Learning a language is profoundly, fundamentally unfair. At no time, at no point in the process, are you ever getting as good as you give. Of course, overall you will; overall, the quality and range and volume of your output shall be determined by the frequency of your input. But at any given moment, you are always either getting back much more than you give or much less than you give.
Mental Tools
Start Dirty: Why A Clean Slate Is Bad For You and What To Do About It
by khatzumoto
This entry is part 10 of 14 in the series Intermediate AngstRing the bells that still can ring Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything, That’s how the light gets in. ~Leonard Cohen So, I’m a bit of recovering perfectionist. I’ve walked that terrible path; it still comes up here and there,…
There Is A Magic Silver Bullet
by khatzumoto
Looking for silver bullets is the silver bullet. The very act of seeking awesome solutions — magic silver bullets — is itself what will lead you to find something or some combination of things. You keep asking high quality questions, and you start getting high quality answers. Just to keep things moving, you might want to keep using regular bullets while you search for them magic ones, but…yeah, I mean, you don’t stop driving cars until you can figure out how to travel faster than light speed, right?
The Trouble With Heritage Languages
by khatzumoto
The problem with learning an ancestral or “heritage” language is that it takes just as much effort as learning any other language, except that you get no credit whatsoever for doing it well (and it’s happily assumed that you basically got it “for free”, effortless, in a native or semi-native childhood environment), only derision for…
Getting There Is Also Your Life
by khatzumoto
This entry is part 9 of 14 in the series Intermediate AngstThe journey of getting used to a language is so psychologically long that it can’t merely be a means to an end. It must become an end in itself. It must become its own joy, its own reward. And this perspective, this mental state,…
12 Common Reading Mistakes You’re Making That You Need to Stop Making if You Want to Be Thin and Pretty Like Me
by khatzumoto
Stop trying to read in massive chunks of time
Most of life is waiting. Most of life is disjoint snippets of time: two, three, five minutes here or there. That’s when you read. Stop trying or waiting for some golden multi-hour block: Assume that you’re not gonna get it, because even if you did get it, your powers concentration wouldn’t hold up.