As you all already are aware of, I’m the type of person who loves to track my progress and I love to experiment and figure out what works for me, what does not work for me, as well as why those things have that specific effect on me. I guess I have always been a very geeky person when it comes to things like that.
However, in order for me to actually make use of the knowledge about myself, I also need to be honest about the mistakes that I make, which is something that I have failed at doing recently.
I have known for a long time now, that I continue to make one big mistake and I also know that it is affecting my learning to a pretty severe degree, and for the past year or so, I have kept on telling myself that I will start working on it soon. What is ‘soon’ anyway?
My mistake isn’t bad or dramatic in any way, but it is so easy to fix. So why don’t I? I really don’t know. I think that it’s a mistake that a lot of people make.
Lately this issue has really started to bother me to the point where I think about it almost daily, so now I’m fixing it. I guess it’s true when they say that every thing has its own time.
As for my mistake, I actually feel really silly now that I write about it. It should be basic learning knowledge. But as with many other things, basics can be skipped when you are eager or lazy, and to be completely honest, I’m not even sure which one is the reason in my case.
Anyway, my mistake is that I don’t use what I learn. It sounds like such a small and trivial thing, but it really does make an enormous difference.
I have worked though a lot of books and I often study with advanced material, but I’m not actually at that level. I have worked through a ton of intermediate material and I have one notebook after another filled with notes to prove it. But nevertheless, I’m not able to use most of it, because I don’t use the new things that I learn, beyond the assignments at the end of a chapter. Because I have gone through a lot of intermediate and advanced grammar in my books and because I expose myself in a big variety of ways, I’m good at recognizing and understanding it whenever I meet it somewhere, however I’m not able to actually use it myself. If I learn something knew, but already know another way of saying it, then I’ll stick to what I already know. This have become such a bad habit. I can’t even count the amount of times where I have wanted to say something but thought that I didn’t know how to, just to come across that very same thing later and realizing that I understand it completely.
Because of this mistake, I now have a giant gap between my ability to understand the Korean language and my ability to actually use it. What fun is there to understand anything, if you can’t actively use it?
I promised myself to stop making this mistake and actually make an effort in using the things that I learn, so that’s what I will do.
By acknowledging this mistake, I can start closing this gap. I’ll do my best! 🙂
Cammilla's Korean 