I’ve always hated The Tortoise and the Hare. The allegory has a good enough message and all; don’t be lazy, don’t be conceited, hard work pays off in the end, that’s all good stuff, sure. And it all applies very neatly to language learning if you think about it. Dashing forward in heavy sprints that … Continue reading The Tortoise and the Hare
In keeping track of all these numbers, one of the figures I haven’t been posting is what this is doing to my bank account. An old saw about language learning is how incredibly expensive it is by necessity. You need to go abroad and be immersed in the language in order to learn it, you … Continue reading Learning a Foreign Language Without Going Broke
So there’s an elephant in the room. It’s just a little one, but I’ve noticed it, as I’ve thought over these blogs and the topics I’d like to eventually cover. That elephant’s name is Motivation. I’ve skirted around the topic a few times. Having clear and compelling motivation is a key point of conversation in … Continue reading Motivational Speech
So last week, I was soundly defeated by a book. Things were nicely timed to where I finished El Maravilloso Mago de Oz on Monday, and would be beginning my next book at the start of this week: Harry Potter y la Piedra Filosofal. Perfect! I’d been working my way up in reading level more … Continue reading Facing Defeat and Bouncing Back
I have no memory of learning to read. The closest I have to that is hazy scenes of a time when I was very small and not wanting to read when asked, which is of course not the same thing. It was a time when I was capable of reading, but hadn’t yet fallen in … Continue reading Reading in a Foreign Language: The Struggle Is Real
Two weeks in, and I am finding myself struggling with trying to figure out how to start these blogs off. I haven’t quite nailed down the voice I’m aiming to strike in them, or have a pictured “audience” that I could project to, so there’s a bit of stumbling to fall into a tone I … Continue reading What and Why Deeper Dive
Over the last six months, I’ve become well acquainted with feeling dumb. It’s a laughably easy achievement in language learning, all it takes is seeing a word that you know you’ve seen at least five times before and being utterly baffled trying to remember the definition, or seeing a sentence where every word in it … Continue reading Feeling The Stupidest, but also Smart
What is this blog, indeed? Well, to start things off, an introduction of sorts. Hello! I’m bats. I’m a writer, artist, and monolingual English speaker. I like those first two labels, but I’ve never been happy about the third one, and toward the end of 2017, I decided to try and do something about it. … Continue reading What Is This Blog?
Fumbling Toward Fluent 