Dealing with burnouts in language learning

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Actual Fluency Podcast for language learners and aspiring polyglots, and anyone else who's interested in learning languages out there. Today the topic is on burnout. How we can identify it, how we can avoid it, and if we do suffer from a burnout, what can we do about it? I thought this would be a great topic to talk about as I have experienced it myself a few times. I'll share my own sort of story and how I dealt with it, and I'll also get into some techniques that I've learned by interviewing a lot of people, a lot of language learners, on how to overcome burnouts, and more importantly, like, why do they even happen in the first place? So, stay tuned for that in just a minute.

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So, enough blabbering about the upcoming season. Let's stay in the moment and let's talk about burnout, because let's face it, everyone suffers from burnouts. And I'm a particularly good example of burning out, because during my Russian studies, and it's coming up to about a year soon, I must have burned out about 10 times. And the reason that I say that with a very casual tone is that in my opinion, there's nothing wrong with burning out, you know, that's just what happens. Our minds have this weird defense mechanism almost where if something gets repetitive, if something gets boring, if something gets difficult, the the brain or the mind just tends to go, "Uh, I really don't want to do this anymore."

And I this is so totally subjective as well. I know some people who can just do the same thing over and over and over and never get burnt out, and I know people who do it, like me probably, do it for a month and then they burn out. And so the the idea of a burnout is so natural that that's the first thing you need to know, just take it easy, don't worry about it, it happens to everyone. And what I just said, were kind of the reasons for burnout, is that we do the same things over and over. We might push ourselves too hard, or the language that we're learning is too difficult. And that, you know, that makes sense, you know, a foreign language is difficult. But what I mean is the brain will, if you think that you're not making any progress, it's gonna sort of tempt you to stop doing what you're doing, because it's like, well, why are you doing what you're doing? It's like nothing's happening.

But most of the time we are actually improving, even though we don't actually see it. It's like if you're learning a language and you're learning vocabulary for instance, very often, at the first stages of memorization of vocabulary, you can't recall the words, but if I told you the word, you would probably know what it means. That's a sort of a stage of learning, but that's not really provable. You can't, you can't say to yourself, oh, I'm just gonna raffle off uh 100 Russian words and then that proves that I know more today than I knew yesterday. A lot of the learning that we get while we're learning languages is quite passive in a way, and it's it's one that kind of has to bubble a little bit and develop.

And one interesting example of this was over the New Year's, uh the Christmas and New Year 2014, I had to move, well, I didn't have to, but but I I I went home for Christmas. And I had a lot of work to do, uh because the work I do is a little bit seasonal, uh so that means that during the holidays, we have a we have extra work. Uh and that meant that I was so busy in December with uh also good stuff, you know, I didn't mind, but I just didn't really have time to focus on language learning. And when I came back in January, sort of mid-January, I totally felt better than the start of December. So obviously the brain is still working, even though you are not. That's a good distinction to make, and a good sort of thing to keep in mind, that even even though you might not be working, the brain is still processing, it's still learning in its own pace.

So, what you need to do, if you realize you do happen to be in a burnout, and actually let's talk a few things about how to avoid one in the first place. I personally think that it's very difficult to avoid a burnout, just because the brain and the mind is just sort of built or programmed to set up these defense mechanisms. So, for me, the way to avoid a burnout is to be realistic about yourself. Uh one of the burnouts that I had recently was I was doing a challenge. I was challenging myself to see how much Russian vocab, specifically flashcards, I could do on sort of a daily basis. And it went quite well, and I learned a lot in a very short period of time. I think I got over 1200 new vocabulary learned in a month. So that was extremely awesome, and that was very nice.

But then, when I had when I reached New Year, it was like, "Ugh, I'm so sick of flashcards. I don't want to do it anymore. I give up. This language is too hard." You just kind of sit down and cry on the street almost. I don't know if any of you guys have felt that before, but I definitely felt it. So if I had to go back and tell myself anything, it would be if you set your initial expectations or the workload way too high, then of course you're gonna burn out because you can't sustain that. I mean, that would be like a marathon runner running a marathon every day. At some point the body is just gonna give up. And that's a physical burnout, right? But also the mind, you're just like, "Ah, I can't run anymore." Um, so in that sense, it's a it's it's still a natural process. So I wouldn't worry about it in in, but try not to be too optimistic.

And this probably counts more when you first start out, start out on your, let's say, first foreign language than if you've learned 10. But one of the things you'll discover is that when you start learning a language, it's gonna be very tempting to set unrealistic goals on a daily basis. And maybe not only unrealistic goals, but also unrealistic uh expectations. So you might say, I want to do 50 new words a day on Memrise. Well, let me tell you this. I tried to do 70 a day. And that was absolute torture. Um, it's not that I hate flashcards, I like the gamification of it, but sitting and doing flashcards for three hours just to clear the queue of words that you've amassed is way too much for me. So I was just that that was too much for me.

But other people might say, "Well, I have lots of time, you know, I could do it, no worries." And then they set these unreal unrealistic goals and then they burn out, because they can't keep it up. I mean, it would be absolutely amazing if there was some kind of drug we could take that would just allow us to do, you know, three hours of language learning a day doing the same thing, you know, the high value things. But the fact of the matter is that doesn't exist yet, and so I I would say again, don't worry about it, but try to be a lot more realistic when you set your goals. And I would almost say err on the side of caution a little bit, because you can always do more. And I'm talking of course on on the goal setting or the expectations you have.

But when you start learning a language, you can always do more. But it's it's it's very it's very hard to do less because then you feel like a failure. So if I say, okay, I'm gonna do 10 Russian words a day, it's a very realistic goal, doesn't take long, and means I can do other things as well, but I'll constantly improve my vocabulary. The thing is, if I one day feel like, okay, I'm in the zone, I can do I I think I can do more today. Going up to 25 is a really, really big win for me, but if I don't manage 25 the next day, I'm not focused on the 25, I'm still focused on the 10. So the point is by setting my goal slightly lower than what I expect, I can overperform. And my brain is gonna absolutely love that, because it's like, oh my god, you achieved something out of the ordinary. You're amazing, you're a genius.

But if the other case was true, that I set my goal of let's say 35, and I only did 25, then my brain would automatically classify me as a loser, and it would take not very many times of failing in a row before the brain would simply say you're useless at language learning. So why are you doing it? And of course, these sort of brain tricks are quite annoying and devious in a way. It's like the brain is trying to sabotage us. Uh and depending on your willpower and your personality, those signals from the brain might be stronger or weaker. For me, my brain is always challenging what I'm doing, and that's why I probably suffer more burnouts from uh than anyone else.

But the fact of the matter is, the only way you can fail in language learning is by giving up. And I don't just mean a single language, but if your ambition is to learn 10 languages in 10 years, like mine, then the only way to fail that is to give up. I know that 10 languages in 10 years, there's also a a risk of not making the deadline. But I I strongly believe that by the more language you learn, the better you get at learning and understanding your own learner profile. So I think actually 10 10 languages in 10 years is quite a generous amount of time, particularly because the languages I tend to learn are related to my own languages. You know, I'm not gonna go from Russian to Chinese to I don't even know, you know, something completely unrelated to any language I've studied. Um, not because I don't find it interesting, it's just because my goals are based on sort of where I expect to be.

And I'm I I must say I'm probably European by heart. So European languages, often Romance languages, will be my focus. And I honestly believe that just judged from, you know, other language learners and the fact that they share so many words, they share grammar structures. I honestly believe that learning something like Dutch for a native English speaker like myself, who also has knowledge of German and Danish and um well, Russian, I don't know how much help that is, but Um Esperanto, maybe a little bit. I honestly think that that can be learned in no time. So so when you say 10 languages in 10 years, it's actually it actually sounds like a very ambitious goal. But when you factor in that you get better as you go along, and the fact that the languages are related to the languages you are learning, generally, then I find that that goal is actually quite realistic. Some might even say it's a little bit uh careful. But that's going with what I what I said before is um is my goal to be a little bit more careful, and then I can always overperform. Like, if I end up learning 12 languages in 10 years, I'll be over the moon. But I don't wanna set that goal to start with, because then I'll only set myself up for burnout down the road or, you know, losing interest because I feel like it's too far away.

So, we talked about how to why they happen and how we can prevent them from happening. But the more one of the more interesting things is probably identifying a burnout, because um you might never experience one and in in that case I, you know, I I I salute you because I definitely have. And by by knowing what to look for, particularly signals, we can sort of revert the process and beat burnout. And this is how it works. When the body is entering the pre-burnout stage. And none of these terms I say are scientific or anything, it's just me coming up with them. Um, but once the body is getting close to a burnout or nearing the process of one, it's gonna send out some signals that will demonstrate to you that you need to change something. And they might not be very obvious.

For me as an example, if I have a goal of doing a lot of flashcards and I start I suddenly stop, start losing the interest in flashcards, then I know that unless I change what I'm doing, I'm gonna lose the interest altogether, because the like I said, the brain gets defensive, and when the brain gets defensive, it's very hard to overcome. Let me give you an analogy from the real world, the real world. As if the language learning world isn't real. No. What I mean is, let me give you an example from the outside uh the language learning world. Weight loss or dieting. The thing is, every time you eat right, it takes a certain amount of willpower. Like, every time you take that salad instead of a pizza, it costs willpower. And at some stage, unless you really, really make sure that you mix it up and that you don't do the same thing every day, you know, you're gonna get to a point where the brain is just gonna start convincing you that you need that pizza. Or you don't need to go to the gym that day.

And and you might be like, oh, I can do one day. The problem is, once you start saying no to things that you should be saying yes to or vice versa, you're eating away your willpower. And when there's no more willpower left, that's when you got a full-blown burnout, and that's when you give up. Usually. I mean, I know you guys listening out there are fantastic language learners and you probably never give up. But a lot of people do. A lot of people will say, I really want to learn French, I really want to learn Spanish. They buy the books, they buy the Rosetta Stone or whatever. It doesn't really matter what they go out and get. And then they do it for three weeks, get bored, burn out, never return to the language again.

And some of you guys out there who learn a lot of languages might feel that the burnout comes on a per-language basis. So you might feel like, oh, I studied German for three weeks, then I got bored with it, so I switched to uh French, and then I got bored with that, so I switched to Serbian or something. And you know, I really dislike this switching too much between languages. I think you need to be really a very organized person to be able to study multiple languages at once. And I know some some of you guys out there are really talented at that. I just want to present the opinion that I think it's better to focus on one at a time, because then you can sort of, you can get further in the same amount of time, and you can get to a useful stage in the language quicker. And that means that the brain is going to accept, oh yeah, it it does seem useful that you're learning Russian.

And for me, that process took a long time. You know, when I started learning Russian, I I didn't know what I was doing, I had to find out everything. I had to reinvent my entire personality in a language learner profile. And I just didn't feel like studying because I I I I couldn't see, first of all, what was I gonna use it for? And second of all, I couldn't understand anything, so what was the point? And it took me, I'm not kidding, it it took me more than half a year to be able to understand basic things enough for my brain to say, hm, okay, I see you're starting to get something with this. And that's another mental point is that you need to get over the hump. Like when you first start learning a language, you're not going to understand anything unless of course it's very related to one of your other languages.

But by the time you get to that hump, everything else is so much easier. Like, when you can start to express yourself in that language, it everything that you have to learn from there gets easier because you understand how it works. But also, it gets easier because the brain is convinced that, ah, okay, so it does make sense that you're doing this, and there is a purpose to it, and you are improving. So, that's a very tough point. And I had to really battle with it in the beginning with Russian. I really, really had to battle, and I was also, you know, when you're just a new learner, you just don't know what you're gonna do. So now I have a much stronger feeling of what to do. So I expect my my next language, once I get to it, I'll be a lot more focused in the beginning.

Whereas with Russian, I am not kidding if I say that I probably did almost nothing for the first six months. And I don't know about, you know, I'm not trying to set records or anything or pretend that I'm a good student, but I have really, really good conversations with my tutor now where she understands me and I can speak almost uh freely about most topics. So, you know, and that's only by the time of recording this, that's only about 10, 11 months into the whole process. So if I say that I learned 95% of what I can speak now in Russian in the last four or five months, then you see how how the exponential process works. And we have to grind ourselves through the first phase, and never give up. And don't change language either, you know.

If I changed my language after four months, I bet you I could not say a single thing. I could probably say, hi, or how are you doing? And then answer that with okay, or good. And that would be it. But because I persevered, I now am able to speak and understand quite well. I'm actually at a point now where I can look at a Russian TV series where they speak really fast and get the gist of it enough to not be bored by it. That's a huge step up because now I can watch native material, get the hearing and then slowly begin to understand native-level speech, and that's huge. And I'm not saying all these things to brag. If you know anything about me, you know that I'm the worst student in the world. So what I'm trying to say is never give up, and when you hit a burnout, you need to be creative with how to proceed.

And so far we talked about why burnouts happen, and we've talked about how to identify them, and I talked a little bit about the general mental state that's required to learn languages in my opinion. And I guess the the the third and final point about burnouts is how what do we do when they do happen? I mean, we've talked about preventing them, but they are they are gonna come no matter what. So what can we do when the burnouts happen to make sure that we don't quit learning something? I think the first point is to don't stress out. And I know I've said don't worry quite a lot uh in this uh in this episode. But what we need to do is realize that it happens. We've done that, so we're anticipating the burnout, which means they're less likely to happen in the first place.

The second thing is, we need to mix it up. So if you're a type who does flashcards a lot and you really enjoy that, that doesn't mean you're not gonna get burned out if you only do that for a, let's say, months and months. So if you feel like, ah, I'm not feeling like doing flashcards today, that's your warning sign that a burnout might be uh coming. And then you need to start looking at other methods you can learn. That this could probably be a great time to find a tutor on iTalki, or maybe listen to some podcasts, or anything you can do that you feel is still worth desk time. Because it's also a very easy, it's also very easy for us language learners to sort of just sit and watch a film or something, and we don't understand anything, and we still equate it with study time doing flashcards and shadowing or reading or anything, or looking up in a dictionary, reading a grammar book.

And I I wanna I think you should make a distinction there between enjoying and studying. And if you're not enjoying it, and if you're not studying it, then I would probably not do it. Like watching a Russian movie six months ago where I couldn't understand anything, that is not studying, and I wouldn't enjoy it, because I would get bored because I had no clue what was going on. So, the point is, once you feel the burnout coming, try to mix up your language learning routine. So if you're doing flashcards all the time, try to do some uh listen to some lessons, maybe, some RussianPod lessons, they're quite nice. Uh read something, try to do some grammar exercises, try to learn about affixes, try to translate some, try to write some, try to find someone to communicate with, get tutoring lessons, in what I'm basically trying to say is mix it up so you don't so you're not doing the same thing all the time, because the other method or the method that you're not doing is always gonna feel more refreshing than the one you were doing.

It's kind of like, you know, when you're, you know, the grass is always greener on the other side. Obviously it's not true, there's no, like, for instance, for the methods of learning a language, there are no perfect answers, there are no this is better than that. My, in my opinion, the best method to learn a language is the one that you enjoy the most. Because if you enjoy doing something a lot, then you can put in a lot of hours, and that's way more important than being able to learn a language fast. Like if there was some kind of scale that measured efficiency of a language learning method, and you had method A was really fast at learning a language, but also very boring, then it would be very hard to put in hours in it. So then I would just say, well, why don't you just do something you really enjoy, and that will allow you to spend more hours doing it. And of course, even if it is slower, what does it matter, you know.

People are like, yeah, I need to get fluent in three months, and while I appreciate the concept, I think for most of us, definitely for me, it's not very realistic. I'd much rather take my time. And also with the brain, like I talked about earlier, the brain is learning all the time. So if you take an extended time learning a language, the brain is gonna figure out things on its own, which is very powerful. Uh, I I still really enjoy the Fluency in 3 Months concept, and I really enjoy the concept of how fast can we learn a language. But I think for us, let's say, quote-unquote normal language learners sitting at at home just interested in learning languages, the better is what method can we pick that is allows us to put in the most hours without getting bored and without getting burned out as well.

So, once you hit that burnout stage, try to mix it up. And, you know, it doesn't really matter what you do, as long as you do something. Like one of my, I think, success lessons I've learned over the the interviewing sort of 40 successful language learners is that as long as you do something every day, you're always improving. You might not improve as fast as you would have liked, but you're sticking to it, and you're not giving up. So that's that's how you can combat the burnout once it happens.

Now, there will be times where the burnout is so strong that it's impossible to get any constructive work done. My suggestion here is once again defaulting to tutoring or language exchange if you prefer that. I really don't like language exchanges because it's kind of like a 50/50, you know, you you teach me English, I teach you Russian or whatever. And I just think it's better for everyone's time if I just spend a little money on hiring someone who's completely devoted to me. Uh it's not because I don't wanna help other people learn English, it's just there's always this problem of, oh, you helped me 25 minutes and I only got, you know, 15 minutes back or something. And I I just find it silly. So, you know, it's my learning, I I prefer a tutor.

The reason I recommend a tutor is not so much the contents of the lessons, but during a burnout, one of the hard things for you as a as a learner is to actually do stuff on your own. Uh finding the motivation to do your stuff. And what I've found is that by having regular tutoring lessons, let's say twice a week, even if they're only half an hour, I find that they really boost motivation to work during the week, because you wanna be better at the next tutoring session. Or if you look at it from a different perspective, the tutoring is sort of a forced learning because you've you've paid for it, which is motivation. There's some other person showing up, which is motivation. You can't just let them down and be awful. And you've scheduled it in your calendar, so, yeah, you can still cancel, but that takes a lot of, I mean, you would be have to be significantly burned out to cancel lessons.

Uh it happens, it definitely happens, you know. Right now there's the iTalki Challenge going on. Oh yeah, by the way, I should probably mention that. Uh the iTalki Challenge is uh you have until uh the 31st of January to sign up. 31st of January 2015. So, you can still sign up. But what I wanted to say is, oh yeah, actualfluency.com/challenge to find the sign up page. But what I wanted to say is that right now I'm doing a lot of tutoring, way more than I've ever done before, and it's starting to, I'm starting to get bored with it. Uh but because it's another person sitting there, and because I'm asking the teacher to mix up the contents of the lessons, just because they're forced lessons mean that I still do them, I still get it done, and it doesn't require a lot of motivation or willpower compared to opening up, let's say, a grammar book and studying that, or reading a text while looking up every other word, or any of these exercises that I also could be doing. So instead I'm just relying on my tutor to sort of be my motivation. And it helps a lot.

But I would still say that doing daily tutoring sessions is a bit of an overkill for me. I I I would say every other day is is fine, or just twice a week is also fine. Um, like I said, I I realized over Christmas that the brain is always working. So it's not about necessarily how often you can get tutoring, it's also how meaningful they are, and if you have tutoring sessions every day, it might be hard for the brain to have, you know, time to sort of consider what you've learned or, you know, process. But I think that is probably more anecdotal than anything else. I think it's definitely as much tutoring, as much as much uh work of the language or as much input you can get from the language, or even output as well, the better you'll be in it. I mean, it's quite obvious, it's a it's a one to one relationship, the more you put in, the more you get out. Um, so in that sense, it's not like I'm gonna speak against tutoring uh on a daily basis, but for me, it's starting to get a little uh not boring, but I can feel that kind of burnout feeling that I was mentioning earlier.

So, for me, it's about mixing up the lessons, which is also one of the things I talked about. So instead of just uh talking to my tutor about the wind and the, yeah, the weather and what's been going on in my life, we started watching a Russian TV series and every week I or every lesson, I explain what what I understood from the episode. And this is actually a fantastic method, and I would highly recommend it if you're getting tutoring. Try to do that with your tutor, because one of the most important things when you get to that middle stage of a learning a language where you start to understand native material is that you need to consume native material. But it's very hard to consume when you don't understand much. Uh, but I find that my tutor when my tutor asks questions, she's like, um, who was that person there, or why was he mad or something like that. Asking three questions on a 15-minute clip really allows me to watch the series because I'm looking out for things. It's like a detective mission. I'm not just sitting there just listening to Russian, you know. So for me, that that would be the top, you know, mix it up with the get a tutor.

And then the absolutely final point of dealing with a burnout is take a break. And it's controversial because the risk of taking a break is that you never return. But I feel like by saying taking a break, you're already kind of preparing your brain to return at some point. And I've taken some really serious breaks where I was really evaluating, am I doing the right thing? Should I be doing this? Why am I doing this? You know, questioning my existence even. You know, and then I think I think the biggest break I took was probably in the beginning of learning Russian. Probably I I got started, you know, the honeymoon period where it's just, oh, everything's so exciting, I learned so much. And then after a month or something, I probably was like, hm, it's so boring, I can't remember anything, and then I just took a time off.

But I knew because I had blogged about it that I had to learn Russian, I wanted to learn it, and I was not falling for the tricks of my mind. So, after I guess a few weeks I came back, and I was a lot more motivated. But like I mentioned earlier, it took me almost eight months to get started properly learning it. So, you know, don't worry about it, and learn at your own pace. And if you really can't stand the language or learning it, just take a break. And you'll find that you'll be so refreshed about it, and you'll really be excited about it again, and you just want to get back to learning it.

You can also, I mean, there's a step between mixing it up and giving up, sorry, not giving up, taking a break, and you can where you can go into sort of a lazy phase. And I think that's totally that's totally legit as well. Like if you were doing a lot of active stuff like learning grammar, flashcards, or anything, you can change to a more passive learning where you just listen to podcasts like RussianPod101 or you watch TV shows, listen to music. It's not really studying, and you don't get a lot out of it, but you're still being exposed to the language while recharging your batteries for learning, like really putting in that learning period. So that's a something you can do before taking the full break is you can just go passive, and maybe even talk to people if that's possible. That's also good. But taking the break really can help.

And the final thing I wanted to say is, if you after have taken a significant break, don't feel like learning the language again, then I would probably have to question if you really want to learn it. And there is a point where any amount of motivation, any amount of inspiration, any amount of self-help, any amount of tips and tricks and mind hacks and efficiency hacks and everything. There is a point that if you decide, maybe inadvertently, that you just don't want to learn the language, at some point there's just nothing to be done. You just can't do it. So you have to have a basic motivation of wanting to do it.

And if you realize after a break that, I'm just not excited about Swedish or Zulu or whatever, then maybe that language is just not for you, and you haven't found that language that excites you enough to keep going. Because like I said in the beginning, the only way you can fail learning a language is by not learning it anymore, is by stopping. So, if you don't feel like studying it, and you don't really get excited by it, then you should probably just find whatever language you do get excited about, you know, find that language that you really like the sound of, find that language your grandmother still speaks, or, you know, find that language that has personal meaning for you.

And I I I find it really hard to advise somebody giving up, and it really it really should be a really last resort. You shouldn't be thinking, you know, once you hit the wall after a few months, you shouldn't be thinking, oh, I can't do Russian, I don't want to do it. You know, don't be fooled by the brain trying to tell you to stop. You need to be, you need to have been on the language for a long time, and hit by that burnout phase, and then decided to take a break, and then not get excited about coming back. After all that is the only time I would consider switching languages. And even then, I would still be very concerned. So don't make this decision lightly.

It will take time, it's hard to learn a language, but once you get over the hump, it's fantastic. Every time I I go to a tutoring session now, I learn something new, I use new words, my tutor is impressed. And yeah, it's easy to be impressed when, you know, you you couldn't speak a word uh three months ago, but it's for a from a personal point of view, it's just so satisfying. And I would never have made it to this very awesome satisfying point if I hadn't fought through the very, very hard early stages where I couldn't say a word. So, yeah, there will be a point where you should consider if the language is really for you. But I want to really, really, really emphasize that it shouldn't be it shouldn't be your first decision, and you should really, you should really fight against that decision, I would say, you know.

And try not to switch between languages as well. I don't feel that helps anyone, because it's the thing is once you reach a comfortable level in a language, like a B1, B2, and you can communicate without using English or, well, being too slow, you can you can start on a new language on a basic level. That that would be my kind of idea about it. But if you start two languages at once, I mean, you know what happens when you try going in two, I mean, just imagine yourself trying to go two different ways at the same time. I mean, it's just not possible, you're not gonna get anywhere. So my suggestion and my philosophy will always be to focus on one language, and you know, it's a general success concept as well.

I read it in I read a lot of sort of success books and inspirational books and one of the things that they constantly mention is focus, focus, focus. Like, focus on that one thing, and you will see amazing results. If you drift between five different languages, you're just not gonna you're not gonna see the real enjoyment at the end of the hump. You know, that when you hit that wall and you get over the other side, that's when you start enjoying it. I mean, I'm only speaking from a personal point of view here. I know some people are really interested in learning a little bit of every language, but for me, I would just recommend try not to because it gives you a way it gives you a distraction.

Like we're trying to avoid burning out here, and if you just, if your mind knows that when you get bored or burned out with a language, you can just switch to another one, then the mind is gonna see that as a as an easy way out every single time you get to something that's challenging, or something that's uh you know, hard to do. But the way life works, uh unfortunately, is that those hard things and those challenging things are what develop you the most, and this is transferable to any part of life, but it's especially important for language learners.

So that was what I had today about burnouts, and it's an it's an important topic for me, because it's something that I routinely struggle with. But I hope that you could use some of the tips and tricks that I offered you today. And if you have any experiences or share some of your tips of your own for avoiding or dealing with a burnout, I'd be happy to read them on actualfluency.com/47, as this is episode number 47. So I'll be looking out for that and don't forget the Actual Fluency Season 2 Crowdfund at AFpodcast.com. You can see at the top, go and claim those uh nice rewards. And I will see you in the next episode.