Learning a foreign language is probably one of the most frustrating aspects of education. I don't mean that it's not interesting or important or totally and completely cool, because it is. But I feel like there's a reason that people find it so hard to learn a foreign language. Sure, you could attribute it to mental development and the difficulties of absorbing language after a certain age. You could say that some languages are harder for certain people to learn than others. But at the end of the day, it all comes down to patience.
The problem is, there's this gap of so many years between when you first start to learn a language and when you can actually express yourself to the full capacity of your own intelligence in that language. The problem is not that people can't learn languages. The problem is that people aren't persistent enough for long enough to bridge that gap.
Thus, when my professor asks me to write 25 sentences in Russian about Anton Chekhov, I spend longer trying to figure out what I'm capable of saying than actually writing. And then I quit and eat peanut butter cookies, because I get impatient with being incapable of communicating what I know. So, I stay monolingual. Yeah...
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