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What I didn't know about learning a new language

Learning a new language has it's ups and downs, but sometimes you just hit a learning wall face-first and don't know how to climb it over.

For me, this came about quite recently during my 3rd year of learning Chinese.

I'm at this frustrating stage where I can read and actually understand the nuances and more subtle points, but I can't for the life of me understand normal spoken Chinese. And I don't mean the classroom kind, where the teacher speaks slowly and clearly and doesn't use idiomatic expresssions or slang. In class 我没有问题

But when I'm talking with my Chinese classmates and friends, and they're excited or passionate about something they switch into rapid-fire Chinese mode and then they look at and I'm just frozen, staring blankly at them and not having the faintest clue as to what just happened this past minute.

I should be better at this, after all I've been studying and practicing like hell, and yet.

Maybe with time I'll get better, and be able to properly participated in a conversation. Language learning is a marathon, and not a sprint as someone once said.

In the mean time, all I can do is continue to practice and to just try get over this wall of frustration. Or alternatively grab a metaphorical hammer and just smash it.