Photo by Iñaki del Olmo on Unsplash
I’ve recently restarted my Dutch course. Half-way through a class, I started questioning whether I was actually any good at learning languages. I realised it was a somewhat farcical thought, considering I’ve been learning languages most of my life. Logically I am rather good at it, since I speak 3 languages fluently and have been learning three others.
To some extent everyone has doubts around their language abilities. That’s just part of the learners journey. Yet there is something about the course structure doesn’t particularly play to my strengths. It’s four hours of class twice a week. I don’t think such lengths of concentration are exactly my forte.
Not only that, the structure feels somewhat hard to follow. We seem to jump from one topic to another based upon a set syllabus. This week we reviewed how people introduce themselves (even though we did that last semester). Next week we are going to talk about volunteering. There doesn’t seem to be any particular logic to any of this, and I can’t help but somehow feel a little lost.
The difficult thing is knowing whether this is confusing for everyone or just for me. I’ve had flashbacks to when I was in primary school. I remember at one point that I was in the top set of Maths class, but my teacher felt I needed a kick of motivation. I was sent down to the second set. Then, wanting to compound the effect further, I was later put in the bottom set. Eventually, I was moved back into the top set but with the idea that this was a proverbial kick up the backside.
I can’t help but be gobsmacked at how I now realise that I had no idea what was happening. Nobody seemed to properly sit me down and explain what was happening and why. I simply followed what I was told. I seemed to have built this reputation of being smart but lazy, yet in reality I didn’t really understand what was going on.
Clearly, neurodivergence was at play. My brain works differently, that is pretty evident. I think I often would start thinking about something and then get caught up in it that I would miss the next part of the conversation.
Yet I’m also very cautious of having this all brushed under the ‘neurodivergent’ tag. I also remember that when I was unsure of something, I was too scared to ask. I remember this once meant that I ended up doing very little during the class, which very much annoyed my teacher.
I was cripplingly timid growing up. This, I think, stems far more from my family upbringing than anything else. Being the youngest in what was a pretty dysfunctional family environment, I generally grew up being scared to ask things. South Asian family culture is also far more strict compared to western ones around respect and deference. It meant that I was still shy and fearful around adults until well into my teens.
Disentangling all these things is pretty tricky. But I’m fairly confident that it was a mix of both things. My brain does work differently which has created additional challenges, but some of these things have been made more dramatic by cultural differences.
Fast forward to today, I’m far better at concentrating. I’ve done a whole lot of work in calming the mind and being more present. So much so that I am a much better listener than many people. But I’m left wondering whether I have become good at these things by heightened compensation of my weaknesses.
It’s why the point about me not being very good at learning languages does have some resonance behind it. I have found my own methods as a way of overcoming heightened difficulty. Much of my language learning I have done in private. I now usually use 1-1 teachers as I find that much more dynamic. I also much prefer spending time with natives rather than following a school curriculum.
In some senses, I know that it doesn’t really matter how I became good at something. Whatever method I use, the result is the same. Yet if I have constantly been using these additional compensatory measures, it helps explain why I’ve had such an implosion in my cognitive functioning in these last few years.
Another interesting point is that my Sanskrit classes feel very different. It is a slower, more thorough pace. I actually find it more rigorous and much easier to follow. Whereas western language learning seems to be rushing to up skill as quickly as possible, my Sanskrit teacher goes by slow, repetition of simpler topics and phrases.
I think our Western style of teaching has become so embedded in following a bloated curriculum that it ends up rushing around. This is rather ineffective for all of us, but I would say tends to be more difficult for neurodivergent and marginalised folk.
I do think we are also partly to blame for this. Most people are not willing to put in the time and effort to learn the more traditional way. Teaching has needed to become more about entertainment than education in order to survive. After all, a gamified language learning app lets people feel good about themselves without having to do the hard yards of grammar tests.
So where does that leave me with my Dutch class? Well, I follow it, and I actually am better at it than I give myself credit for. Whatever difficulty I may have is outweighed by the fact I turn up more consistently and take it more seriously compared to my classmates.
Yet the one thing I need to be careful of is pushing too hard on these compensatory mechanisms. After all, I’m pretty sure that’s what led to my burnout in the first place.