I am making no more progress

This is a frequent feeling, and a direct (or indirect) complaint of many language learners. How to address this issue?

First, we need to ackowledge that learning a foreign language, as well as it was learning our native language, is a long-term process. It is a marathon, not a sprint. There are no real short-term wins. The feeling of making no more progress, in practice, has the effect of students or dropping out or giving up completely, or significantly reducing their effort.

Therefore, it is important to analyze all the main implications carefully. We need to start by assessing whether our feeling is correct, or not. Not all our feelings and emotions are grounded in reality, or are accurate representations of reality. If you find this outrageous, please do some introspection, or ask a psychologist that treats depressive patients.

So, why should our feelings about our language learning process be automatically more objective than our other ones?!

To assess the veracity of this feeling is a difficult task. How should we measure it?

Most language students have one or more of the following problems:

1.      They have no concrete and quantifiable objectives for their language learning process, on paper: how many words do they want to learn each month, and in what areas? „I want to speak language XYZ well” does NOT count as a SMART goal.

2.      They do not have a set of indicators for measuring their progress: percentage of mistakes in written texts or conversations, number of e-mails written, mean lenghts of produced sentences, etc.

3.      They do not monitor those indicators on a regular basis: every week, month.

4.      They do not keep an archive of texts and spoken words with time signatures.

Without that, all appraisal of one’s own performance will be highly subjective and unreliable. To assess your performance you need

·        To have a clear and objective standard against which to compare yourself;

·        to compare yourself against the same (!) standard repeatedly.

If you want to approach this reasonably, you will need to address the four points above and fix them. If you do not want to do this, you need to ask yourself: why do I have this resistance against objective monitoring of my performance? Is it possible that I like to beat myself up and to self-sabotage my learning? Am I looking for an excuse to give up the language altogether? And if yes, why?

Right now, whenever feeling frustrated, find an answer to the following questions:

·        Has some other negative event occured in my life, which may have „primed” me for negativism?

·        May it be that I had previously an intense growth period, and that, now, comparatively, I am improving only slower?

·        Can it be that I have raised my standards and expectations?

·        Do I have a sustainable home routine for training that language, and do I stick to it?

·        Am I using the wrong learning techniques?

If you like the attitude of these articles, please check out my online courses : at the moment, German for Russian- and Romanian-speakers, as well as on goal-setting.

If you are interested in improving your English in the area of business presentations, I know of no better address than Tom Antion. Please check him out following this link.

Stay tuned!

Gerhard

The GO Method

The GO Method applies quality management and psychological science to the study of foreign languages. It helps students establish individual and clear goals, build learning routines, overcome psychological obstacles, monitor progress and systematize the learning process.

It is the perfect approach for high performer students that need to speak as closely as possible to a native speaker. From lesson one, it focuses on building your own sentences bottom-up, and not memorizing phrases like a parrot.

Gerhard J. Ohrband

Psychologist and polyglot from Hamburg /Germany (*1979). Married with children. MA in psychology from the University of Hamburg. More than 15 years of experience as a university lecturer in psychology as well as a consultant for UNICEF, Terre des Hommes, IOM, the EU and private companies. Coordinator of the GO Method network, with representatives in more than 90 countries worldwide.