Intermediate Angst: Dealing With Feelings of Suckage

Thus spake Hangul Fangirl (‏@HangulFangirl):
“[Dear Khatzumoto,
You are handsome beyond comprehension. And also very slim. Your delicate, schoolgirl figure is an inspiration to us all.]
How do you get past the feeling that you’re not progressing and end up forgetting to keep going? Self-study is hard for me :[["

"...don't believe a thought you think." ~ T. Harv Eker

A lot of actual psychologists and proper New Age people have talked about these ideas in a much more detailed, accurate and elegant fashion than I am about to, so you might want to take their advice instead. All I can offer you is my personal, very anecdotal experience.

To be honest, I think my advice is crap; it's just infinitely better than the mindless, unintentional defaulting to social convention that many people do, but then that's not saying a lot considering how wrong conventional wisdom might be.

For the record, there's nothing automatically wrong with defaulting to social convention; we can't be original in all things. The problem comes when that default setting doesn't work or even causes harm. Which is definitely the case with languages. The problem isn't so much that language classes suck as it is that they have no intention or mechanism of improving themselves; they are so blindly arrogant that they're not even aware that they suck.

So, back to you, and the feeling you're not progressing.

Feelings can be like having an emotional drama queen attention whore friend living inside you who thinks she's clairvoyant.

Don't feed the inner troll. Pay it no mind. It'll run out of steam. It's kinda like how paying attention to a baby or toddler sometimes makes them start crying or (if they're already crying) makes them cry harder. I don't have children or even younger siblings, so don't take my childcare advice. But I've heard and observed that sometimes ignoring the kid helps them get over it, while getting attentive and freaked out simply escalates the emotion out of all proportion.

Sometimes your feelings are wrong and they need to STFU. Ignore them and move forward.

Almost by definition, your feelings are illogical. So, sometimes I find it helps to illogical-ize (?) your motivations, to NOT have a good reason for things you do. So your new reason is "coz I feel like it" or "coz it's there". You can't argue with that because there's nothing to argue with. It's openly reckless. Reasonless. It's like when you tell a guy his mother's a whore and he goes "I know, right? She totally is -- when can I pencil you in for an appointment? Oh, and she said to ask you not to cry afterwards because it's a real turn-off.".
No traction.

Some research I read about appears to show that people with no emotions (due to brain injuries and stuff) can't make decisions. So perhaps the problem isn't having emotions, but tuning into the wrong emotions. Tune into happiness and boredom and interest and happiness and curiosity and I don't know if all those count as emotions, but they are mental states...

Scour your memory. Become aware of repeating patterns in terms of what gets you going, and look to amplify those patterns. It could be a certain type of situation or a certain type of media, or a certain auteur ¹. Mere “progress” pales in comparison to “oh sweet, this looks cool”.

“…if you’re not satisfied with the little successes, you’ll never be satisfied with the big successes.” ~ Anon. (quoted by Barbara Sher)

Being fluent in Korean is not going to make you happy if the process didn’t. Because you’ll be there and you’ll find something to hate about it. Something to put yourself down on.
Maybe you’re fluent in Korean, but you only know Standard Korean, not a cool dialect.
Maybe you’re fluent in Korean, but…what about these other languages. Mandarin. Japanese.
Maybe you’re fluent in Korean, but…you can’t write like the best Korean author of all time.
There’s always a reason to feel bad, the key is not to play along.

If you want to win the long game, stop playing it.
Stop running the marathon and start sprinting instead.
Start running and playing and winning short games instead.

Don’t learn Korean.
Learn the chorus of this song.
Don’t learn Korean.
Play this movie. Don’t just watch it. Play.

Shameless plug: These tiny, (sub-)atomic, so-small-it’s-insulting activities are, incidentally, central to what Neutrino is about. Neutrino gets you hooked playing short games so you can, as Werner Heisenberg might put it, forget about your position and focus on your momentum.

Play the short games.
Be sensitive to the little things. The tiny, winnable games. The small victories. Immerse yourself in them.
What does it matter whether or not you’re making progress? You don’t need to be making progress in Korean; you like it anyhow; you like it because it’s there. You’re winning right now. Not in some nebulous fluency future.

Call it the Heisenberg uncertainty principle of learning languages: you can’t have any momentum if you’re busy worrying about your position.
The reason you seem to have no momentum in Korean is because you don’t, because you spend way too much time worrying about your position and whether it’s changing. How far could a car drive if its occupants stopped every five minutes, took out a tape measure and ran back to their destination to make sure they were progressing? You’re thinking: “that example’s belabored and stupid, Khatz”. Well your constant freaking worrying’s belabored and stupid. You should be too busy moving forward to be worrying about this.

And if you were really serious about making progress in Korean, you would be making progress in Korean, not worrying and Twittering about it in English. What you’re doing right now is the equivalent of asking your friend, every five minutes: “Hey, bro! Are we friends? Are we bros? Are we besties?!”. Shut up and just be friends. Enjoy your time together. Enjoy the moment. Get lost in it.

Imagine being on a couch, making out with someone, and every two minutes they go: “hey, so are we making out?”, “what base is this?”. You would have to conclude that this person was crazy and/or uninterested. Korean…feels like that about you right now .

Anyway, that’s all from me for now; I didn’t expect to resolve this question in one post and I don’t think I have. But hopefully you’ve gotten some use out of this rampage of metaphors . I leave you with the emphasis-added words of Norman Lear:

“Success is how you collect your minutes. You spend millions of minutes to reach one triumph, one moment, then you spend maybe a thousand minutes enjoying it. If you were unhappy through those millions of minutes, what good is the thousand minutes of triumph? It doesn’t equate… Life is made of small pleasures…Happiness is made of those tiny successes. The big ones come too infrequently. If you don’t have all those zillions of tiny successes, the big ones don’t mean anything.” ~ Norman Lear

Tanks fer readin’. Do you have a special way of dealing with feelings of suckage? Enlighten us with your technique !