What Is Language Burn Out and Why Does It Happen?

Language Burn out is a phrase you will hear being thrown around the language learning community …but what actually is it and why does it happen?

This is what I will be looking at here, so you can start to recognise the signs of it and hopefully avoid it.

What Is Burn Out?

Burn out can be a serious problem for language learners and is when you basically push yourself too breaking point.

It is when you start to hate studying and everything to do with your language. You will feel constantly overwhelmed and fatigued and start to struggle with making progress and just generally not wanting to study.

Your studies stop being enjoyable and become a real chore and actually something you dread. Most people totally stop studying and the thought of going back to it seems impossible.

Often people who are burnt out will not study for weeks, or even months and they often end up quitting completely.  

You can become burnt out in other areas of your life; such as at work and this is usually caused by too much stress that leads to depression and you can certainly compare this to language learning.

Learning a language is stressful, especially if you are really pushing yourself too hard and overwhelming yourself. The slow change into resenting your studies can be similar to how people feel burnt out at work and that is not a good feeling to have.

(You can read more about – Frequently Asked Questions About – Language Learning Burn Out)

Is Burn Out The Same As Language Fatigue?

While burn out and language fatigue may seem similar, they are not. Language fatigue is just a short term problem. It is usually from doing too much too quickly, usually from cramming too much study into one day.

Fatigue is when you completely drain your brain of energy and can’t focus any more until you rest. Burn out will happen if you repeatedly do this. If you are pushing yourself day after day and not giving yourself time to process the new information you trying to learning and recover, your brain will just burnout.

Burnout is basically a more extreme form of fatigue and it will take you longer to recover from it. 

(You can read more about – What Is Language Learning Fatigue?)

Why Does Burn Out Happen?

There are a number of things that can contribute to burnout which I will go through below and you will probably find that you are suffering from a combination of them.

They can all very easily add up and overwhelm you.

Going Too Fast

One of the biggest problems is going to fast with your language and just trying to take too much in too quickly. This is normally accompanied with spending too many hours a day trying to study and more importantly always pushing forward and trying to take in new information.

If you do this for one day, you will get fatigued. It is very taxing on your brain and the reality is that it’s actually not the best way to do things. You need to slow down and go over things a few times and really master them. Your brain needs time to process the information and if you are constantly bombarding it with new stuff, it can’t process it all.   

I always see this with beginners, they get really excited to learn and then just go crazy with it trying to learn everything too fast and it just slows them down in the end as they can’t take it all in, get overwhelmed and end up quitting as they get burnt out.

I have done this myself. I went really hard every day for a month and eventually couldn’t handle it and just stopped learning completely for about 3 months!

You Feel Like You Are Making No Progress

If you think you are making no progress in your language, the logical thought process is to then work harder and push yourself more. While this can be good to a certain degrees, too many people take it too far and do exactly what I discussed above and start going too fast and overwhelming themselves.

As I discussed above, going to quickly through your studies will not allow you to process the new information properly, so you don’t make any progress. This can really wear your mind down. You were making no progress before and now you are studying harder and still making no progress.

This can really make everything really overwhelming and it will not take you long to burnout if you get stuck in this cycle. 

Seeking Perfection

Seeking perfection in language learning is a mistake that can easily lead to you to burnout. You are never going to be perfect at a language and you are always going to make mistakes or forget things. We do this in our own languages all the time, so it’s totally normal that we do it in a new language.

Wanting to be perfect can lead to a lot of frustration and anxiety. You may actually have the opposite problem of not pushing forward fast enough as you are only focusing on what you have already studied too intensely.

The issue is that that you get too fixated on this and the constant stress of wanting to be perfect overwhelms you and after a point you start to dread studying because you start getting sick and tired of doing the same thing over and over again also worry about making mistakes, which eventually you will cause you to burnout.  

Things Outside Of Language Learning

Learning a language is usually something we do on top of a busy life and sometimes the hardships of life can affect our studies.

Life can really tire us out and then trying to learn a language on top of this it can be too much. In this state it will not take us much to become overwhelmed and exhausted. Our studies may just be too much to handle and it quickly becomes overbearing and in most cases, it will be the first thing we give up on, as for most of us, we are just doing this for fun.

When something is no longer fun and actually adding more stress to our life it makes that we start to resent it and eventually give up.

(You can read more about – How Do You Balance Your Language Learning With Work And Other Commitments To Avoid Burn Out?)

How To Prevent Burn Out

Burnout can be easily avoided if you just slow down and make things more enjoyable. We are usually studying a new language for fun, so it should be exactly that.

We put too much pressure on ourselves and this ends up causing us to be overwhelmed and stressed, which ultimately leads us to not enjoying ourselves and finding he whole experience negative, which of course leads us to quit. 

I have covered how to prevent burn out in more detail in this separate article – How To Prevent Burnout When Learning A Language

Conclusion

Language Burnout really can happen to anyone, we can all too easily want to push ourselves too hard so that we get results, but this can quickly overwhelm us and then we end up getting burnt out

Hopefully now you understand what it is and why it happens, so you can start to look out for this in our own studies and avoid it before it becomes a real problem.

(You can read more about – How Long Does It Take To Recover From Language Learning Burn Out?)