I've struggled lately to write and share anything on this blog. I haven't had a lot of time but mostly I think its because of what I have published on this blog for others to read and then later regretted sharing and subsequently removed. The good it did in sharing any of it still remains to be unseen. Truthfully, its hard to adequately judge what is of value to me alone and what has the potential of being beneficial to others, but my desire to find a way to express my thoughts and feelings to others continues to drive me to try anyway.
For as long as I can remember I've felt a great need to communicate and connect with others…to truly understand them and have them understand me, but doing so has been far from easy. From my earliest memories I can recall being painfully shy. But usually the issue I found I have in communicating is my inability to understand what others are saying.
I hear them speak and my brain registers that they have said something and instantly I know what it is, but somewhere between that initial sense of understanding and my own creation of a reply I lose the meaning of their words and become unable to come up with an adequate response. In order to try to continue the communication, I have had to ask others to repeat themselves frequently in hopes that what ever is short-circuiting in my head will resolve itself and I'll once again understand their words, but having them repeat the words rarely helps. The more I struggle to focus and grasp the meaning of their words the more the words' meanings seem to slip through the cracks in my mind. My thoughts scatter and I struggle to say anything in response. These interactions always leave me feeling greatly embarrassed and deeply ashamed of my inadequacy, and have created a great sense of anxiety whenever I'm in social situations because I never know when these moments of misunderstanding will occur and if I'll be able to overcome them.
The spoken word is not the only thing I have had difficulty understanding. It was very hard for me to learn how to read. Many teachers worked with me in and out of school (along with my parents) to teach me how to sound out words and understand what they mean. Ultimately I was never able to learn to read by sounding things out but instead had to rely on repetition of seeing the word as a whole and connecting it with the sound of the word as spoken by others. I would ask my mother, usually when she was distracted, to read my word list and I'd practice repeating the words until I could recall and say them when I saw them. I imagine I am not the only person who has had to learn to read this way, but have wondered if my issue with understanding words is something others have experienced as well.
Despite my struggle with communicating and understanding language, and maybe because of it, I've always had a great interest in language learning. Since my youth, I have tried many times to study and learn other languages. I've spent many, many hours pouring over language materials I'd bought or borrowed from the library. I bought language books on French, Italian, Spanish, Latin, German, Swahili, and Mandarin. I've checked out language learning materials from the library on learning Hebrew, Arabic, Turkish, Farsi, and ancient Greek. In school I took classes in Spanish, Latin, and Russian. But my efforts in learning these languages have yielded very little. The only language that I have been able to learn well enough to speak and read (at the most basic level) is Russian. That ability has since faded over the years so I can no longer read Russian. I can still recall some of the phrases and what they mean but I doubt I'd be able to carry on much of a conversation now without a thorough review first.
Why do I mention this? I think its because that desire to learn how to communicate hasn't gone away and I still desperately want to learn how it all works. Despite the many failures I've had to really learn another language I continue to try to learn how to better understand other people...how to connect with them.
Recently I've had the desire to understand those around me who speak Spanish, so I've decided to try again to learn their language. It's a language I've studied many times so I'm not starting from scratch, which is good. But because of how familiar it is some times I find myself thinking I know the meaning of a word or phrase when really I don't...it's just one I've heard before.
I want to be successful so I'm approaching the language learning a little differently than I have in the past, so hopefully given enough time I'll actually learn it. I'm using a variety of language learning apps to practice vocabulary and listening comprehension. I'm watching videos on Youtube, such as Hola Spanish, where the instruction is given in Spanish about Spanish grammar. I've really loved that because as I listened I've actually begun to understand what she was saying even though I only knew about a quarter of the words she was using. I highly recommend the channel to fellow Spanish learners. I've tried to incorporate the recommendations she has made--such as listening to music in Spanish, watching tv shows and movies in Spanish with Spanish subtitles, listening to audiobooks in Spanish, reading the scriptures in Spanish, and finding ways to talk to others in Spanish each day. This is the best I can do to immerse myself in the language in my current situation. And little by little I can see improvement from my efforts so far. But only time will tell if I'll be able to overcome my understanding issue enough to succeed in communicating with others in this language. I'm hoping that my desire to communicate with them will help me break through that barrier.
If any of you reading this have suggestions that may help me please leave a comment. I'd love your input especially if you've struggled with understanding others as I have.
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