{"id":3842,"date":"2016-03-05T08:50:49","date_gmt":"2016-03-05T13:50:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/payton-downing\/?p=3842"},"modified":"2016-03-23T16:33:52","modified_gmt":"2016-03-23T21:33:52","slug":"learning-language-is-like","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/payton-downing\/2016\/03\/05\/learning-language-is-like\/","title":{"rendered":"Learning Language is like…"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Payton Downing<\/em><\/p>\n

\"DSC02612_800x533\"<\/a><\/p>\n

There’s two things I’m new at: language learning and beginning\u00a0a retirement account.\u00a0Funny enough,\u00a0these two things have\u00a0some striking\u00a0parallels\u00a0that\u00a0are worth musing over for a moment:<\/p>\n

Amusement\u00a0One: Both need consistent inflow for anything substantial to happen. I’m sure your somewhat familiar with the retirement graph that shows\u00a0a\u00a0line that progressively get’s steeper and steeper as years go on. There’s not much growth in the former years because there is less to work with, but in good time, with consistent investment, the money compounds upon itself and increases at a quicker rate in the latter years. But if it’s only added to “a little here, a little there,” then it really doesn’t go far and you’ll be ill-equipped for the years down the line.\"compound<\/p>\n

It’s almost been a year for us here in Asia Pacific and we’ve been learning language and culture full-time. The first few months there has been a lot of inflow with very little return. But as time goes on, still maintaining that steady inflow of study, we have been seeing more of that “compounding interest” principle at play. Just as much investment of time and energy\u00a0is necessary, but it seems like it yields more and more as time goes on and we get more and more in return for\u00a0what we put in.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Amusement\u00a0two: Sometimes retirement accounts and language ability doesn’t preform as well as we would like. I’m pretty sure we actually lost a bit of money this last year with our retirement account. Though this happens, there is still overall progress in the life of the account (this is the norm anyway… nevermind the 2008 stock market crash). There are definitely those days were I think to myself, or even worse, whine\u00a0to Grace (poor Grace), “Am I even making progress!?” On those days there’s a loss of everything I know of Bahasa and I can’t even string\u00a0two \"depressedwords together. Those tend to be fairly quiet days, as though I were a mute… filled with pointing to things, miming, and doing my own version of sign language. Ok, that’s a little dramatic, but you get the picture– there’s regression. Those days are present, but thankfully fewer rather than many.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Language
A representation of all our sessions with language helpers in 2015 (Approx 120)… not including classes at our language school.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The parallels\u00a0could go on, but I’m sure they’d get quite silly. So in the meantime we’ll be putting in that steady investment into learning language and culture. And rather than trusting time as the golden key to making progress, we must rather look to\u00a0“God who gives the increase.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Payton Downing There’s two things I’m new at: language learning and beginning\u00a0a retirement account.\u00a0Funny enough,\u00a0these two things have\u00a0some striking\u00a0parallels\u00a0that\u00a0are worth musing over for a moment: Amusement\u00a0One: Both need consistent inflow for anything substantial to happen. I’m sure your somewhat familiar with the retirement graph that shows\u00a0a\u00a0line that progressively get’s steeper and steeper as years […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1068,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[448,637],"class_list":["post-3842","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-uncategorized","tag-ethnos360","tag-new-tribes-mission","entry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/payton-downing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3842","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/payton-downing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/payton-downing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/payton-downing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1068"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/payton-downing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3842"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/payton-downing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3842\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/payton-downing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3842"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/payton-downing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3842"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/payton-downing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3842"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}