The enormous gift of patience and the tyranny of the internal timer

On patience. We need patience with ourselves, and patience with others. This is key. People sense the passage of time. The thinking time before speaking and while speaking, we ourselves monitor. And it gets in the way. It interferes with making language.

The internal timer may go off, causing you to bail from the sentence. To give up. To feel bad. To feel like you’re never going to get it.

Other people (listeners) also have an internal timer. The speaker is sensitive to not only their own timer but that of their conversation partner.

We have the ‘too fast problem’ and the ‘too slow problem’. Maybe you talk too fast to try to cover up the mistakes you make and hope nobody notices. Maybe the other person talks too fast and you didn’t get it. Here’s the phrase to remember. The energy is, ‘can you repeat that more slowly please’. Just say it in the new language, practice it, prepare it. You’ll need it. Stick to your objective to speak in the new language. Don’t give up too fast and switch to English, even if that’s what the other guy wants to do.

Patience is a gift. When you give it to someone, they give it to you.

Bailing from a speech production (i.e. saying something) is to be expected in the beginning. You may know most of what you want to say, and then come to a stop mid way in the sentence. It’s normal.

When first learning to ride a bicycle, you always fall off. Falling off, is part of the process of learning to ride. Then you learn it, and realise it wasn’t as hard as you thought. When you are confident with what you are saying it’s like riding a bicycle. Everything’s fine and smooth. However, sometimes you’re not in control because a car jumps out in front of you. Things happen when you’re riding a bicycle.

If you ride in the city, you have to ride up curbs onto the foot path to avoid a cobbled road. What do you do? Do you get off the bike and lift the front of the bicycle with your feet on the ground, or do you try to ride up the curb by putting your weight back, and at just the right moment doing a little jump on the pedals? It depends on how high the curb is, and how much confidence you have as a bike rider.

Producing language is like riding a bicycle and trying to ride over curbs. Some curbs are OK and not too high, some are too high causing you to bawk.

But riding a bicycle is so fundamental, that you keep working at it until one day you can do it. And you are pretty surprised. It’s the same with learning a language.

Learning to ride is fun. Let’s make learning a language fun too. When there’s a bump in the road, it’s OK, because that’s part of it.

Have patience with yourself, and patience with others. It’s not about ‘efficiency’. Efficiency is a false prophet. Let’s take the time we need. Remembering that it didn’t take so long to learn to ride a bike.