Absence makes the brain grow fonder
My lifestyle is not perfectly conducive to language learning. I have a busy job, several time-consuming extra-curricular activities, and a fair bit of travel. The study is still a priority for me, but occasionally life gets in the way and I fall behind. The last month and a bit I spent in Australia and England, and though I managed to do some Skype lessons with my teacher, I did virtually no review, listened to very few ChinesePod lessons, and did very little homework of any kind.
The result must inevitably be a decline in my facility with the language. The feeling I had, especially on returning to China was quite the opposite – I felt more relaxed and confident speaking Chinese than I did a month before when I had been studying every day. This happened to me once before after a long hiatus. What’s going on? Is the brain using the time to recover and reorganise, or, more likely, one forgets how much one doesn’t know and just gets on with the business of speaking?
I’d really like to know the answer, because it may prove valuable to take breaks from time to time and recover a bit. In the meantime, back to the vocabulary list.
Jake, I think it just shows that language study is not as directly related to language confidence, language performance, and language acquisition as we might assume it does.
A prof told me once that language acquisition isn’t steady; there are plateaus in the curve where progress in proficiency doesn’t climb as time progresses.
Also, I suspect your studies have surpassed daily routine language; in that case, perhaps you’re already proficient in daily routine language, but you didn’t realize it. So returning to China meant returning to familiar patterns.
Finally, I know that when I went studied in France a while ago, I didn’t sound great. When I returned home and returned to classes, I still didn’t sound great in French. But for some reason, a year after I left I started noticing I sounded awesome… and French people were having a harder time guessing that I wasn’t French. Obviously, my environment was less French-rich than when I had been in France, but progress was still happening, much to my surprise.
I’m one of the people that believe that all language learning is instinct; we can’t hope to control instinct; the best we can do is activate it, feed it, and put ourselves in an environment where our instinct can be fed.
加油！
Thanks, JP, some interesting insights there. I think most would agree that language learning often involves quantum leaps, inflexion points in the learning curve or jumps up from stale plateaus. I’d like to think I was about to make one. We’ll see.
well, I have same experiences on learning English. In China, there is a saying goes,,”退一步海阔天空“ or ”拳头收紧再打出去更有力。“ Not only for language learning, but for almost all the things in your life.