Emotions in language learning

Or: How to be open without falling apart

A week and three days into the University of Iceland program I signed up for months ago, I feel as vulnerable as a child: frustrated by what I can’t say, afraid that others are judging me, and isolated. But I anticipated these feelings. I knew I would have them. It’s okay. My feelings, as a yoga teacher once told me, are not my self, and luckily I’m adult enough to remember that. Mostly.

In this language, I really am a child. I’m somewhere around 18 months old, though I haven’t yet slammed my spoon on a table and yelled, “Nei!” (No!) I can say Hello (Goðán dag) and I know how to say the next thing, Hvað segir þú gott? (Whatcha got to say good, or What’s up?), but I haven’t yet said it to anyone, though I have said the response, Allt fínt (Everything’s fine.). I am beginning to be able to read short, simple texts if I know the context. I can see a word and guess its gender and maybe its plural and maybe its accusative form. I’ve learned a bunch of words to recognize them but probably not to produce them. I’m definitely in the back of the class when it comes to fluency and accent. My classmates are half a generation younger than my children and they can already reel off a lot more language than I can.

What I’m surprised by is my own shyness; under the psychological pressure to produce language, I freeze. I can’t remember the words to speak them, though I can easily recognize them. In short, the receptive skills are doing all right, but the productive skills are lagging far behind.

The program I am in provides three and a half weeks of intensive Icelandic language instruction—two-and-a-half hours of grammar instruction in the mornings, an additional cultural lecture in the afternoons and several field trips. On two weekends, there are out-of-town jaunts. There is a student-led conversation table that I just learned about today; I’ll start going next week though the idea of having to speak in Icelandic for a half hour roils my gut.

The schedule is fairly similar to the schedule that we followed at the University of Tennessee’s English Language Institute, which we also advertised as “intensive.” But there are differences. At my institute, we divided our instruction into four parts: grammar, reading, writing, and speaking/listening, a division I continue to question. We didn’t include culture instruction at all. Why didn’t we? Perhaps because American culture is a touchy and elusive subject that (to be honest) has to veer into politics and history—neither of which is a very comfortable topic.

But this program feels to me much more intensive than ours was, more traditional grammar lecture and less practice. Each hour of instruction, in my opinion, requires another two hours outside of class to assimilate all the information that’s presented, and it’s assimilation on an intellectual level, not a productive level. I don’t feel confident that I’ll be able to speak much Icelandic at all, though I will be able to read some, for sure. And that lack of confidence shakes me. Will I be able to do it? I just don’t know.

Learning another language in an intensive environment calls for a psychological vulnerability, a radical receptivity, that can be painful to experience. You don’t recognize “incoming” information. You can’t recall the words you need, and if you can find them lurking in your memory, you’re only too aware that you’re not speaking them correctly in a country where apparently everyone takes turns as chief grammar critic. Staying emotionally calm while trying also to be intellectually open and vulnerable is a high-wire act I hadn’t remembered I would experience. I’m up for it, but my hands are trembling as I hold the balance poles.

Small acts of kindness help. A classmate invited me to lunch and I think I thanked him twenty times. Another one, only 22, put me on the group Whatsapp chat two weeks after it started and I feel disproportionately grateful, though I haven’t accessed the chat yet. I’ll at least lurk, though I probably won’t go out bar-hopping with the young ones. But I’ll have the option.

I may pass the final exam of this course and I may not. It doesn’t really much matter to me in the big scheme of things; I’ll be going home to tend my garden soon enough. But the exercise of being an 18-month-old in another language has been a refreshing reminder to be as kind to myself as I try to be to others.