For me, true confidence in my language came when I was able to have fluid, natural conversations with native speakers. Before that point, I had always felt a bit clumsy and uncertain when speaking, like I was constantly searching for the right words. But once I reached a certain level of fluency, I suddenly felt more confident and comfortable using my language. I no longer hesitated or stumbled over my words, and I was able to hold conversations without difficulty. This milestone made me feel proud of my accomplishments and motivated me to continue learning. Now, even though I still have moments of uncertainty, I know that I am capable of communicating effectively in my language.
It’s a lifetime study, there’s no rush, I’ve resigned to the fact that there are just some elements of even my mother tongue that I’ll probably never know, we can only hope to learn that which is most relevant to the topic that we enjoy discussing most.
It sounds like your goals are too ill defined and you are spreading yourself too thin. A common trap I myself fell into when using LingQ in the past. The solution:
For the sake of maintaining motivation it’s best to become extremely competent at one small area of the language first, before using that as a base to branch out. For example, you can become conversationally fluent, be able to converse and understand native speakers on topics of interest and general life without any strain within a relatively short space of time. Doing that is extremely gratifying and doesn’t require learning hundreds of thousands of words.
Feeling totally confident and at ease (allbeit only in one or a few areas of the language) is vital. If you spread yourself too thin and your goals are too ill defined (e.g. you want to be able to understand everything all the time) language learning will feel like a constant, never ending battle, your progress will be imperceptable and there will be no light at the end of the tunnel. Conversley if you make your focus more narrow, you will be able to percieve your progress and maintain motivation.
So pick a topic of interest, and make it your goal to become almost as competent at speaking about or reading/listening to material on that topic as you are in your mother tongue. Then move onto another topic. The immense feeling of gratification you get from becoming very good at one thing will spur you on to continue spending time with the language long term.
Some background. I’ve been studying Chinese for five years. For the first four years I approached it in the way you described. I tried to read and listen to anything and everything I could find on LingQ. It was an aimless, thankless task and I became very frustrated that language learning seemed like a never ending mountain.
One year ago I changed my approach. I massively narrowed my focus to concentrate exclusively on improving my pronunciation and conversation skills on a few topics of interest. Because my focus was narrow, within a few months I was able to became very good at speaking about the things I wanted to speak about.
Does that mean that my Chinese is now perfect? No of course not. There are still many topics I’d struggle to speak about. But it means that it doesn’t matter anymore because I am very confident in my ability to do a few things very well and have no doubt that if I wanted to branch out to other areas of the language I could become highly competent at them too.
All of the best language learners I’ve met have done it this way. You may be more interested in reading than speaking but the same principles apply.
Do not worry. You should be competing with who you were yesterday: as long as you learned more yesterday.
Matt Vs Japan has one of the highest levels in Japanese a learner can have (Steve even confirmed this in the video he did with him) and he tells a very different story. He definitely didn’t focus on a narrow converstational part of Japanese. He dived in at the deep end and learned to swim. He would listen to stuff that was miles above his level, right from the very beginning. He even suspects that it’s a more efficient way since you’re always encountering new vocab/tricky grammar. It takes a number of years for it to produce real results, but those results seem to be much higher than the skill building results reported/demonstrated by most. If you think about it, it makes sense. It is (though not completely) how billions of people learned their native language after all.
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I have a book I bought about 3 years ago waiting for that day. I suspect it may never come, haha.
Matt vs Japan isn’t really doing anything revolutionary its just read and listen but he only did that and a lot of it. He talks about in refold how one should pick a domain and then hop to the next and to the next etc. He is also a huge anime watcher which isn’t the hardest vocab wise so that is probably why he says this “He even suspects that it’s a more efficient way since you’re always encountering new vocab/tricky grammar.”
“He would listen to stuff that was miles above his level, right from the very beginning” He did this because there isn’t but of another option especially back then. He says hard and exciting is better than easier and boring which follows along with stephen krashen’s work.
I wouldn’t say he dove into the deep end more like the part in front of the shallow end because anime is not very dense speech wise and it has a lot of phrases that are super easy etc. Obviously the other half is the dense paragraphs and narration etc so it has a shallow end and deep end.
I wasn’t talking about his method. Whether or not he did it because there wasn’t an option isnt relevant, the point is he did it, and it worked, very well. You might say, ‘Anime isn’t the hardest’ but for a beginner it really is, and he lived with the difficulty, for many months. He frequently tells how he could barely understand it for a long time. I’m not sure if his site now advises to ‘focus on one domain and then hop to the next’ but that’s definitely not what he did. Or at least he’s never mentioned doing that in any of his videos. He watched tons of Anime, but as far as I know that covers a wide range of themes/topics.
@hellion He didn’t have a job for like 7 years so efficiency isn’t a strong point. Anybody on this planet can learn a language with 4-8 hours a day for this long, but the main difference between kids and adults is kids don’t have jobs. So if one quits their job and studies like he did I can guarantee they will be fluent. But this isn’t the reality so doing everything he did and claiming it works doesn’t prove that its the most efficient way but only that it works because he did it. The real question is what activities work with a higher grade of efficiency because he listened for over 4000 hours according to him which is very inefficient. This is only listening and There are people that accomplish greater feats than Japanese listening in that amount of time. So I would argue that his listening strategies were inefficient because 4000 hours is too much (this isn’t counting all the reading he did to learn all the words he is trying to listen too). So pointing to Matt and listening to his claim of listening to stuff where you can’t understand is fine as long as you know 90% of the words on paper written down then you can acquire those words but if you are trying to acquire words through listening that you have never seen/heard prior this will take a lot longer hence why kids learn so slow. Listening is understanding the sounds of a language but more importantly it is subconsciously processing words into information and languages have a lot of words and combinations of words.