Grab a seat. Let me tell you a short story.

So I took up a challenge to learn Hausa and my target was to reach the A2 level ( a level where I would be able to understand basic sentences and interact with people) During this time, I was self-teaching French and thought I could add Hausa. Oshey! JAGABAN. lol!

You can already guess what happened… It didn’t work out. I couldn’t reach my target as I was only able to learn basic greetings and vocabulary.

It got me so depressed. I wasn’t doing so well in Hausa because I couldn’t get sufficient Hausa learning resources. And as for French, I soon started to forget all that I had learnt. Determined to learn Hausa, I shoved French aside completely. But that still didn’t solve the problem of having no resources.

August became such a drab. No blogging and no language-learning because I kept wallowing in self pity. Then one morning, I realized that I had learnt some lessons from my failed attempt to learn Hausa and French. Here are some lessons I learnt.

• It’s possible for a well thought out plan to fail. Things aren’t meant to work out so perfectly all the time. So we shouldn’t beat ourselves up when they don’t, we should rather change our method of execution or move on to something else.
• The right way to multi-task is by combining a difficult task with a very easy one. Combining two difficult tasks (in my case- learning two new languages at the same time) isn’t a very smart thing to do.
• Get rid of ANYTHING causing mental stress. Let me reiterate that. Avoid, take away, delete, remove anything that causes you mental stress. You can take a break if something you really want to do isn’t just working. And if putting an end to it restores your sanity and peace, END IT!

Want to know what I did with these lessons I learnt? I closed the Hausa chapter and continued to learn French. I designed a language routine and I am steadily following it to reach my goal. Has it been awesome? Totally!

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Remember, we can all be polyglots!