It’s good to force yourself to do things you’re bad at. I’m trying to learn a foreign language. I started with Duolingo as a way of keeping myself from scrolling the malignant internet sites, like Facebook and Instagram and whatever our monied, sociopathic overlords are calling twitter these days.
That part of the plan didn’t work. Although Duolingo is really good at holding your attention. It bings and dings and rings and sizzles in your hand when you get simple vocabulary words right. It emails you and sends you texts when you haven’t used it yet and it’s almost breakfast time. It has characters you weirdly find yourself thinking about when you aren’t on the app and it even creates buzzy viral news events in an alternate reality—last month everyone who used Duolingo was talking about how the owl got hit by a cyber truck, but if you aren’t on the app, you don’t even know it was a thing.
Keeping offline failed but something else happened. I picked a language I knew almost nothing about and I was embarrassingly bad at. But then I actually did start to get better. And it turns out being bad at something is good for you. Being bad at something is humbling, even humiliating. But once you stop challenging yourself, you forget how good it feels to improve. Not only that, learning a new language is one of the few things that actually reorders your brain, makes you see English in a brand new way. Struggling to put sentences together with the vocabulary of a toddler triggers connections that you never noticed. My family is tired of hearing me go on about how hotel and hostel are actually the same word—they even basically mean the same thing. Oh and “déjà vu?’ Turns out those are just two ordinary French words. It just means you’ve seen it before, like it could be just for a TV show or something like that!
I may have more practice at being bad at things than most people, but with a little effort, you can be bad at something too.
Je suis Dan Libman et c'est mon point de vue.
Dan Libman’s book, Shocker in Gloomtown has just been published by University Wisconsin Steven’s Point Cornerstone Press, and is available wherever you have a phone.
