Why Some Language Learners Are Afraid to Speak

Today I wanna talk to you about a book that has real

application for language learning.

You know that I'm going to Sweden, Denmark, Poland.

In preparation, I've been listening to audiobooks and

reading eBooks on LingQ, of course.

And I discovered this wonderful Danish, um, audiobook ebook from the,

uh, online publisher called Saxo.

And the book is, is called lev mere tænk mindre.

Pardon my Danish pronunciation, but it means live more and think less.

And, uh, it's by Pia Callesen, and she talks about what is called

metacognitive therapy, helping people who have, you know, stress

and feel depressed and so forth.

Now, I'm not suggesting that language learners are depressed, but one of the

symptoms of this depression that a lot of people face, Is this sort of fear,

call it the social anxiety disorder.

Uh, one of the many kinds of, of negative feelings that people can develop.

And she explains why people develop them and how to deal with it.

So it's explained in the book that typically we are bombarded

by thoughts all day long.

70,000 thoughts she says, okay.

Many of those thoughts are negative and people who struggle with depression,

it's not because they have more negative thoughts than other people,

but it's because they spend too much time with their negative thoughts.

They ruminate, they cogitate.

So again, it's explained in the book - and there's also an English language

version of the book and it is based on this, uh, metacognitive therapy, which

came out of the University of Manchester in England - and she says, so there are

sort of three levels of our thinking.

At the lowest level are all of these thoughts that come at us, many of which

might be doubts and negative thoughts and so forth, and tens of thousands.

We all get them.

At the next level is how we deal with them.

So some people spend a lot of time delving into these negative

thoughts, wondering, how did I do?

Uh, does he or she like me?

Am I gonna be fired?

Uh, is my pronunciation in English bad?

You know, some of the language learning anxieties.

People are gonna judge my ability and the language.

All these negative thoughts, we can sort of dwell on them, which only makes us more

unhappy or we can choose to ignore them.

And she points out in the book that the sort of key to having a strategy of

ignoring these negative thoughts, which she calls trigger thoughts, which can

trigger sort of anxiety or unhappiness.

The key is to have a belief system.

The belief system will determine the strategy that we use to

deal with all of these thoughts.

So if we believe that dwelling on these thoughts, thinking about them, uh, is

gonna help us, then that's what we do.

Uh, if we think that these thoughts are outside of our control, or at

least the negative impact of these thoughts are outside of our control.

If we think that there's, it's a function of, say, a, in the case of

people with, uh, depression, that is because of a negative imbalance,

then they might go for medication.

Or if they think that a psychologist can analyze these thoughts and find out

the reasons why we have these negative thoughts, and in other words, continue

to dwell on them, if we think that's the right strategy, then that's what we'll do.

And in many cases, we'll be very unhappy.

If on the other hand, the belief system is that these thoughts are within our

control, we can choose to ignore them.

We can choose to only deal with them at a certain time of the day.

Uh, we can choose to address our focus somewhere else and not

focus on these negative thoughts.

And if we feel that that's the right strategy, if that's our

belief system, then we will adopt a strategy, a positive strategy for

dealing with these negative thoughts.

So I, I think this has real application for language learning, because very

often, yeah, we wanna be happy that we're learning the language, but we want to be

focused on the enjoyment of the language, of feeling that moment when we're with

the language where it's an outward focus.

It's a focus on the language, on the audio, the, the language that

we're listening to, or that we're reading or we're speaking to people.

And so it's outward, not inward, not how did I do, how am I doing?

You know, is this right?

Is that right?

Why do I make mistakes?

Why do I forget?

So if our sort of mindfulness around our language learning is one of enjoying what

we're doing in an outward facing way, then that's gonna be positive for us.

If on the other hand, we somehow feel that we have to indulge all

these doubts and neg negative thoughts, that's probably going to...

won't drive us into depression, but it will hinder our language learning.

And so I just, whenever I read something on any subject, I always

bring it back to language learning.

And I just feel that that is a, is a discipline and that

sort of is an understanding.

What are our beliefs in terms of how we deal with these negative thoughts

that we are going to get negative thoughts about our language and our use

of the language, we're gonna get them.

How do we deal with them?

That's determined by that higher level, our belief system.

If we have a belief system that says the mistakes don't matter,

we don't need to dwell on them.

We don't need to try to remember, you know, how did I do?

Why did I make a mistake?

None of that matters.

It's going forward, enjoying the language, appreciating what we have

done and where there are negative thoughts, which there will be.

Everyone has them.

We just ignore them or detach ourselves from them.

So I just thought that was a very interesting, uh, book with real

application for language learning.

Check out the link in English probably, although if you're trying to learn Danish,

you might wanna check out the Danish book.

Thank you for listening.

Bye for now.