Laziness and complacency are two of the most common obstacles that people face when trying to learn a new language. This will be a post taking some ideas from Dr K’s videos linked below, and it builds heavily on learning how your mind works and identifying what ‘laziness’ really means.
Laziness is the tendency to avoid doing something that requires effort, while complacency is the feeling of being satisfied with one’s current level of knowledge or skill. Both of these can be detrimental to language learning, as they can prevent you from putting in the necessary time and effort to improve.
Motivation is key to overcoming these obstacles.
However, it is very easy to gloss over these terms and thus never actually get anywhere to ‘solving’ this issue. So let’s look at what ‘laziness’ is, because identifying the cause of your lack of progress has to be one of the first steps to addressing it.
After a lot of buildup and definitions between Asmongold and Dr K (which is important to get through for the insights that Dr K brings but too long to deal with here), we get to this portion of the video 42:08.
Laziness, or the hijacking of your mind aka scumbag brain
Trying to learn a second language does require focusing of the mind, and lots of input. I’ve discussed this topic on my blog many times before, and certainly I would start with this post:
However, often you can spend minutes, hours, days, weeks, months studying a topic and it never sticks. How do you keep going? Firstly, it is to recognise that stopping studying or giving up because you ‘don’t get it’ is not the way forward.
Secondly, it is noticing that we all have that little voice in our head, telling us that it is all too hard and we’ll feel better if we give up. That voice is a scumbag, and there are good evolutionary reasons for conserving energy, which is the genesis of this voice. So all you have to do, is tell that voice to shut up, or ignore it.
Jocko has an interesting way to approach this scumbag voice and I would recommend watching this entire clip:
Once you realise that you have control over this voice and it is the sole thing in your way, you will be able to overcome it and move on with your progress towards your goal.
Intellectualising it or calling yourself lazy or whatever other reason you choose from is discussed in detail in the Asmongold video timestamped above.
Don’t get hijacked
Don’t get discouraged if you don’t see progress right away. Instead, focus on the small victories along the way and celebrate your successes. Language learning is brutal as you will not see a linear progression or a matching up of time spent studying and then understanding more. You will hit many plateaus, you will not be able to objectively see progress at all.
However, don’t then use this apparent lack of progress to buy into the self-fulfilling prophesy of ‘I don’t get this’ or ‘I’m too stupid for Japanese’ or ‘my talents lie elsewhere’.
When you’re in the zone, and feel good about your study, that is a healthy moment. However, be wary of the complacent or lazy voice telling you to not care or give up, because that’s just your scumbag brain following its system of using less sugar.
You are in control.
I hope this helps! Let me know if you have any other questions.
Reference videos from HealthyGamerGG:
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