Language Learning

Today has been an especially bad day with learning French, not that I have that many particularly wonderful ones. I gave a post-it to my host mom telling her the times when I'll be leaving/coming back from my trip and I made a conjugation error... I wrote serai instead of sera because I was thinking in 1st person terms but writing in 3rd person. She read it out loud and I just nodded my head in verification but as I reached the top of the stairs going back to my bedroom I realized I made the stupid mistake, and I also realized that she probably read it aloud to give me the chance to correct myself. I was too lazy to go down and correct it so I've been sitting in my room for the last 2 hours feeling dumb instead :p Most of me wishes she would have just corrected my stupid error...

Anyway, right now I'm reading a guide that I got in my pedagogy (aka teaching methods) course and in a section about language acquisition is written: "The learner's emotional state can act as a filter that impedes or blocks input necessary to acquisition (The affective filter hypothesis.)" This really sparked my interest, since it struck a chord with me, so I looked more into it:

From wikipedia: "According to the affective filter hypothesis, certain emotions, such as anxiety, self-doubt, and mere boredom interfere with the process of acquiring a second language. They function as a filter between the speaker and the listener that reduces the amount of language input the listener is able to understand. These negative emotions prevent efficient processing of the language input.^[3] The hypothesis further states that the blockage can be reduced by sparking interest, providing low anxiety environments and bolstering the learner's self-esteem."

In all honesty, I'm having an immense amount of difficultly learning this language. Speaking is incredibly hard for me, I make tons of mistakes in my written French (that I hardly even care to correct, I just want to get it over with), and sometimes I can't even understand what people in stores tell me. STILL.

In other news, this is from Valentine's day. Kelsey is holding her card from Tanya and I'm holding my card from Amanda.

In an earlier post, I mentioned that I just feel like my brain is literally blocking the language. This theory explains perfectly my sentiment and just validates for me that there's a reason why I'm having so much difficulty. I knew my level of anxiety was why, I just couldn't put it into words or validate it until now.

The only class I'm truly enjoying and am eager to learn in is phonetics. It's incredibly interesting, the teacher is really nice, and it's something I've never seen before. I feel like the fact that it's brand new is what really sets it apart; I've been studying this language for six years...honestly, it's starting to become slightly monotonous.

I'm not trying to say that I'm learning absolutely nothing; I'm learning a lot and I can speak when I'm not feeling anxious. I also understand most of what people tell me when they're talking to me (if they're nice enough to not speak to me at the same speed/with the same blending-of-words like they would speak to a friend). 

It does stress me out though, which isn't good because I have the initial stress of being here, plus the stress/frustration with myself. The last few nights I've had dreams in which I'm speaking French with my friends and I literally wake up with what I'm going to call a language-headache. It's when your brain starts to hurt because it's working so hard.

And Amanda with her stuff from Kelsey next to Tanya with her stuff from me. She loves bueno bars. (Sorry these are not very new subject matter, nothing very exciting has happened. But Saturday we leave for Rome so I'll make up for it next week!

I guess what I really need is a change of mentality...but how can I change something that I don't feel I have much control over? That is the question. I might talk to the program directors about it tomorrow, if I can manage to blab all of this out in French, and see if they have any suggestions. 

I have a feeling I'm just being too hard on myself, but that's nothing new.