On Language Burnout After a few too Many Countries
For one, you’re not as freshly enthusiastic as those who are venturing out on their first big trip or landing in their first (or even third) foreign country. Sometimes I can be downright jaded and cranky.
My rose coloured glasses cracked sometime around 1997 in London and were thoroughly smashed over the course of 6 years in Turkey (a country I love very much but which didn’t always love me back). I don’t wear glasses at all anymore.
This is not to say that I’m beyond the point of wonder and fascination, no, no. You may have noticed that this blog is almost neurotically drawn to the quirks of the utterly mundane in Faraway Lands (or rather, as I’m in Shanghai, the Immediate Vicinity). I like exploring places very much, thank you.
Sometimes, however, there is burnout.
About a month ago, I posted a piece about my fast-travel burnout, how I just couldn’t take any more bam*bam*bam backpacking, dashing from crappy bus to slow train to trishaw to scary shared taxi to back-of-scooter. I’m reaching a similar point in language acquisition.
A little background here:
I grew up bilingual in French and English, having been sent through a French immersion program from kindergarten to grade 12. That’s one spare language.
Then, in my London years, I was surrounded by, working with, working for, dating (just one) and living with an impossible number of South Africans. At the end of all that, I ended up living in Cape Town for 6 months. At one point, I was stage manager in a wholly Afrikaans speaking theatre company, taking all tech cues in Afrikaans. That was three years of Afrikaans immersion. I can still recite dirty poetry and demand cups of tea, fluently.
After South Africa, I moved to Turkey and spent six years trying desperately to grasp Turkish so I wouldn’t feel horribly embarrassed when my students would say, “You’ve been living in Turkey this long and you still aren’t totally fluent? Are you stupid?” Their English skills (usually after a dozen years spent studying English) were generally no better and no worse than my Turkish skills but I still felt horribly ashamed. I spent most of 2005 (year 4) loathing the language, resenting it, feeling like it just wouldn’t sink into my brain, feeling utterly stupid. That year passed and more Turkish was absorbed and I stopped resenting it. I left Turkey as a solid Intermediate (still not fluent, but very good at what I needed to be good at).
Before I left Turkey, I started studying Spanish, as we were tentatively planning to move to Mexico or Colombia or maybe Ecuador (we are flexible that way). For six months I ploughed my way through Live Mocha levels and tried to separate my Turkish intake from my Spanish (because I was also taking Turkish classes at the time). By the time we made it to Mexico, I could easily read Spanish but my speaking was hesitant and my listening was just tired.
Between 1994 and now, I also travelled in countries that required German, Flemish, Portuguese, Twee, Bulgarian, Romanian, Burmese, Indonesian, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian and Arabic. I learned between a little and a lot of each of these.
Now, after a year and a half in Shanghai, I’ve just started taking Mandarin lessons. It’s a 4 week intensive course and I’m ashamed to admit that although it’s just a basic beginner course, I’ve learned more in the past 3 weeks than I had in the past 18 months. That’s actually quite embarrassing.
Why hadn’t I learned more than just the basics I needed to get by? I knew my Thank Yous and How Muches and Hellos and whatnot but I had a huge mental block against learning Chinese. I bought book after book of the Learn Chinese in 2 Days sort, hoping that I’d learn by osmosis. They mostly stayed shut, gathering dust on my bedside table or on my desk at work. I tried listening to people speaking and tried to pick up bits and pieces but usually failed (though I became fluent in metro announcements due to my long commute). I was functionally illiterate due to the character system so my old learning style of constantly reading signs and billboards and newspapers failed me. I mostly just felt tired and wished I could still use one of the other languages I’d worked so hard for, which were fading away in my brain already from disuse.
I have met a lot of foreigners who were fluent in Chinese: they had Chinese spouses or they’d come here out of a singular passion for Chinese culture and language or they were super keen first time travellers with brains open to anything new. I felt like a big, thick, stubbornly ignorant old doofus because my Linguistic Firewall had slammed shut and I was almost willfully refusing to learn one more freaking language. I was here for work, and we were in China mainly because when we left Turkey in 2008 during the autumn height of the Big Fun Financial Crisis, it was the only place that would take us and pay us a non-laughable wage. I wasn’t here out of a love for China (though I do have a big soft spot for it now). Part of me resented China for making me learn one more freaking language. I was tired, damnit. Just leave me alone.
Ironically (in an Alanis Morrisette kind of way, perhaps) I’m a long-time career language teacher whose job it is to motivate students to learn and to help them develop independent learning skills. I know exactly what I’ve been doing wrong but, damn it, I’m tired.
I’m studying now, studying harder than I have since my early years in Turkey, trying to keep up with my course. Sometimes my brain just feels full; sometimes Turkish vocabulary pops into my sentences when I try to say something in Chinese; sometimes I just want to bang my head against the table because I have way, way too much conflicting linguistic knowledge battling for space in my brain. I’m glad I enrolled, as I can now deal with shop keepers and waiters without feeling like a complete imperialistic jerk but it’s hard.
Is there a sell-by date for travellers and their ability/willingness to add one more language?
This post is great! Go and publish it somewhere! I am silently reading your blog for some time now (on my Facebook feed), and I really like your style and way of narrating! Sorry for not commenting earlier though.
I haven’t been to as many countries as you have, but can relate to being tired of learning languages. Especially since I refuse to speak my native or second languages before I have properly learned the one of the country I’m staying in at the time. Currently I’m in Greece, and I get exhausted from time to time just to listen to (and trying to understand) the news, the radio, people in the village, office clerks and my husband all day long without a babelfish in my ear. I never open books to learn a language, I do it just by absorbing it, in other words speaking, listening, reading signs and newspapers, watching the subtitles to foreign movies asf. After three or four years I usually get the feeling that I will NEVER be able to speak the language, this being the last barrier before speaking it quite fluently.
Did you also encounter the joy with speaking them alltogether? I tend to pick words from each language that are – in my opinion- stronger than the same words in another language and thusly mix the languages together in sentences. Confusing anyone around you except yourself. 😉
Or I mess up the languages completely and talk to Greek people in German, to tourists in Greek or translate Greek to my parents in Dutch (or in Greek, explaining it only with different words), without the slightest feeling that the language I chose is not the accurate one.
I used to do the whole reading/absorbing language thing but it doesn’t work in a country that has non-phonetic characters for its written language and a brutally tonal spoken one. In Turkey, I read EVERYTHING- cereal boxes, political posters, dry cleaning ads, the works. I absorbed a lot. My speaking was hesitant for a very long time because I’m stupidly shy generally and adding a half-understood language only increased the terror.
I AM a language nerd- I read linguistics books for fun and have been collecting stray vocabulary and grammatical quirks since I was a kid (I tried to teach myself Irish when I was 14). I still keep my great big collection of words and concepts in my brain and add to it all the time (even Chinese- new fave word: mamahuhu- AKA şöyle böyle in Tukish AKA so-so/meh in English) but actually having the discipline to sit down and master a new language… well, damn it, that motivation has been waning for a while.
I think I just like picking the tasty bits of linguistic meat from the bone without bothering with the scarier bits like gristle and tendon and marrow and whatnot. I can say I’ve tasted it but I sure as hell haven’t eaten the whole thing.
The other day two French tourists approached me for directions and I immediately responded in French and it was SO EASY! I’d forgotten how easy it was to be speaking something other than English (because I speak English all day for my job and at home because, well, if I spoke Turkish or Afrikaans or my Awful Chinese, Doug wouldn’t understand me). I found myself willfully bantering with them because I was so relieved that I could still interact with people in another language without feeling like an idiot.
Learning one language let alone three or four as you have can be extremely exhausting. I took Spanish for four years in high school and then focused my whole attention on Italian in college. I went to Spain last week and felt awful saying “due” instead of “dos” all the time. I know that feeling of beating yourself up about not being a part of place in the language department. Sounds like you have much to be proud of in that area though. Good luck with Chinese!
You just described my two long years in Hong Kong. I only realized how much Cantonese I had picked up (not formally learned, no time for classes and such) when I left. It was such a joy to ride a bus in San Francisco and understand what the people were saying. And since they were telling jokes, I freaked them out by laughing at the punchline.
I think when you reach a certain point, your brain just gets tired. I’m experiencing it right now in Japan. I just can’t be arsed anymore. So it’s not grammatical? So who cares? People understand me, don’t they? Then it’s good enough for me. But this attitude is about to change (whether I like it or not) – this coming Wednesday it’s back to Japanese classes for me. After one year break, it won’t be easy… I’m scared. Very scared.
It was the same for me and my Turkish self-learning- I beat myself up over it constantly for 6 years, convinced I was awful and useless (I’d only had time for one short course at the very end of my time there due to work). When we got to Mexico, a month after leaving Turkey, I was shocked by how fluently my Turkish came to the surface when I was trying to speak…er…Spanish. And now when I’m trying to speak Chinese, I find myself wistfully thinking about how utterly easy Turkish was, how well I could get by in it… (Note: Turkish was brutally hard, with a grammar structure akin to learning calculus, and a vocabulary unrelated to any other language I’d ever set eyes on).
Whenever I go back to Canada for a visit I marvel at how utterly easy it is to do stuff: no need to formulate sentences in my head before calling someone, no need to focus all my attention on what someone is saying so I don’t get totally muddled and miss key words (or in Turkish, key suffixes, because they really pile those on in a crucial way). Here, it’s tones and, oh god, I am so utterly tone deaf it’s embarrassing.
Last night I asked the veggie guy how much a jin of carrots was and he looked at me like I was insane. I had to repeat that a few times before he got it and replied with something I had to strain to understand (‘longguaioooo’ or suchlike, deciphered as liang kuai wu jiao, or 2.5rmb) Then I asked how much our baggie of carrots and cukes was altogether and he looked stumped again until I asked again with slightly different tones and replied, ‘sssssihgaaaassssih’ which I eventually worked out to be sì kuai sì, or 4.4 rmb.
My brain hurts.
Gosh, I feel quite embarrassed that I only know English and then lots of bitsa languages. I feel a little more motivated now to take on another language and to move to another country again. You have done a lot in your 16 years of travel. I also lived in London in 97 with a house full of South Africans, and dated one. I bet we could share some stories!
I think it must be a rite of passage for many people to live in an overcrowded house in London full of South Africans…
ha, funny post, you’re obviously very talented for languages! I’m impressed at the diversity of languages you speak. For chinese, you may want to try chinesepod.com it’s a fantastic way to learn – I used it a few years ago and found Chinese to be my favourite of all languages (I’m speak English, Croatian, Italian, French and some small bits of many others, but Chinese has been really really fun and easy to learn). The chinesepod guys are based in Shanghai so you could even find some buddies to learn with I’m sure.
Xie xie
I’d been thinking about subscribing to Chinese Pod- that way I could listen to it on the metro going to work and not totally fall behind in my learning once work starts up again next month. Nothing worse for learning a language than having a full time English teaching timetable!
Boy, does this ever resonate with me. After two years of living in China and making little or no progress beyond my already-extant intermediate level Mandarin, I’m about to start a year of intensive language study in Beijing. Here’s hoping.
Good luck! Did you do your initial studies back home (university?) before coming to China? I’m surprised that you plateau’d as an intermediate as I’d thought that if only I had a foundation in Chinese I could somehow break through the wall of incomprehension…Maybe it’s just a really hard language to casually pick up? Were you in a place like Shanghai where you can easily get by with pretty much no Chinese at all?