like well-behaving Pavlov’s dogs, we learned to equate getting an “A” in our French 101 class with getting real good at French? Good boy—we will see you next year in French 102! (Oh, and by the way, if you got a C, you probably don’t have talent for languages anyway. But you’ve already arrived to the same conclusion yourself, haven’t you? )
Your Duolingo rank and your grade in a language learning class are very poor proxies for language proficiency. But until this idea fully sinks in, there isn’t much you can do.
So which one is it, Neo?
Once you awake to this harsh reality, getting unstuck is a matter of seeking relevant knowledge and skills. Often you have already identified what your particular problem is (“I can’t understand spoken language”, “I understand everything but I can’t speak”, “I can speak no problem but my grammar sucks”, “I can speak but people don’t understand me—coz accent”). Now, all you need to do is to see how other people solved it. Because—believe it or not—but somebody somewhere had the exact same problem—and, yes, they’ve dealt with it.
For example, for years, I didn’t quite know how to “hack” the speaking component of language learning. I knew, step-by-step, how to get my reading and listening comprehension to quasi-perfect in a couple of months but speaking remained this massive unresolved problem with a capital “P”. Because, as most introverts, I prefer all of my conversations to be meaningful. With a 1000 words vocabulary base, they are, by definition, not—and small talk frustrates the hell out of me. Quite a conundrum! I tried several approaches—normal language classes (duh!), Pimsleur, Polyglot Club, language learning trips, Italki—but none of them brought the gains I was looking for. None of them qualified as “hacking”. …Until one day after some further research and tinkering I found a method that worked.
If you find yourself in a similar situation, the first step is to research your options. Look for outliers. What do people who quickly learn multiple languages do? How do they do it? Then—the most important part—try the damn thing yourself. Does it work? Spoiler: more often than not, what the outliers are proposing will make you uncomfortable AF—at least initially. Which brings me to the third category…
In the third case, you are very well aware that you’re engaging in a counterproductive activity but you continue (willingly) to do so. The worst part? You know—perfectly—what you should be doing instead. Some call this procrastination. I call this stalling. You are unwilling to take the next step because whatever the required action is, it is outside of your comfort zone (perhaps too far outside). When I was learning German, even though I knew exactly how to approach the speaking part (again!), I stalled for at least three weeks before taking action—because getting outside of the comfort zone sucks by definition. It’s… well, uncomfortable.
The solution is to pre-commit. If it’s schedule-able, schedule it. Find a time when you’re calm and collected and put the damn thing in your calendar—so that the only thing you need to do when the dreaded day comes is to show up. Likewise, if you need to research, purchase, upload or prepare something—do it in advance, so that when the right moment comes you have everything you need. So that all that’s left is to execute.
Perform the action that is causing you discomfort a couple of times and it gets incorporated into your comfort zone. It is these leaps outside of our comfort zone and the subsequent expansion of our comfort zone that we call progress.
Regardless of what brought you onto the “nothing ever works” cliff, getting unstuck and moving forward requires embracing some discomfort. Whether it’s changing your way of thinking about language learning, trying new ways of tackling a known problem or pre-committing to something that you know works but sucks—discomfort is part of the game. The question is whether you’re ready to embrace it.
Written by Alina Kuimova | 17/08/2024