Foreign Languages on the Eights: 3/18

Almost all of us have things that we want to accomplish or improve upon in our lives. And effecting the changes that enable us to realize our goals usually involve both investing time and changing entrenched habits. All of which can make for a very interesting life, if one has the tenacity and courage to take on his or her dreams, that is. But I’ve found that trying to change several areas of my life at the same time can be awfully difficult, even counterproductive.
Sometimes I think that I tend to spread my goals out too much and try to fulfill to much at one time. Perhaps it would be better to prioritize what I’m trying to do and concentrate on only the most important goals in my efforts. After all, not only are there only twenty-four hours in a day, but, as you already know, that time is diminished by the demands of living to the point where it can be a struggle to find time to work on personal endeavors. Often I find that, even when I have some available time to work on something, I am too mentally or emotionally exhausted to focus on what I need to do.

In the sections of this blog that I refer to as “The Eights” (based on the Weather Channel’s use of that term to give local weather forecasts every eight minutes), I report, at eight-week intervals, on various self-improvement projects that I have been working on. But often I come to the time that I need to report on a particular area and find that I had been neglecting it. So, I wonder whether or not I’m spreading myself out too thin by trying to do too many different things. One major example is foreign language study.

Since my late teens, I’ve been interested in foreign languages, having studied several over the past few decades. But I’m never going to reach a reasonable level of proficiency in any of them if I keep hopping around from one language to another. For the past few months, I had been studying Vietnamese. But my progress has bogged down a bit, not because of a lack of interest or ability. It’s just that I’ve let other things encroach on my study time, as well as the creeping feeling that my foreign language study would be better served by concentrating instead on a language that I am much further down the road on toward proficiency. So, with this in mind, I am trimming my goals a bit to studying in an intensive manner just Spanish, French, German, Russian, and Chinese. I recognize that, even in doing this I am still spreading myself out quite a bit. But, unlike with other languages (like Vietnamese), I already understand quite a lot in these five languages and feel that I am close to crossing learning thresholds in all of them. So, from here on, I will be concentrating on them in my foreign language study and will report “on the eights” about my progress in this regard. Without abandoning my already-attained knowledge of Vietnamese.