Since updating my language goals on January 3rd, I’ve made some progress:
A grand total of 1h 10mins of progress, that is. At least, that’s how much time active time I’ve spent on my Telugu studies. I have done more hours of passive work, like reading some news articles, listening to music, or watching TV in a target language (such as Spanish, French, or Telugu), but my goal is to increase the amount of active study I do. Active study is the hard stuff that pushes you outside your comfort zone and ultimately improves your ability.
Some observations I’ve made so far:
3 hours is a lot of time 🙁
To reach my goal, I would have to do between 2 – 3 hours of study a week. That’s a lot of time. It’s been nearly 4 years since I was a full-time student, which was the last time I was sitting down to really study something. It’s really hard! I forgot how hard it was. My brain hurt after 10 minutes of trying to read Telugu.
3 hours is a lot of time!
The flip-side is that if you dedicate 3 hours of study to anything, you can actually get a lot done. If I can successfully ramp up to 3 hours of Telugu a week (which might be harder than I thought), I will probably blow past the progress I’ve made in the previous times I’ve tried to study Telugu intensively.
Delayed gratification is hard
Part of the reason I haven’t studied more is that delayed gratification is hard. That is, I’m working towards a goal now that I won’t realize later. It’s only after a few months of dedicated study will I get to the level of fluency I want to be able to communicate with family and take part in Telugu culture.
There are a lot of distractions
I’m living in Brooklyn, NY right now. There are a lot of distractions here that bring me away from studying. Some of these distractions are good – I’m dedicating time to finding a job, doing basic life things like cooking / cleaning, and spending time with friends, all of which are critical to my (and our) functioning as human beings.
Some of these distractions aren’t so good. Sometimes I just sit around for an hour and do nothing. Other times, I sleep-in when I really should be doing something productive. Other times entirely I get sucked into “soft” distractions. These are things that aren’t complete wastes of time, but aren’t the highest and best use of my time and won’t move me towards my goals. A lot of these involve doing things I’m like 60% excited about, which crowds out my ability to do things I’m like 80 or 85% excited about.
This would describe a lot of the bars and nights out I had. I like spending time with friends, so I would sometimes go to bars and clubs I wasn’t a huge fan of to spend time with them – thinking that I wouldn’t get time with people otherwise. This year, I’ve tried to steer away from the types of social plans that don’t give me joy (loud, crowded clubs or bars with bad music at nighttime) to the ones that do (quieter bars where you can talk, small group environments, earlier in the day socializing, or concerts where I like the music). I’ve been trying to drink less alcohol this year, and the former type of environment tends to make that worse. I’m hoping to be more conscious of this going forward – and spend more time on things that give me energy.
Plan going forward
I actually finished this article after doing a 45 minute Telugu lesson, which brings my total up to 1hr 55 minutes. But I didn’t want to give up the 3:10 to Yuma pun so I’ll keep it.
Telugu study isn’t the highest priority for me – because I need to find a job, but I don’t want to ignore it completely. This is challenge I faced while studying for the LSAT – where I sometimes ignored the important but not urgent work. Scheduling lessons on iTalki – where I am paying someone else for their time, is a good way for me to stick to my goals.
I’ve also started to aggressively use my Google Calendar, and I’m finding it helpful. I’ll try to block out some more time this week and next week to focus on Telugu, and put it at the beginning of the day. With the iTalki lesson taking care of 1hr of the 3 hours I need to study, it shouldn’t be hard to hit my weekly goal.