No one is coming
Taking control of your education
Welcome, aspiring polyglot! An interesting piece of growing up is learning that adults by and large do not know what they are doing. As a kid, when you think about how things will be when you become an adult, it is easy to believe that everyone knows what they are doing and that everything runs smoothly. Unfortunately, that is rarely the case and so it is necessary that you learn to take care of yourself. Some people will be glad to help you along the way, but you must rely on yourself to implement everything with consistency.
No one is coming to save you
What should happen and what does happen are often different things and that could not be clearer than it is in the public education system. In theory, adding more systems and higher education standards would lead to higher quality education. In practice, literacy rates are plummeting, more people have disdain for the process of learning a second language than speak a second language. Education standards are dropping which means you have to pick up the slack.
With the advent of AI and the rapidity with its advancement, more people than ever before are going to be outsourcing their thinking. Choosing to read physical media, write things down, and work on skills that can be done instantaneously through the use of AI will separate the best from the rest in the coming years. While a helpful tool and something that can and should be used to advance your learning, the more you use AI to outsource your thinking, the more difficult thinking will become.
Things are already bad within the school systems. The reports are vast and the data are concerning. Already plummeting literacy and numeracy rates are about to be amplified by the implementation of tech in the classroom. Discipline has always been a pillar of education, but that is only becoming more true as technology progresses. Since you cannot rely on adults to resolve these problems, you must do it for yourself.
The consequences of waiting
The best time to start is always now. Tomorrow never really comes and waiting really only hurts you. Complacency causes problems in al things and that is especially true with education. I know that the majority of those reading this are adults, and that is who this message is really for at the end of the day. Continued education as an adult is something admirable, but it should be standard. One of the best part of class is that I get to learn a lot alongside my students.
One of the most common reasons for people to not learn something, be it a language or another skill, is that they wish they would have done it when they were younger. It isn’t people who are 70+ saying this either. It’s often people in their forties and fifties. Personally, I don’t want to spend twenty to forty years saying “I wish I had done it when I was younger”. You are today, at this very moment as you read this, as young as you will ever be again.
Waiting any longer to try out that new skill, take that risk, and learn that language only fulfills the prophecy that you are now, in fact, too old to do those things. Even if you spent years or even decades saying you were already too old to try. As sad as it is, this problem is compounded by the fact that AI is being used more and more to replace conscious thought. Once you start down that road it is easy to spiral and difficult to climb back out.
At the same time that all of this is happening, competition has never been as fierce nor as global as it is today. Where you were once competing against your neighbors for jobs, schools, resources, and power, now you must compete with the entire world. Good or bad is irrelevant, the competition is there and over 50% of the global population is bilingual. Translation devices are cool, but they miss the point to a large degree.
If you are in a meeting trying to close a deal with an international client. You don’t speak the same language, but the translation team and your product are top notch. Your competitor has a slightly worse product, but speaks the same language as your prospective client. Nine times out of ten, the person walking away with the deal is the competitor. Language is more than language. That is why outsourcing to a robot is so dangerous for the average language learner.
How to take control
With that, here are some ways that you can go about taking control of your education and taking back the drivers seat for your future:
Set deadlines
Since no one is going to be grading the work you put into improving your life, it is up to you to determine what is a passing grade and what qualifies as exceeding expectations. Without deadlines on these goals you risk missing out on milestones and opportunities for evaluation that are invaluable in your education.
Determine worthwhile goals
The reason I mention grades above is because your deadlines are meaningless without goals, as your goals are without deadlines. Too many people approach language as fluency or failure and that is not a healthy nor appropriate way to view second language acquisition. There will come a point in your journey, and it will endure for several months if not years, where you are perfectly capable of expressing yourself and understanding what is said to you without feeling fluent.
Fluency is not only too general of a goal, but it is also too arbitrary. Without something specific, something concrete, to hold onto, learning as an adult can feel like a complete waste of time and it is crucial that you avoid falling into that trap. Setting small, short term, long term, and stretch goals is great, but they must be attainable in order to serve their purpose.
Following your interests
Once you have your goals and timelines sorted, it’s time to find the content or the comprehensible input as it is often referred to within language acquisition. As a quick aside, this format will set you up for success in learning irrespective of the subject, I just happen to love languages. The first thing you have to do is go to reverso.com, type in what you might search in English in a YouTube or Google search bar, translate it to your language of choice, and copy/paste into the search bar.
If you need help hunting down resources for your language acquisition, please don’t hesitate to reach out and I will see what I can do. As your skills improve, this becomes an exercise in and of itself where you can pick and choose who you want to follow along with and who is not really to your taste. With languages, music is always an option too and, personally, that is probably my favorite form of comprehensible input and passive exposure.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, no one is going to care about your education and your future as much as you do. Therefore, no one will go to the lengths that you might to ensure you have the best of everything. This goes doubly for your children, if you have them. No one is coming to save you and AI is coming, not for your job, but for your ability to think. Choosing to fight against the grain and learn valuable skills will become a differentiator sooner than later.
Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on your frame, doing hard things, it turns out, is difficult. Choosing to take control over your education and reclaim power over your brain and conscious thoughts is not the easy path. However, it is well worthwhile. In 10 years I don’t want you to say, “I wish I would have done x when I was younger”. Learning new skills is difficult, but you can do difficult things and be great. So get to doing some difficult things and become great.
Requests
If you have anything you would like covered you can reach out to me on X, Instagram, or at odin@secondlanguagestrategies.com.
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