Have you hit a plateau in your language learning journey? It’s a common challenge, but with the right strategies, you can push through and continue making progress.
In this article, we’ll explore effective ways to overcome stagnation using language learning apps. Whether you’re struggling with motivation or finding new material, these tips and strategies for progress in language learning will help reignite your momentum and get you back on track. Let’s get started!
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What Are Plateaus In Language Learning?
There’s nothing more frustrating than feeling like you’ve put a lot of energy into a goal you’ve yet to reach but you’ve stopped making progress. Feeling stuck can be more daunting than not knowing where to start in the first place, because you can feel like you’ve tried everything and nothing works.
When it comes to learning languages, this is especially demoralizing because the point of learning a language is to be able to communicate with people, and this can make you feel like a door between you and other people is being slammed in your face. What to do!
How To Progress In Learning A Language?
Throughout your journey learning any language, your progress will be uneven. You’ll be learning, improving, progressing, and then suddenly, feel as though you’ve hit a wall and nothing gets better no matter how you try. This will happen more than once, so it’s important to not get discouraged!
Following some strategies for progress in language learning.
1. Be Accepting Of The Plateaus
The first and important thing to keep in mind is that since it is basically guaranteed to occur more than once, that also means if you keep at it, you’re basically guaranteed to get through it. Those of us who have studied multiple languages for some time are here to tell you: get used to the feeling, because once you do, you’ll see that it’s not such a big deal, and is every time surmountable!
But it’s not just a question of blind optimism to power through a plateau. Thinking through why you’re stuck, considering what’s holding you back and where you need to go next, will provide you with morale and direction that you need.
2. Identify Patterns Of What Challenges You Face
In a way, the very first plateau is the one you overcome by starting learning a language in the first place. You’ve wanted to learn a language for some amount of time, and you finally sit down and start putting in effort, and you make any amount of progress. This is, in a sense, what all acts of overcoming plateaus in language learning are.
Reframing it this way is often an important psychological step – instead of being stuck and not learning more, you are putting in that burst of intentional focus and effort again, and can draw confidence from that you have learned something already to get you to the plateau that now troubles you so.
Well, that’s a cheerful thing to say, a nice little pep talk, but what does that look like in practice?
One of the nice things about plateaus you encounter as your studies continue compared to your initial state is that you’re not totally lost at sea, so to speak. You know some things, and can identify patterns of what you don’t know. As you feel yourself going around in circles at a given point in your language learning journey, try to notice what are the biggest problems you’re facing.
3. Shift Perspective, Start Anew
Let’s say you’re at a lower intermediate phase with a given language, perhaps Arabic. You’re having a few concurrent problems, but the one that’s most sticking out in your mind is this feeling of being stuck, which you’ll start to project by saying things that are vague but express your feeling of being overwhelmed, like “people speak Arabic too fast”, “these words are too different”, “I can never remember enough words”.
Statements like the above may feel or even be true, but they’re not really a new or more pressing obstacle to overcome, so much as an articulation of the challenges you were always facing, which hadn’t caused you to plateau up to this point.
Try shifting your perspective onto the things you’re getting right so that more specific blank spots stand out more: “I’m doing fine understanding the sentences in my reading, I’m writing/speaking simple sentences pretty well, but I freeze up whenever I try to make sentences with helping verbs like ‘can’ or ‘should’ or ‘make [someone] do [something]’.”
What Are The Strategies For Progress In Language Learning?
- Now you’ve got a little mini-lesson all set up for yourself. Think of all these kinds of sentences which are troubling you. If, as in this example, you’re able to recognize the right words when reading or listening to someone else, but struggle to make these sentences yourself, you’ve already got some examples to start from. Either way, look up sentences of the kind that you’re having trouble making, and try to write more based on the patterns you see.
- Focus on this new task as if it were a new thing you were learning, from scratch. This is actually how little kids learn new patterns in their first language – you’re going to make mistakes, but you’re also going to start slowly moving forward again.
- Try incorporating the words you need into other kinds of sentences, and back into the curriculum you’re already working with. You’ll get stuck again, and you’ll have to start again, but that’s okay! This is how we make progress, and you don’t have to view it as any bigger a problem than starting to learn the language in the first place was!
It’s not always possible to give a one-size-fits-all guide to overcoming such plateaus. You may be learning different languages in which different parts seem easier or harder, and everyone is different. The important thing to take away from this is that you can identify your own problems more specifically by shifting your perspective, you can start again to keep your progress going, and there’s always a chance to fine-tune as you go while you dabble with various exercises in language learning apps!
How Can Language Learning Apps Help You?
As stated, the above advice is difficult to fine-tune for every learner’s experience. There are as many possible stumbling blocks as there are people out there learning so many languages. But many people who find they plateau with the most frequency or for the longest are people who don’t have access to a teacher and are learning with the aid of an app.
Can apps be hurting your progress? Well, yes and no.
It’s difficult not having someone else personally monitoring your progress and pitfalls and showing you the way forward, but that can be expensive or difficult for many of us. Apps fill an important niche for most people who simply can’t afford to invest time and money in a personal “coach” for every thing they’re trying to make progress on, including language.
Moreover, the 24-hour availability and broad array of tools language learning apps provide can provide their own advantages that a once-a-week meeting with a tutor or teacher, no matter how knowledgeable or skilled, might not be able to offer.
Language Learning: Linear Or Non Linear?
Both in apps and outside of them, we frequently look at our language progress in terms of literally going forward in a curriculum set for us. But language learning can be quite non-linear and inconsistent. It’s important to consider: Am I not able to move forward because I haven’t really internalized the material right before this? Try doing a section you’ve already completed over.
Again, being mindful of where you have trouble expressing yourself in particular, try returning to an earlier lesson that may help you strengthen your existing weak areas. Perhaps even try skipping ahead before returning to where you got stuck.
Any of these strategies at a given time may provide you with the confidence in a given part of the language that you need to keep moving as planned, or simply by shifting your focus elsewhere, build up your momentum and get you out of a rut.
Do Language Apps Address Your Plateaus?
Language learning apps themselves don’t force you to go in a certain order. But beyond skipping back or forth in the lesson plan, most apps have other sections of a given lesson which might focus more on dialogue or listening or writing, or specifically to study your vocabulary.
Also, because apps are opened and closed at your convenience, unlike a class where you have to be part of an actually occurring social interaction, you can always look up features of the language which are troubling you in a book or website or YouTube to find more explanations or examples.
Ling’s Role In Language Learning
One language learning app I recommend is Ling. In addition to having one of the widest array of languages of language learning apps out there, and for each language a full curriculum covering dozens of lessons in units covering diverse, practical topics, and always incorporating new content into the app itself, Ling also is staffed behind the scenes by passionate language learners and teachers.
Ling’s crew care about learning languages, even when it gets hard. That’s why Ling produces multimedia
content through the Ling blog, YouTube, TikTok, and more. This content includes short and fun vocabulary builder videos particularly on Instagram or TikTok, and long form video and text blogs about languages of the world, which can include further resources, particularly in the language-specific blogs.
In addition to in-house produced multi-media content and the app itself, Ling are building a community of users through Discord who are facing and have faced hard challenges in learning languages from around the world.
Try Ling today, and get a new perspective on the world through language, and on language together with people from around the world! You can download the app from App Store or Google Play Store.