The ups and downs

[suMMit]

Sometimes i feel like the ups and downs get to me. I'll have some success and feel good about study. Another time I'll mess something up and feel like my progress sucks. Anyone have a similar experience?

[imron]

Yes. https://www.chinese-forums.com/forums/topic/50208-getting-out-of-a-listening-rut/

[DavyJonesLocker]

 yes for the last 5+ years 

 

i think some learners just asymptotically tend to a level, that 'level' may be be high for some and pretty moderate for people like me. 

 

people always seem to have this idea that you can keep continually improving, (noting the bumps). I can't see any evidence of this myself as far as language study is concerned 

 

 

[Weyland]

1 hour ago, DavyJonesLocker said:

people always seem to have this idea that you can keep continually improving

... Are you saying there is a hard-limit to the possible vocabulary someone can have? Or that they'll never be able to understand the nuances of the language anymore than they do now? Like what does "continually improving" mean to you? Seems like a self-defeating attitude to me.

[PerpetualChange]

Absolutely, don't beat yourself up. If something isn't working for you, or you need a break, try doing something different. For example, if you're getting burned out on a textbook you could take a break to dive into a podcast, try deeply watching some TV, or maybe read a short story. If you are getting burned out on grinding through books or TV, maybe do the opposite - pick up a graded reader or textbook and see if that brings some focus back to your study.

[Shelley]

Welcome to the joys of learning Chinese.

 

This must be one of the commonest comments people make, sometimes called the plateau effect.

 

My advice - Don't worry about it, plod on and eventually you will have another aha moment and you will be filled with enthusiasm again. the important thing is consistency, keep at it and you will find the plateaus get smaller and the highs are longer, but I don't think it ever gets totally flat.

 

I think its just the nature of language learning, some of is just hard work and some of it is intuitive and when the hard work outweighs the intuitive it feels like you are not making progress.

 

There will always be progress but it get less and less as there becomes less and less to learn.

 

Its also a case of diminishing returns, as explained very well by our good friends at Hacking Chinese https://chinesehacks.com/study/learning-chinese-and-the-law-of-diminishing-returns/

 

 

 

[mungouk]

11 hours ago, suMMit said:

I'll have some success and feel good about study. Another time I'll mess something up and feel like my progress sucks

 

Common experiences for me when I first arrived in China:

 

     (Orders food in Chinese in a restaurant)

 

     Waitress: (in Chinese) "wow, your Chinese is really good!"

 

Compared with:

 

     (Orders food in Chinese in a different restaurant the next day)

 

     Waitress: ???? Zero understanding of what I just said. We try to communicate but in the end I point the menu and say "这个".

 

And similarly for taxi drivers, etc

 

I think some of it is down to whether people are used to dealing with foreigners.

 

Chinese is difficult!  加油！

 

 

[mungouk]

5 hours ago, Weyland said:

Are you saying there is a hard-limit to the possible vocabulary someone can have?

 

That "listening rut" thread was a hard-to-read exposition over some months of a learner deciding they had reached "their level" and was ready to give up.

 

I guess we are disputing that nobody has "their level". 

 

I agree. I believe that we can all learn... but we just have to have the right environment, encouragement and most of all motivation.

[Weyland]

10 minutes ago, mungouk said:

That "listening rut" thread was a hard-to-read exposition over some months of a learner deciding they had reached "their level" and was ready to give up.

Had to look it up.

After reading the first page of said conversation it feels like this person, Adam, is doing everything in his might to disadvantage himself. If you want to improve your skills the least you can do is put yourself into an unconformable situation where you're allowed to fail. Adam is also very pessimistic, and delves into defeatism in his later posts. If you have as much anxiety as he has that he just shuts down when he doesn't understand or doesn't properly hear something... then, yeah... I can see how he's "stuck". His mindset is the problem, though I'm going to get on my high horse and also say that he has done very little to remedy his own failings.


Like Adam I suck at listening. I suck at pronunciation. But, not because of my lack of motivation or because I'm daunted by listening to someone speak Chinese. When I was younger my brain got starved from oxygen and one of the impacts is deafness to certain sounds. While it certainly has improved over the years, I still have to read people's lips when there is any noise in the background. I often have to guess at what people are saying and when studying a new language, I will go out of my way to learn the accents and to be prepared for when I encounter them.
 
A few months ago I started recording myself and other people to improve my pronunciation/intonation. Because hopefully in the end I'll be able do the voice-over of the documentary I've been preparing for over the last 2 years which I want to shoot in China.

I'm physically handicapped. I have people that tell me to "moderate" my efforts, who tell me that I don't need to improve any further because I'm a foreigner. You know what? Fuck all that.

Mediocrity depends on the person's own capabilities, and I sure as hell won't lavish in it.

[大块头]

Foreign language performance (listening comprehension, reading rate, speaking intelligibility, etc.) can be regarded as a random variable subject to variance caused by external factors (Did you get enough sleep last night? Are you in a noisy environment? Have you ever encountered the current conversation topic?) Some performance metrics have so much variance that it is hard to see your progress at all over time. For example, the plot below shows about a year's worth of my data from daily reading practice. Some days I breeze through the material, and some days I feel like I'm plowing through mud, but the mean shows slow, steady, and statistically significant improvement. Don't be discouraged by your "downs"; the "ups" will cancel them out.

 

[abcdefg]

19 hours ago, suMMit said:

Anyone have a similar experience?

 

Everyone has had a similar experience.

[suMMit]

I should say its not a 'rut' for me, but can be day to day, week to week thing. 

[matteo]

same here mate! I have been studying English for 20 years now, it is the only language I speak daily and I still feel ups and downs...so yeah that's probably not going to change.

Just enjoy the good  moments and don't take it personally

[DavyJonesLocker]

i wonder how much language learning is affected with the aging process. My brain seems to not work as well as it did 20 years ago, ..... that could be from alcohol and lifestyle abuse though  

[mungouk]

3 hours ago, DavyJonesLocker said:

i wonder how much language learning is affected with the aging process

 

One of the reasons I'm ploughing on with Chinese is that research has shown that language learning (among other things) helps the brain to maintain neuroplasticity, and possibly stave off dementia.

 

 

[DavyJonesLocker]

2 hours ago, mungouk said:

One of the reasons I'm ploughing on with Chinese is that research has shown that language learning (among other things) helps the brain to maintain neuroplasticity, and possibly stave off dementia.

 

Interesting, do you know if its it language learning particularly that is helpful in this regard, or just general learning?

 

[Shelley]

I think any learning helps,  but language does give the brain a good workout and chinese in particular becuase of the characters. As these are more pictogram than alphabet it means you use both sides of your brain, one for languages and the other for visuals. Its also to do with it being a tonal language.

 

If you do a search for the subject you get loads of hits, it is a thing.

 

I also think that if you don't use it you will lose it and is one reason I continue on with my studies at the ripe old age of 62. 

[roddy]

On 12/9/2019 at 4:44 AM, suMMit said:

Sometimes i feel like the ups and downs get to me. I'll have some success and feel good about study. Another time I'll mess something up and feel like my progress sucks. Anyone have a similar experience?

Oh, only since birth. 

  

18 hours ago, 大块头 said:

For example, the plot below shows about a year's worth of my data from daily reading practice.

And suddenly I feel better about my running spreadsheet...