If there is one thing I'm proud of is my ability to learn anything regardless of what it is. I have spent years nurturing my mind to be patient with the process. Whenever I find something difficult to learn, I have conditioned my mind to believe it is just a matter of time. The thought of this put my mind at ease while I go through hurdles and challenges of learning it bit by bit.
Truth be told, I have always boast of how fast my ability to learn is, I know how easy it might seem to people when they see me pick up things that is almost impossible for others to learn, yeah I have a retentive memory or a photographic memory. I can memorize things just by looking at it. Not as if I crammed it or anything, my eyes just seems to work like HD camera, while my brain handles the storage. But my ability to learn as never been about my natural capabilities, it is always about the consistent assurance.
Most people might not believe this but from years of studying myself and students, I realized that when a person says something is too difficult to learn, suddenly it becomes difficult to learn. This is not magic, it is just that our minds pay more attention to our feelings than we think. That moment you are wasting saying all sort of things, it disorientate the mind, sends some kind of weird signal to the brain. Like a time stamp, it becomes mandated, that thing you believe is difficult to learn, your whole body suddenly agrees to it.
Which means the next time you decide pick that thing up and try to learn it, every thing might feel overwhelming, like your whole body is reminding you that, "this is difficult to learn, just like you have said. So this what I manage to avoid, before my mind start making up thoughts for me, I already reassure myself that whatever it is, it is not difficult to learn and suddenly my mind and I come to an agreement, let's learn this thing and get over it. This has always worked for me like magic while i nurture my other learning skills.
As skillful as I might seem when it comes to learning, learning language is where I draw the line. Long before I manage to condition my mind, I believe my mind had already processed that language is the one thing I might never be able to learn, believe me I have tried. Well, probably I need more motivation but the thing about me is that, most of the things I have learnt is self taught but with language it is not working.
I admire those that learn and speak different languages, I look at them and they look like aliens or probably they have more than 4 chambers in their brains because there must be something that makes it easy for them to learn and difficult for me. One of the languages I have tried to learn in the past and till this moment is Spanish. This is not just because I admire the language or I'm passionate about it, there is something that leads to my interest in this language.
There is a movie I have been trying to watch since I was around 18yrs old, the movie was displayed on a Tv channel but it was aired bit by bit and I missed some episodes. I admire this Tv series so much and I kept hunting for it ever since. The title is "Corazon indomable" - wild at heart. I eventually discovered this series is not available in my region, I try finding other ways to access it, I eventually found it listed on a channel on telegram in full. Every episode was there, about 140 episodes. I didn't mind how much data it would cost, only for me to discover that there is no English subtitle for it anywhere.
I have searched for it everywhere, I couldn't find it. So I decided to learn Spanish, hoping this would be a permanent solution, that is when I discovered how difficult it is for me to learn a language. I have tried to learn french in the past and I was not too serious about it. So I thought it was because I lacked motivation but now I have one but I still couldn't learn anything. I tried learning through Duolingo, I learnt few words but I couldn't keep up eventually. I guess language learning is not for everyone.
This write-up was inspired by weekly featured content titled Language in hive learners community.
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