Today we released an episode for Living in Greek (Zῶν Ἑλληνιστί) on the ProveText podcast where I discuss surviving burnout in language learning, though I believe it is applicable to most any discipline you could engage in. If you have ever found yourself struggling with burnout or have struggled to prioritize the hard things in life that you know are important, I would encourage you to check out this episode.

Below I share the episode Video and a transcript (generated by our recording platform) if you would prefer to read.

ProveText Episode 1356

Transcript

Note: this transcript was extracted and the section titles were generated using AI.

Understanding Language Learning Burnout

Jesse Orloff (00:01.58)
Hello everyone, I’m Jesse Orloff and this is Living in Greek. Today I’m wanting to take an episode here and talk about language learning burnout. I have been going through a period I think of language learning burnout or

maybe just a lack of intensity or lack of energy for a little while. And I’ve noticed that a few of those around me have as well. And as we’ve been discussing this, there’s been a few things that we’ve kind of realized and a few things I’ve thought about that I think might be helpful for other individuals who get themselves in a rut or feeling a little bit burned out, whether that’s in language learning or

Just about anything. So I started feeling a little bit burnt out in my language learning at the beginning of summer. Summer can be a downtime. And what I found was that my burnout didn’t really feel like it was getting better, even as summer started wrapping up. And I had some realizations that I’d changed some priorities in my life.

and what I was experiencing as burnout maybe was simply kind of the result of some of the decisions that I’ve made. so I wanted to just remind and express to all of you something that you probably all know, and that’s that language learning takes consistency over time.

And in my experience, language learning, not only does it take consistency over time, but it usually is accompanied with spikes of heightened intensity for various periods throughout the learning process. You often see spikes in the beginning, but as you continue over the years, I’ve experienced that there are different periods that

Jesse Orloff (02:26.67)
I’m just more intense and other periods where I’m less intense. And I think this last period has been one of the least intense periods I’ve had. And I think that’s OK. And I’ll walk through. I’ll walk through a little bit of of my own experience here. So I’ve been doing Greek now, learning Greek for a

about four years, I think, if I’m doing the math right, I started in at beginning of 2021. And in the beginning, was fairly intense in my learning. And really, I feel like I’ve maintained a pretty high level of intensity for about three and a half years. So much so that I started developing habits, which I’ve talked about on this podcast of

reading and doing Anki flashcards and listening and and I would push and push on those habits even through other down times in my life like for instance I think I had COVID twice in that period and I had my hip replaced and it was really important to me not to get off track and to lose progress so I continued my reading and my

and my Anki even through that. But to be honest, I managed those times by finding ways to reduce the load and Anki and to not have a huge reading burden. So even during those times, I would find ways to manage the load. And so I think it’s really important that everyone learns to manage

the intensity levels in your life based on the priorities, based on the priorities that you have in your life. So in order to do that, I think it’s really important first that you discover what high intensity and low intensity look like for you. Everyone’s going to be different. Everyone has different energy levels. Everyone has different priorities and different goals, different circumstances in their life, but you need to find what

Jesse Orloff (04:53.034)
What does it look like when you’re all in on something? And what does it look like when, you know, you’re, kind of teetering around the edges. And if you can understand that about yourself, it will help you to be intentional and managing, managing your priorities and managing your burnout as you progress through, through language learning and through any, any discipline that you expect to have for a long.

time. I’d also say it’s really important that you have clear, attainable goals and a plan to get to those goals for your language learning process.

Jesse Orloff (05:36.871)
If you don’t have a vision for kind of what you want out of the language, it’s going to be hard to know what it’s going to take to get there, when it’s okay to let off the gas, when you need to push down on the gas and really get intense. So I’d encourage you as you’re stepping in, whether you’re stepping into language learning for, you know, for the first time,

or you’re getting back into it or you’ve been consistent for a while and you’re watching this because you’re starting to feel some burnout yourself, make sure that you know what your next goals are. I’m not saying that you have to decide what your final goals are. I want to be 100 % fluent and able to converse at the level of a native speaker. That’s one that may be unattainable.

depending on the language that you’re in and your opportunity. just having a few checkpoints along the way is going to help you to understand what you need to do. along those lines, I would encourage you to be prepared to make language learning a priority for a season to get yourself to some of your early goal levels. Ultimately,

you want to get to a maybe I would say I would recommend in Greek getting to at least an intermediate level before you decide to let off the gas. So I would encourage you to prioritize making time in your schedule and and really dedicating yourself to the process until you can get to an intermediate level. And what would I define as an intermediate level? Well, I think there’s a lot of different ways you can define define that.

Managing Intensity in Language Learning

So I’m just going to throw out a couple of things I think make you an intermediate level in the language. And what I would say is that you probably have a vocabulary of around a thousand words. And you are probably familiar with all of the basic morphology of the language. And you can probably read, verbalize the language.

Jesse Orloff (08:01.58)
fairly well through regular practice. And I think that would look like you’ve probably established some consistent personal reading patterns. I think that that would, like that to me, is a relatively safe goal mark for an intermediate level. A thousand words is attainable. It might feel like a lot, especially in the beginning.

But it is attainable. It’s something that you can attain probably within a year or a year and a half of a focus study and learning all the basic morphology is as well, whether that’s through a book like Basics of Biblical Greek by Mounce or through one of the many other grammars that are out there. If you can get to an intermediate level,

then you kind of have the core basics. And then I feel like at that point, you definitely have something worth preserving if you find yourself getting burnt out or into a down period. set some goals, shoot for getting to some of those goals, that’s going to help you maintain in the long run because it will

You know, don’t want to lose what you’ve worked so hard for. So I would also encourage you, you know, be honest with what’s important, what’s important in your life. And, you know, for those of us getting into getting into Greek, most of us probably are getting into Greek because we want to read the word of God at a deeper level. We want to know God better. And so for us,

Greek is important and it has the potential for, you know, a valuable payoff if we stick with it. But Greek is one important thing amongst a life full of other important things. And, you know, I have children, I’m married, you know, I have bills and a job that has nothing to do with Greek. And so there are a lot of different important things in my life.

Jesse Orloff (10:29.43)
There are a lot of different important things in your life and you need to understand what those things are because that’s going to help you prioritize. But I want to encourage you to be careful not to forget the long term. Sometimes things will come up in our life and they will be urgent and that urgency gives us the feeling of importance. But urgency and importance are not the same thing. And that’s not an original thought to me. You know, there’s there’s a lot of, you know,

business, productivity books that you can read that will talk about managing the urgent and the important. And I would encourage you to remember when you are faced with the urgent that the long term important things that aren’t necessarily, you know, barking at your feet to get attention are really important and you need to pay attention. You need to manage those well. Language learning takes

to get really, really good at a language takes years of consistent practice and study. And it doesn’t, you you don’t have to push all of those years into one year in terms of intensity level. There are periods of intensity that you want to have that help to accelerate you, but have a long-term mindset.

You know, if you don’t feel like you’re particularly strong at the language or or whatever right now, keep looking to your goal and keep preaching to yourself. It doesn’t matter if I’m not where I want to be today. If I take the little steps today and I take them tomorrow and I take them the next day, I will get to the place where I want to be. Also, think about where you’re spending your time.

you know, there’s, there are those obvious and urgent things that come up, but if we’re honest, you know, there’s a lot of things in our modern world that are distracting and, and not useful. What I want to say really loudly and clearly is rest is important. And we, you know, obviously we all need sleep and, and that’s really important, but we, we also need to find what activities.

Jesse Orloff (12:55.348)
are those that refresh us. And when you’re prioritizing, don’t cut rest out. Cut out the junk that we do when we’re not thinking that really isn’t restful, that really isn’t encouraging, that really isn’t building us up. And make sure that you preserve those things that are really restful. So, all of this being said, you might find yourself

in a period where you are either feeling burnt out or other priorities are coming up in your life and you need to deprioritize your language study. So what do do when that’s the case? What I would encourage you to do is to make sure even when you deprioritize that you keep a foot in the door. So how do you do that?

Maintaining Engagement During Downtime

So I think the way some of the things you need to do that is first you need to figure out what you need to do at a minimum to maintain your present level, to attain what you have worked so hard to grow. I would recommend that at a minimum you need to have some consistent language input and some ability to

to maintain your vocabulary. What that’s looked like for me as I’ve kind of deprioritized some of my language study in this last season has been I still listen to Greek daily as I drive to work in the morning. So I’m getting probably, I don’t know, anywhere between 20 and 30 minutes of listening input.

five times a week. And then on the weekends, you know, maybe I’ll pick something up and read something, but reading has kind of dropped out of my maintenance schedule for a period. I think that’s okay because I’m still intentionally getting input at a comprehensible level through listening. If listening is not a comprehensible activity for you, I would encourage you to…

Jesse Orloff (15:19.946)
You know, I’ve talked before about the seven minutes. I would encourage you to maintain a habit of seven minutes a day or maybe it’s five minutes a day of reading. I think that that input habit is kind of the minimum thing you want to do to to maintain your language. I would also encourage you if you if you if you have a system for vocabulary, which I think is really helpful and important in language learning.

I’ve used Anki, but I would encourage you for them, you know, when you’re trying to minimize things there, you know, stop taking in new vocabulary words and find ways to reduce the volume of your reviews. And so some of the ways that you can go about doing that, you know, one, just said, stop taking in new words. That’s the first place you start. If you’re feeling feeling burdened and you need to start scaling back.

You stop taking in new words. And after a couple of weeks, Anki is going to naturally, or a spaced repetition system is going to naturally start reducing your volume because you’re not taking in new words. New words are typically, in my experience, the source of the majority of the volume in Anki or in a spaced repetition system. Once you have stopped taking new words, you know,

you can start asking yourselves questions like, do I have my system tuned to handle reviews? know Anki has, it has a scheduling tool called FSRS and you can define a percentage of correct words that you want to hit on average. so like if you have that set to 90%,

maybe for a time drop it to 80 % and the system will automatically start scaling down. One of the things that I did, I was doing both Greek front, English back cards and English front, Greek back cards. So it’s it’s kind of flipping both sides of those cards. And fairly recently I decided that English front cards were really not, they really not helping me in the way that I was.

Jesse Orloff (17:44.778)
I was wanting, and so I decided to cut those out. And that really cut my volume in half. So I don’t know what that necessarily looks like for you guys, depending on the system that you’re using. But find ways to kind of cut that back, but still engage with the language. The last thing I would say here as a way to keep your foot in the door is, and I think this might be the most, or one of the most important things here.

Find ways to continue engaging regularly with a language learning community. Especially if you have a group of friends or people in your own life that you have fairly regularly engaged with. Keep engaging there on a regular rhythm. For me, that has looked like we, my group has kind of consistent weekly meetings that we’ve done.

Some of them have been classes where I’ve been teaching and others have been where I’ve been just kind of hanging out. And even just getting together to sit down and weekly read a small passage in Greek or weekly translate a small passage in Greek, like that can be really encouraging. I know one of the things that my group has done that has kind of filled this space for me is that

We have been listening to Fred Long’s, you know, his exegesis, his breakdown of the book of Romans that he’s been doing on a weekly basis. Fred has all those posted online. think they’re all shared through the Proof Text podcast, if I had to guess. you know, you can find those videos and you can set up, you know, like a weekly, I’m just going to watch this, that it’s

It’s pretty low energy if all you’re doing is watching. doesn’t take much effort and it can be really encouraging. So I think by doing some of those things, figuring out what those things need to be for you and just being intentional to keep your foot in the door, don’t close it all the way. Don’t completely give up on your practice because once you really give, like once you stop doing anything, that’s when

Jesse Orloff (20:11.83)
you really start to atrophy and that’s when you start losing what you’ve worked so hard to build up in the first place.

Reengaging with Language Learning

And then when, you know, at some point, know, seasons come and go, there’s a season for everything as we read in Ecclesiastes and you’re going to get through the season that you’re in now and you’re going to want to come back to Greek at some point or whatever the language is that you’re learning or whatever the discipline it is that we’re talking about here.

You’re going to want to get back to that. you know, if you have let it go completely, you might find yourself discouraged getting back in. but if you’ve maintained just, you’ve maintained the work that you’ve done by some minimum level, it’s going to make it much easier for you to, to jump back in and to reprioritize and to say, okay, now I’m ready to really give it. Now I don’t have to relearn.

or reestablish the ground that I had already established once, but I can kind of, you maybe there’s much less that you have to reestablish and you can start, you know, start from further ahead and then really launch ahead rather than just work on catching up. So, yeah, I hope those ideas there are helpful to kind of give you

give you a starting place to think about what you need to do to keep your foot in the door. The last thing I want to say is watch out for this. If you are in a deprioritized state, watch for those signals in your life that you are ready to reengage more intensely. Pay attention to those. You know, what I’ve started seeing

from time to time, I really started seeing these as I was watching Fred Long’s Exegesis of Romans, is there’s these little sparks that you can kind of feel like of excitement. Maybe it’s not like you’re fully ready to commit back into spending an hour or two hours every day engaging with the language, but maybe it’s just like, that was cool. I enjoyed.

Jesse Orloff (22:37.046)
I enjoyed hearing about that or that was a cool insight. You can kind of see, I think of it almost like a campfire, like after it’s all smoldered down, but you know, you see like a little bit of oxygen gets in there and you see a spark or a flame come up and it’s like, that there’s still some life there. Pay attention to those because it’s those things that when you can identify where those are, like one, that might be a sign that you’re starting to turn around.

and get through some of the burnout. And it might also be a sign that this is an area that when you’re ready to reengage, maybe that’s where you should pour some gas. Maybe that’s where you should really blow the oxygen at it and let it flame up. another thing I would encourage you is because you want to have a long term plan here, it’s OK to intentionally

recognize that this is not a priority now, I have these other priorities, but make a plan for when you think that this might become a priority again, whether that’s in three months, six months, or a year, try to plot out like, okay, I think that once I get through this season of life, I’m going to be able to put some more energy back into my Greek language study and just write it down or, you know,

Take a note of what you think it’s going to look like when you want to reengage. And one final thing I want to say here, after you’ve spent some good time building up a skill, any skill, but especially a language skill, don’t forget to just pause and enjoy the fruit of your labor. You’ve worked really hard.

Enjoying the Fruits of Your Labor

You have worked really hard to diligently study, to practice, to engage in this skill and this language. And you can enjoy the fruit of your labor. Find some ways to just enjoy that. So maybe that looks like just a

Jesse Orloff (24:59.648)
finding a simple book of scripture and just reading it without any expectations on yourself or picking up one of the many great Greek Greek graded readers out there and just starting like with some of the easier chapters and just just not putting pressure on yourself but just allowing yourself to say hey this is this is fun like you know I worked hard to get to where I am now and and now I can I can

can do this thing with it, you whatever level it is that you’ve gotten to, like, maybe it’s just, you know, taking your Bible to church on Sundays and, and flipping open the passage that your, your pastors preaching through and, and just kind of like looking at the words and recognizing, yeah, I, I can read these, like, I can pronounce these words or I, you know, look, there’s a, you know, there’s an imperfect verb there and

And that’s that’s cool. Like, you know, you know, a lot of pastors, they’ll they’ll call out words or they’ll highlight insights they’ve gotten. You can, you know, look at it be like, yeah, look, I can see that word or I don’t know. I don’t I don’t get that one. But, you know, it’s OK. It’s just fine. Find ways to enjoy the fruit of the labors that you have put into this language. And yeah, anyway, with.

All that being said, I hope that this has been encouraging for you and has maybe given you something to hang on to if you’re feeling some burnout in your language learning study. And I wish you the best of luck and I encourage you to keep pushing if you can. even if you feel like you can’t keep pushing, I encourage you to just find those things that will help to keep your foot in the door.

and and to remember remember that this is this is about the long term like you are going to read you’re going to read your bible for the rest of your life and this skill will continue to be valuable for you for years and years to come if you can if you can you know just put a little bit into it just to keep keep that flame from going out completely

Jesse Orloff (27:27.235)
You know, you’ll get back to it and you will find that value, you know, paying dividends, reaping fruit for the rest of your life. So with all that said, thank you for your time and I wish you the best. I’ll see you next time.