week 6

making discomfort the goal

Since I was a kid, I had a dream of becoming bilingual or even trilingual, and pictured myself traveling to foreign countries and effortlessly switching between English and the language of the peoples. I loved the beginning of learning a new language— some new vocabulary words (I can introduce myself! I can count to 100! I can name every item in my fridge!), but as soon as we started moving to sentence structure, conjugating verbs, and having to listen, interpret, and speak more than a couple words at a time, I lost interest (read: confidence). I felt most comfortable reading in another language and getting the gist of what was being said, if I had to write I could try, but the listening and speaking felt grueling.

In high school, I took French, after the first year muddling my way through the course, often praying that I wasn’t called on to speak sentences in front of the class. First semester of college, I somehow landed in a beginning Mandarin Chinese course, and spent seemingly endless hours alone in my dorm room and one on one with the instructor trying to repeat the tonal patterns of given sentences. Every Friday, we would have to stand up before the class and perform our memorized sentences with the correct tones. It was so embarrassing. There’s almost nothing quite like the constant self-consciousness that comes with practicing speaking a new language.

When I studied abroad my junior year in London, I dated a Swiss guy who spoke fluent French. I’d listen to him speak to his family and his visiting friends with wonder, trying to recall the French I’d learned in high school. At best I could pick up about every fourth word, and he’d laugh when my head would jolt up upon hearing a word I understood. When one of his friends learned that I’d taken French in high school, she asked me why I never tried to speak French with them. I blushed and said I’d forgotten most of it. I was encouraged to try just one sentence. “J’etudie le francais dans l’ecole, mais, Je suis terrible!” (I tried to say: I studied French in school, but I’m terrible). They were generous with the attempt, saying that even though the grammar was wrong, they understood what I was trying to say.

My brain has a naturally challenging time processing auditory information, and it is a long-running joke in my family that we each hear very different song lyrics than the ones sang in popular songs (“Island girls” = I like girls). To ask me to process auditory information in another language, then interpret that information, then figure out how to speak a coherent response… forget about it!

I haven’t studied a language since freshman year Chinese, and though I truly believe that we get better with auditory processing through practice (I preach teaching auditory speed reading to the blind and visually impaired through assistive tech synthetic speech), it has been so much easier to grab hold of my family’s statements (“I don’t have the ear for learning new languages”) and either give up completely or tell myself that “someday” I’ll learn another language, when I have more time/ energy/ money/ etc.

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is from a newly published book called Hidden Potential, by Adam Grant. As he explores the techniques of high performing individuals to discover principles that we all can apply, he meets two polyglots who he initially assumes are naturally talented “freaks of nature” language learners. However, he discovers that each of them struggled for years to gain fluency in even one language— that is, until they got comfortable with being uncomfortable.

One of his subjects, Benny Lewis, “commits to approaching anyone who’s near him for more than five seconds” whenever he arrives in a new country. (Dang. I can’t imagine approaching anyone who’s near me for more than 5 seconds here in my own country). “The more mistakes you make, the faster you will improve and the less they will bother you,” he is quoted. “The best cure to feeling uncomfortable about making mistakes is to make more mistakes.”

Hey, like the purpose behind this whole project!

Benny makes a conscious goal whenever he is ready to start learning a new language: “ to make at least 200 mistakes a day.” I still can’t help being shocked by that number. It makes my feeling bad about one or two mistakes in French class look… laughable? Sad? It gives me perspective on learning, both a new language and anything new that I try to do.

This inspired me to finally start learning Spanish, a goal my husband and I have shared for years. I would love if we could start planning a trip to Mexico, Costa Rica, or another Spanish-speaking country, even if we can’t quite book the plane tickets yet. But we can collect pictures, dream of the food we’re going to eat, and start learning Spanish— not next month, not next week, not tomorrow. Today. I started by downloading the Rosetta Stone lifetime membership and app, (currently at half price until February 14). After learning Spanish, who knows what other languages I can start learning?

failure #1: My first week learning spanish

Day one: I breeze through the first lesson of vocabulary— el niño and la niña, and simple phrases like “the boy eats” (el niño come), “the girl drinks” (la niña bebe), “the man runs” (el hombre corre), “the woman swims” (la mujer nada), “the men cook” (los hombres cocinan). Then comes time for the pronunciation, and as much as I try to mimic the phrases read to me, I can’t get it right. I stay at 55% (at best) on lesson 2, growing more and more frustrated despite of myself. Any hint of a rolled ‘r’ sends me into a minor tizzy, as I’m brought back to being a kid again, who couldn’t say their r’s in English until the sixth grade and was pulled out of class each week to see a speech therapist. (It wasn’t so bad. I got to miss some boring lessons to go play games and I always brought back a prize, like a colorful pen. The other kids were jealous as my name would get called on the intercom to leave whatever lesson we were on, usually geography, to skip down the halls and peace out. Come to think of it, maybe that’s why my geography knowledge is less than stellar!).

This week as a teacher, I had to give one of my students a reading assessment. There were a couple tricky words in her reading passage that made her quickly give up into tears saying she couldn’t read it. I decided to tell her about my attempts to start learning Spanish (a language she’s fluent in). I told her I kept failing the lesson because I couldn’t say the words right. She brightened. “That’s okay, keep trying.” “Thank you, I will do just that,” I said. Without being asked she picked up her text passage and tried again.

Eventually I practiced my Spanish lesson enough times to where the app let me pass the lesson and move on, but for the life of me I still can’t pronounce las mujeres (women). I’ll keep trying. The more mistakes I make, the faster I’ll learn! And maybe soon I can start practicing conversations in Spanish with my bilingual coworkers.

failure #2: world map

It seems like a great week to take another swing at filling out my world map.

I went from a high score of 22% to my new personal best: 28%.

final word

This failure project has become the best accountability partner for making sure I live my life today, rather than holding out for “someday.” Left to my own devices, I can put off feeling uncomfortable until “tomorrow” forever, but knowing that I will need to write about my lived experience before the publication date at 10 a.m. on Saturday gets me out of my head, gets my butt off the couch, and forces me to start living the way I want to live rather than merely thinking about how I want to live. There hasn’t been a day where I haven’t felt a little sick, a little too vulnerable, and/ or had someone in my life question why the heck I am doing this… and yet, my happiness levels and overall quality of life have skyrocketed upwards from January 1. I am so beyond grateful.

Thank you and happy failing!

Rachel