Have you ever been reading a book, and suddenly found yourself looking at the spine of the book at where your bookmark is to try to figure out how far through you are and how much you’ve got left to read before you finish?
For serial progress-checkers, the temptation is even greater now that we have Kindles and ebooks where you can see how many percent you have still left to read just by glancing at the bottom of the screen.
Sometimes, you can get so focussed on ‘how long it’s going to take’, ‘how fast it’s going’ or ‘how much you have left’, that you almost lose track of what you’re reading and you just get distracted completely…
So why do we do this?
There’s something in human nature about wanting to achieve, complete and finish things that can just take over you, and distract you from the very thing that was getting you there in the first place.
It’s the same with language learning, because a book has a certain number of pages, a CD has a certain number of tracks, and a list has a certain number of words on it.
But once you’ve finished the book, have you ‘learnt Chinese?’
Well, not really.
There’s always going to be something more to learn. Just like there are always going to be things you don’t know in your native language…
There are two ways of looking at this, and it depends on how you see your learning. If you’re just looking for a quick fix, and to reach ‘the end’, then you’re almost certainly going to be disappointed when you never really reach it.
But what if you could enjoy the whole process of learning so much that you just never wanted it to end?
What if you could see the value in every extra word or expression you were able to learn, and feel the satisfaction of being able to learn new things all the time?
What if you could motivate yourself by being able to understand a little bit more of a conversation than before, or being able to spot a new character on a menu that you didn’t know before, rather than thinking about how much you don’t know and don’t recognise?
Because however far you want to get with your Chinese, you will get there, in time.
I’m not saying it’s not important to have goals: it is important.
But the purpose of the goals should be to encourage you to keep moving forward on the journey, rather than to define an ‘end.’
You shouldn’t feel discouraged when you realise that you’re going to have to set yourself another goal. In fact, that’s good, because it means the goal was manageable in the first place and you’ve improved.
In later posts, I’ll talk about how to set goals for your Chinese learning to help you to focus and move you to where you want to be quicker.
But everything really comes back to your ‘why’; the question of why you wanted to learn Chinese in the first place. If that is connected to improving yourself, or discovering a new culture and enjoying yourself, then why would you ever want the journey to end?