Hello, language learners and lovers! Welcome to another episode of Love, Joy and Languages, a Podcast about loving languages and finding joy in learning them. My name is Heidi, and I can’t thank you enough for taking time to listen to my show. If you haven’t already, please take a moment to rate & review this podcast wherever you listen to it to help me reach more listeners. Last week, I sat down with Marjolein Benschop of The Language Community, and we had a very insightful chat about being a multi-passionate person, someone who has a plethora of passions, interests, hobbies, or languages. We talked about the ins and outs of living a multi-passionate life, and she shared so many wise words and some great advice for making progress, seeing growth, and fulfilling the desires of all of our passions. One thing that stood out to me in our conversation is how easy it can be to get overwhelmed as someone interested in multiple things, especially for us, when one or more of those things is language learning. My first three years as a language learner were spent on only one language, Italian. It was such an overwhelming experience trying to navigate language learning, find a foothold to keep me grounded and focused, figuring out what works and doesn’t work for me. I couldn’t have imagined adding on a second or third language during those first few years. Italian was more than enough. And, as I mentioned in Episode 1, I was also a first-time expat living abroad, a graduate student, a mother of two young kids going to the local schools, and we travelled a lot, then just the day-to-day chores to be done and other hobbies of mine. There were always so many things pulling away my time and attention. But thinking about just the language learning itself, it was complicated. It challenged me in a way I’d never before experienced, and it was largely overwhelming. But I never had even the slightest desire to give up. Learning this language had become part of who I am, a passion so deep that charging through the overwhelm was the only option for me. Figuring out how to do that, though - how to deal with the overwhelm of learning a language while simultaneously needing to use it out in the community - it’s constant pressure on top of the love and positive associations with the language. Looking back over my language learning journey to-date, I would summarize the most overwhelming aspects of language learning as stemming from one or more of three categories. I think language learning overwhelm comes from time, resources, and/or expectations. So I want to dig into each of these a bit, and then share my thoughts for how to deal with them. With respect to time, there are two trains of thought that have led to overwhelm for me as a language learner. Not having enough time to do everything I want to do, and seeing how much time it takes overall to learn a language. First, I know we all experience this at some point, but it’s really easy to feel like there isn’t enough time in a day or week to do all the language things we want to do. Some days finding just 5 minutes to spend on a language app feels impossible, let alone 30 minutes to have a language exchange or hours a week for a formal course. And on those days or weeks when we’re short on time, it can really start to feel like there’s never enough time. It’s easy for our minds to focus on the negative, the time scarcity, all the things we aren’t getting done. Thinking about creating and reviewing flashcards, reading and journaling in our target languages, watching a TV show and listening to a podcast, conversation practice, studying and practicing specific grammar points - it can feel impossible when we’re focused on what we don’t have time for every day. It can also be overwhelming to realize how long it actually takes to reach a desired level of proficiency in your languages. How much time - how many hours, months, years - does it take to learn a language? First off, this is a completely loaded question. There is no straightforward answer. But there’s plenty of information available out there for people who ask this question. And, of course, I was one of those people who did some research on this in my early Italian days. According to the U.S. Foreign Service Institute (or FSI), a native English speaker can learn Italian to “professional working proficiency,” so upper-intermediate to advanced level, in 24 weeks of 25-31 hours of classroom instruction each week. That totals about 600-750 total hours of classroom instruction, so not including personal study time. That is overwhelming, right? The Common European Framework of References claims 500-600 hours of guided learning hours, so classroom instruction, are needed to reach an upper-intermediate level in Italian from complete beginner. Again, overwhelming. Similarly, the Accademia Italiana di Lingua, a non-profit association that teaches Italian as a second language, claims 320-400 hours of exam preparation time to pass a B2, upper-intermediate, exam. As a mathematician, numbers speak to me. So here’s what happened for me: I looked at all these websites, and I thought, “Dang, I may never get there,” until I saw 320 hours associated with B2, and I thought, “Okay, I can knock that out in 10-15 weeks, right? Studying for 20-32 hours a week, that’s 4-6.5 hours a day if I don’t include weekends, and I could reach B2 in 10-15 weeks. That’s doable, right?” I erroneously tucked that piece of information into my head and just said, okay, it’s feasible. I didn’t create a plan for getting to B2. My goal wasn’t even to pass an exam, so I ignored the “exam preparation” caveat mentioned on the Accademia’s website. I just thought that with enough study time, like 4-6 hours a day, I could get there in just a few months. If you’re laughing at me, I don’t blame you at all. I cringe at my naïve attempt to plan my language learning goals mathematically. But some of you may be out there saying, “Yep, I did the same thing.” Predictably, this line of thinking is really dangerous because the time it takes to acquire a language, even to an upper beginner level, depends very much on individual motivation, experience with other languages in the same family, exposure to the language outside of classroom or study time, resources used, other responsibilities or hobbies that take time out of one’s day, and so many other things. In this situation, once I realized how many months (years) it would take me to reach an advanced level in Italian, I became incredibly overwhelmed, and I had this constant nagging thought in the back of my head saying, “You’ll never really get there. It takes too long.”  So finding the time each day for focused and engaging language learning and realizing the amount of time it will take to become proficient in a language can both lead to so much overwhelm. The second cause of overwhelm I mentioned is resources. Again, let’s go back and view language learning as an adult beginner. The first thing I thought about as a brand-new beginner to languages is the classroom. For me, and perhaps for many of you, the only exposure we really had to languages in our youth was in school. So that’s the only real personal experience I had with language learning. For me beginning Italian at age 33, the only multilingual people I knew had either grown up in a bilingual home, studied languages at university, or attended intense language immersion courses in early adulthood. Growing up in a bilingual home obviously wasn’t an option for me, so I thought some sort of classroom would do the trick - would make me fluent. So I took some Italian classes and definitely learned a lot, but once my graduate school started back up, where I was studying math, I no longer had time to spare for more formal language classes, the classes I thought were necessary for fluency. I used Duolingo and later added Rocket Italian, but, of course, not knowing how to optimize the way in which I used these tools, my progress was very limited. I had tried Rosetta Stone, though I found it incredibly mundane, and even though I could definitely say I didn’t enjoy it, I often thought about picking it back up simply because I was afraid that I was missing out on something, some learning trick, by giving up on it. For at least a year I just kind of floundered around these few resources and took in a little from just being in the country. I hadn’t taken the time to search for more resources. I assumed everything was expensive, and I’d already paid a lot for Rocket Italian, and that lack of outside resources felt overwhelming. The idea that I had to continue working with only tools that I didn’t particularly enjoy led to overwhelm and frustration. This is true for so many language learners out there. Those learning lesser-spoken, minority, or endangered languages; trying to find resources that aren’t targeted toward English speakers; and anyone learning a dialect or creole, resources can be legitimately scarce. Too few available and accessible resources just increases the struggle and overwhelm of trying to advance. On the flip side, during lockdown 2020, I finally connected to the language learning community, which I hadn’t even known existed before then, and I discovered a ton more resources for language learning: iTalki, Tandem, HelloTalk, StoryLearning, Anki, Polygloss, Yask, Memrise, Drops, LingQ, podcasts, writing prompts, and I wanted to do them all. Not only did I hate the idea of letting a resource go unused, but I was also like a kid in a candy shop. All of a sudden, I was exposed to so many new tools, all of which gave access to language learning in a different way - ways I hadn’t tried before. They all seemed new and shiny and promising. Later in the year I started learning German, and I discovered even more language learning resources - DeutcheWelle, Chatterbug Streams, Speakly, Langauge Transfer, more podcasts. The list could go on and on, but the sheer number of effective, interesting, and accessible language learning tools was incredibly overwhelming. In the beginning of this new world of resources I never considered just taking them all for a test run and seeing which one I gravitate toward most. Even paid or subscription-based apps and programs offer a free 7-day trial or something. But that seemed too limiting for me. The thought of finally committing to one or two main learning resources over all others was scary, to be honest. What if I chose the wrong one for me and wasted time and money being frustrated? What if another resource was more comprehensive? What if I miss something another provides? Then I had to consider resources to balance learning with speaking, reading, writing, and listening practice, both input and output. Without a clear plan or committed choice all of these resources and activities became very overwhelming to think about, and I spent way too much time trying to do them all, or feeling guilty over not doing some, and that lack of focus slowed my progress and left me feeling buried under the mass of resources. So, in addition to finding time to learn a language and dealing with the number of resources, whether too few or too many, expectations in language learning can be a source of overwhelm. When I started learning Italian, I wanted to be “fluent” or advanced in one year, and this would be easy because I was living in the country. And at one point I calculated that I could reach a B2 level in 10-15 weeks of study. When neither of these things happened, I beat myself up and entered a downward spiral of doubt and negative self-talk, and I always felt overwhelmed with the idea that there was still so much to learn, and that it was taking so much more time than expected. And that’s the real key here - the expectation.  For many of us, I think it’s easy to look at our early language goals and see how unrealistic they may have been. But at the time, they probably seemed doable, right? Do some people reach advanced Italian in one year? Yes. Are there people who pass a B2 exam after 4 months of study? I have no doubt. And if other people are doing it, then I can, too, right? But were either of these expectations realistic for my life, my time, my motivation? Not even close. But they sure made for a very overwhelming experience of pushing myself too fast and too hard, not internalizing the vocab and grammar I was learning, getting burned out, so much frustration over making mistakes, not understanding certain concepts easily, and not progressing as fast as I thought I should. So my impractical expectations of language acquisition as a whole caused a lot of overwhelm, but then there have also been smaller, simpler expectations that have led to the same overwhelm. For example, learning a word or phrase and expecting to recall it easily when I want to say it. Buying a language book or program and expecting it to make me fluent. Expecting one particular day to have an hour to work through a specific module in a program, but then something happens that requires my attention, maybe a kid comes home early from school with a fever, or I just get side-tracked by cute kitten videos. Then there are expectations we have of others throughout our language journey. I thought native speakers would all be patient with me as I worked through trying to communicate a thought or express myself. In some way, I expected every Italian speaker around me to teach me things or to at least want to speak with me. I expected immersion to be an easy experience where I would just soak in the language with little study effort on my part. When all of those expectations don’t become reality, we can experience overwhelm. And it becomes even stronger as we experience these realities over and over because we all know; it’s never just a one-time thing. Forgetting words, having our study time cut short, realizing native speakers just want to live their lives, not be teachers - these things will repeatedly happen over the course of our language acquisition. But the resulting frustration and overwhelm can be linked to our expectation that things will happen according to our plans or ideals. Thinking about these three main sources of overwhelm in language learning - time, resources, and expectations - it seems like often these can be very much out of our control. Our study time is often cut short or perhaps dictated by life and other responsibilities. We can’t do anything about the number of language learning resources out there unless we also want to take time to create our own resources. And while we can tweak our language goals and expectations, we can’t always control outside factors that influence those expectations becoming or not becoming reality. So what can we do when language learning feels overwhelming? Whether there’s something very specific that’s overwhelming, like learning a certain verb tense or finding speaking opportunities, or if it’s just language learning as a whole that’s starting to feel too big and like there’s not enough time to do it all, there are things we can do to release some of the tension from the overwhelm and get back to a state of calm, focused growth. I have three main tips for dealing with overwhelm in language learning, and really in life, in general. My three tips for dealing with overwhelm are to get organized, get analytical, and get grounded, and these three tips correspond respectively to time, resource, and expectations overwhelm. So first, get organized. This is something I could easily create an entire episode around, but I’ll highlight some of my best recommendations here. So, get organized. What and how we organize will be different for each person, and it may even be different for various phases of our lives. But the first thing that always helps me reduce time overwhelm is to organize my schedule. When I sit down on Sunday and write out my plans for the week, literally hour by hour each day, I immediately feel the overwhelm start to let up. I have my mental list of all the language learning things I want to do and all the other obligations I have, and as I start to put them down on paper into my daily planner, I can see how there just isn’t time for everything. And that honesty glaring at me from the planner is a reminder that it isn’t about not having enough time, but rather, it’s about how we fill our time. And, I can stop focusing on what I’m not doing daily and start focusing on what I am doing weekly or monthly. - I prioritize my favorite and most effective learning resources over others. I adjust the amount of time I spend on each one to make sure I feel both fulfilled and productive all around. I don’t try to fit in everything in both languages every day. I spread things out over the week, and in this way it’s so much easier to see language learning as a totally doable thing with the amount of time I have. Something else I do when organizing my schedule is to try to purposefully work to get something off my plate. It might be a book I’ve been meaning to finish, a 30-day course I haven’t yet touched, or maybe even a slew of appointments I’ve been putting off making. But focusing on getting a bigger task off my plate by scheduling in specific times for doing it, I free up mental space that had previously been clouded with all the to-dos running around my head. Something else that often results from organizing my schedule is that I find chunks of time when I can combine some activities, which frees up time for others – for example, I can listen to a language podcast while I make myself breakfast, I can do a lesson in the Speakly app while walking home after taking my kids to school, or after I spend time learning a new grammar concept, I can review it in my head, creating my own sentences for practice while taking a shower. Combining activities, or sometimes it’s called habit bundling, can really help shift our view of how we spend the 24 hours we’re given without feeling like we just have to push, push, push, grind, grind, grind all the time. Another thing we can consider when getting organized is to organize your resources. Again, this can go so many ways. You can get organized by making a list of all your language resources, determining how much time you want to spend on each one daily or weekly. You can take a few weeks or a month to track your daily language learning habits, which will reveal which resources you’re actually using or gravitating toward. Then you can get rid of ones that aren’t as useful, guilt-free.  You can go through language notebooks and reduce or combine notes into a single notebook. Or you can organize when you use each resource or for how long you’ll test something out so it no longer feels overwhelming just getting started with one. Organizing your resources can really release the pressure of overwhelm and help you spend more focused time on the actual learning. So, getting organized helps us deal with time overwhelm in language learning, and my next tip is to get analytical. I already mentioned that tracking your language learning habits is one method for getting organized with all language learning things you want to do. But the reason this is such a great tool is because it provides real data of how you’re actually spending your time instead of focusing on how you want to spend your time. In addition to tracking your language learning activities, tracking other things like working out, doing other hobbies, or scrolling social media provides real data that you can analyze for determining your true favorite activities or resources, for changing how you spend your time, or even for shifting your mindset away from “should dos” to “want to dos.” And if you’re feeling overwhelmed by the massive number of language resources and activities out there, tracking how you spend your day, and how you feel about the things you’re doing, will give you irrefutable data to help you get rid of any apps or resources that don’t use, reducing the overwhelm that comes from thinking about them. Another great way to get analytical for reducing overwhelm in language learning is to make a list of what you know you don’t know. I often find that my brain is chuck full of words or concepts that I realize I don’t know, and some of those things linger for years without me ever taking the time to learn them.  This could be specific words I hear but don’t understand, things I want to learn how to say from English, or bigger concepts like Italian subjunctive or German Genetiv case. Making a list of these types of things, just getting them out of my head and onto paper or in the notes app of my phone, helps reduce overwhelm because now I can more critically determine which of these things are worth learning now, and I intentionally look at which resources will help in that process, which takes some pressure off of the resource overwhelm because now I’m using tools with purpose. I spoke before about how I got bored with Rocket Italian because I insisted on doing every single lesson and exercise from the beginning, skipping nothing, and as that resource slipped away, I felt so much guilt because I’d paid quite a lot of money for it. Now fast-forward about three years to just last week, I looked at my list of known unknowns, and Italian prepositions had been sticking out like a sore thumb. I can use them well enough, I think, but I realize I’m not at all confident using them when speaking, and I often choose the wrong one or hesitate, altering between two different ones. So I asked my iTalki tutor if he has a recommendation for learning prepositions, and aside from input, input, input, just repeatedly seeing and hearing them in different situations, he told me about a grammar book specific to Italian prepositions. I thought about buying this book many times. I kept it up on my web browser for days, mulling over if I should buy it or not, thinking about other grammar books I’ve purchased but ended up not doing much with. Then one day earlier this week, I thought, “I wonder what Rocket Italian has in the way of prepositions.” So I logged in, probably the first time in over three years, and I found modules for the most commonly used prepositions, whole modules based on single but versatile prepositions, prepositional pronouns. It had everything I needed to get started learning the proper use of Italian prepositions with confidence. So this one tool that niggled at the back of my brain for years, that had been a major source of guilt and disappointment, that led to feeling overwhelmed with all the unfinished modules still just hanging out there, this tool has now become my first go-to because I decided to analytically make a list of known unknowns, I hesitated adding to my overwhelm by going for more resources, and I realized that most (if not all) of the things on the list in front of me are covered in Rocket Italian. I no longer have to think about all the other resources that may be out there that may explain the things I don’t know. I can feel confident ignoring them because I already have what I need. And, I no longer feel personal pressure to complete every exercise the resource provides. Instead, I take what I need, happy to not be bogged down by more and more resources. So, we can get organized to help reduce time overwhelm; we can get analytical to help reduce resource overwhelm; and my final tip, which focuses on expectations overwhelm is to get grounded. If you aren’t familiar with this term, it basically means connecting yourself to your values or your vision for your life. When we’re grounded, our lives feel in sync with our thoughts and desires, and we can be more mentally present in the experiences of our lives and have the clarity of thought needed to make a move in the right direction for us. Getting grounded in language learning starts with going back to your why. Why are you learning this language? Why do you want to continue? Thinking about what connects you to the language. What brings you joy with the language. Maybe this is a friend or family member who’s a native speaker. Or the food or the culture where the language is spoken. Perhaps you have a dream of visiting there one day. Whatever it is, getting clear about and focusing on your why,  what you’re most drawn to or passionate about in the language, will help ground you and strengthen that connection you have with the language. Being grounded in this way can bring clarity of thought that then allows us to logically consider our expectations. When I am grounded in my why and my connection to Italian and German, I’m more flexible in my expectations,  even when something doesn’t happen the way I want, I lose out on study time, or progress slower than I want. If I feel grounded, I can easily release the underlying expectations and focus on that connection knowing that I’m making progress, I’m doing it, and all is well. In addition to reconnecting with my why, I’ve also found specific activities that make me feel grounded - that help bring me back to focusing on the language and not my expectation of all the details. In Italian, this for me, is ordering pizza in Italian from our favorite pizzeria every Friday and having weekly iTalki conversation lessons. No matter what else is going on in my life or how little Italian I’ve focused on or how much I know I still don’t know of the language, these regular activities ground me in Italian. They make me feel so proud of my progress, they bring me joy and emphasize my connection to the language. They’re little reminders that all is well, that any overwhelm stemming from rigid expectations that I have will pass, and that I really am learning and speaking this language. For German, my grounding activity is just listening to the spoken language. German has always been one of the most beautiful languages to me, and even if I don’t understand much of what I hear, listening to a podcast or music in the language reminds me why I love learning it so much. I can close my eyes and still feel connected to the language, letting the overwhelm of it all just pass over me so I can focus again. So get grounded, reconnect your life to your vision for and values of your target languages, and your expectations start feeling more manageable, more reasonable, and it can release the overwhelm of everything going different than you planned. Now, I think I’ve touched on a lot here today, so I’ll take a moment to recap before signing off. Overwhelm in language learning happens to all of us, and the main sources of overwhelm are time, resources, and expectations. Knowing why you’re feeling overwhelmed, identifying the source or sources of it, is useful for deciding how to face dealing with it. Getting organized with your schedule and your resources can reduce time-based overwhelm. Getting analytical tracking the what, why, and how you use your resources, also making a list of known unknowns and linking a resource for learning them, can decrease resource-based overwhelm. And getting grounded, reconnecting to your why and finding activities in your target language that strengthen your connection to it, can bring clarity and flexibility to your expectations, allowing you to better manage overwhelm when things aren’t going the way you want. Dealing with overwhelm can take time. What works for each of us will vary from person to person, and you may need to experiment with the tips and tricks I’ve mentioned here to see what feels the best to you, or these may just be the start of a brainstorming exercise, where you come up with your own creative ways to deal with overwhelm. No matter the source, overwhelm can be daunting. It can cause a complete halt in our language learning progress. So finding ways to deal with it, to face it and work through that barrier, is really important for continuing this journey in a mentally healthy way. So, that is all I have for today.  Next week I’m going to talk about “good enough” language learning, everything from shifting our mindset away from perfection to being satisfied and proud in how we express ourselves in our target languages. When I first considered this idea of “good enough” when it comes to language learning, it was a real a-ha moment for me, something that was the beginning of a very healthy and necessary turning point in my overall view of language acquisition, and I think it’ll be interesting to share my thoughts on it with you all. So, as always, thank you. Thank you for joining me here today. I hope this episode has helped give you a starting point when you feel overwhelmed with your language journey. I would love to hear from you as you work through overwhelm & figure out what things work for you, so please feel free to reach out to me. Send me a DM or tag me on Instagram at love.joyandlanguages. If this is something you’re working on, I’d love to hear how your journey is going. So, that’s it for this week, and until next time...Ciao!