Days 3-5 - by Maq

‎There's something very humbling about learning something new as an adult. You can be perfectly competent in so many parts of your life and then suddenly find yourself back at square one, trying to figure out something as basic as a new word or movement.‎Day 3 was mostly sign language.‎I've been learning more ASL, and honestly, I feel like a child again 🤭 I get weirdly excited about the smallest things. Like learning the alphabet. Or signing my own name. ‎I get especially excited about that last part.‎Its gotten to a point where I don't even have to think about it.‎At first, I had to consciously remember every movement. And now, sometimes my mind tells my hands to sign something and my hands just... do it.‎Before I've even properly thought about it. Sometimes without thinking at all 😅‎It's such a small thing, but I'm so proud of myself.‎And I think one of the things I've been enjoying most about this whole process is realising that my brain doesn't have to be overly involved in every single thing I do 😅‎By Day 5, I actually stopped worrying about learning new words altogether.‎Instead, I spent more time practising things I already knew and trying to make them feel natural. And, somehow, the list of things I can now do is getting surprisingly long.‎I'm not exactly out here having full-blown conversations yet, but I can carry out some very basic ones. I can introduce myself. I can ask if someone is lonely, or happy or mad. I can tell someone I'm a writer. I can tell them I'm a learner. I can distinguish between something being big or small. I can talk a little about my family, and ask someone about theirs. I can put a few simple signs together and actually communicate something meaningful.‎Which is... kind of amazing?‎A few days ago, these movements meant absolutely nothing to me. Now they mean so much, sometimes I think I can literally feel my heart swelling.‎The funniest thing to me is that, now, my Instagram FYP is suddenly full of people signing.‎I don't know how this happened but now I keep getting videos of people signing songs, telling stories, teaching signs, or just casually signing things.‎...casually signing things like rage bait and swear words and insults in general 😅‎And naturally, I have been learning 🙈‎And more naturally, my siblings have become my unwilling practice partners.‎I can now insult them directly to their face in a language they can't even understand by accident 😂‎But of course, I still tell them what I said and end up running for my life 😂‎It's actually pretty nice seeing something I'm learning randomly show up in my everyday scrolling. It makes it feel less like I'm doing a course, and more like I'm slowly letting this language become part of my life.‎I'm starting to notice it more.‎I'm starting to understand it better.‎And I'm starting to feel a little less like I'm learning a language from the outside and a little more like I'm being let in 🤭<img src="/media/inline_insight_image/1000423311.jpg"/> ‎I wish I could say the same thing about my spoken languages.‎But oh well 🫠‎I was told about the Michel Thomas method a little while back, and decided to look into it a bit. The basic idea is pretty interesting: instead of spending most of your time memorising vocabulary and grammar rules, you're encouraged to understand how the language works and use that understanding to build your own sentences.‎You're not just being handed a sentence and told to memorise it. You're being made to think.‎It sounded exactly like the kind of learning I would enjoy, so I went looking for something similar.‎That's (more or less) how I found Language Transfer.‎It isn't exactly Michel Thomas, but this app is probably the closest thing I've found to what I was looking for. ‎The lessons are basically conversations between the instructor and another student.‎So technically, I'm the third wheel in a two-person language class.‎And the goal is to answer the question before the actual student does, or at least to hit the pause button fast enough to do so.‎I started with Spanish on Day 4.‎Spanish is probably the spoken language I'm most excited about learning right now, so it made sense to start there. If I'm going to convince myself to keep doing something for more than five minutes, it might as well be something I'm this excited to learn.‎I've spent two days learning Spanish now, and obviously I haven't made anywhere near as much progress as I have with ASL. But that's okay too.‎I was surprised by how quickly I started putting together sentences I hadn't consciously memorised. ‎The language feels less like a giant wall of information and more like a puzzle I can actually play with.‎I did try German too.‎For a little while 😅‎But I was getting tired, and at some point I decided that forcing myself through a German lesson while half-asleep was probably not the most intelligent way to learn anything.‎So I figured that was probably a good place to stop.‎And, ironically, after spending all that time trying to learn German, the sentence that felt most appropriate by the end of the lesson was probably the simplest one I could have learned.‎Ich bin müde. Gute Nacht 🫠

Becoming Curious

Contributor Points

Points-to-Coupons

Referral Earning