Meeting the challenges

Hello everybody.

Remember when you were very young. Do you remember being excited about people being interested in what you could do? Your parents, friends and family would encourage and support you.

Remember when your team members in a sports team used to encourage you and challenge you to play well?

Remember when you achieved something special and the people there applauded you?

Remember being happy when your teacher in class gave you a good mark and said "keep trying"?

Everybody remembers these times when we found achievement, encouragement and a
positive response to something we did well.

When we learn a language, especially on our own, I think a part of our mind thinks we are still the small baby, the schoolchild, the sports player or the performer.

However, this can be dominated by all the negative thoughts sometimes: apprehension, anxiety, hesitation, indecision, uncertainty, doubt, reservation, reluctance..... need I go on?? 

The only use these negative words have for us is to know them as part of a vocabulary, but not as words we want to use to describe our language learning!

I often talk about being relaxed when we learn. I even call it "relaxed learning". I believe this is a good attitude to take.

However, we need to challenge ourselves at the same time. The challenges we faced as small children, on the sports field, in class, performing something on stage.

To guide ourselves, we need a way to both meet a challenge, work to achieve it and then congratulate ourselves if we do achieve it, or if we do not quite get there, then give ourselves special thanks for trying.

This way, we get a feeling of continuing along our learning path and meeting the challenges in a way where we can see a "straight line" not a zigzag line.

Some people are very disciplined, like a professional soldier or a professional sportsperson. They are ready, willing and able to meet any challenge big or small. These confident people are to be admired. However, I am not one of these people. So to keep myself motivated, I need to set myself small challenges for getting to where I want to go with language learning. Let's keep these feelings we had when we achieved something and were encouraged to do it well and were congratulated.
Each time we meet a challenge successfully, we feel we are on the right pathway.
 
Of course, we cannot always meet a challenge and succeed. There are times when we don't do something as well as we think we could, despite trying our best. There are times when we become very disappointed, or frustrated. But there is a difference between feeling disappointed or frustrated with one or more small challenges that are not achieved, compared with having general feelings of disappointment or frustration with language learning altogether.

Here are 10 small challenges we can enjoy with our language learning:

1.Getting a difficult text correct when we didn't think we could do it.
2.Speaking a word we didn't know before and finding we said it correctly.
3.Understanding a newspaper article even when there is slang, political or cultural words in it.
4.Understanding some strange accented speech we are unfamiliar with.
5.Surprising ourselves that we can speak about something we don't know much about.
6.Being able to say a tongue twister. Here is an example: "she sells sea-shells on the sea shore"
7.Being able to speak with a native speaker better than we thought we could do, despite having a limited vocabulary.
8.Having a good idea about learning that we didn't think we could do.
9.Writing something that others find interesting to read.
10.Listening to more than one person speaking and being able to understand most of what they say.

How many can you think of?

Bye for now