Start From Your Thoughts
By: Ryan Shaw
Tags: Motivation, Language Learning, Chinese, Emotions, Self Improvement

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

I started learning Chinese in sixth grade. I had wonderful teachers who helped me along every step of the way. In my very first class, I wanted to jump right into writing characters and speaking full sentences. Instead, we started with Chinese history and the Chinese alphabet. It wasn’t what I expected, but it ultimately served to give me the foundation I needed. The teachers understood that I couldn’t master the language in a day, and they never expected that of me.

Recently, I was talking to Sia, my girlfriend who I met in China when I went with the Confucius Institute in 2018. I was trying to explain something to her in Chinese, and I realized I was fumbling over words that a couple of years ago would have come to me quite naturally. “Aiya, my Chinese is so bad!” I said. But then it stopped there. I complained, but I did nothing about it.

Recently, I’ve been getting in touch with my thoughts and emotions. I have come to realize that my thoughts lead to emotions, my emotions lead to actions, my actions lead to consequences, and those consequences lead to more thoughts.

Imagine that I have a negative thought, like “I’ll never be fluent in Chinese. It’s literally going to be a never-ending journey. There’s no way I could ever learn everything in Chinese. There are so many idioms, phrases, and TONES. I don’t even know my tones well enough and I’ve been doing this for over ten years!!” (This is something I have thought and said out loud on many occasions.)

That negative thought is going to lead me to feel a whole host of negative emotions. It will make me feel discouraged. Hopeless. Inadequate. Ashamed.

And those feelings are going to cause me to take certain actions (or not take certain actions). I will stay in bed, eat junk food to hide my feelings, and most importantly, NOT try to make progress in Chinese.

Those actions will lead to certain results. I will not improve in Chinese and will probably get worse. Then the next time I’m trying to use Chinese, I do even worse, and my subsequent emotions, actions and consequences are all worse too. The cycle starts by changing my thoughts.

The truth is, that negative thought I had about my Chinese is totally irrational. “I’ll never be able to be fluent in Chinese.” I have no evidence for this. All fluency means is speaking in a natural flow, without pausing to think too often or hesitating. Plenty of people are fluent in Chinese. Why can’t I be?

“It’s literally going to be a never-ending journey. There’s no way I could ever learn everything in Chinese. There are so many idioms, phrases, and TONES.” That’s all true, and it’s only a problem if I’m focused on unrealistic and unattainable goals. It might be better to just drop the goals, and instead focus on daily habits that ensure my ability will improve. That way, I can feel happy by just doing my little bit of work each day, rather than putting my satisfaction off until I know every single word in the Chinese language, which will probably never happen. Think of all the English words and idioms I don’t know even though I’m a native speaker.

“I don’t even know my tones well enough and I’ve been doing this for over ten years!!” Well, I do know some tones. And I might benefit from reviewing them and finding ways to improve my pronunciation. But the fact that I have been learning for ten years doesn’t matter, especially if I have paid much attention to the way I go about my learning. Once I start being systematic about my learning, I will see more progress and I will improve over time.

If you were to argue with someone who said the negative things that you’re thinking, how would you pick apart their argument? Most of the time, we are making obvious logical fallacies in our own thinking, and then just accepting those thoughts as truth. We have thousands of thoughts per day, and when they’re negative, they can take a toll on us. Start by noticing those thoughts, writing them down, and questioning their validity. Be curious about it. I’m finding is that there is a lot to be hopeful about by doing this, and maybe you will too!