While reflecting on the concept of doing less with more in life and language coaching, I got a nudge from nature and the seasons, which inspired to write this post!

When I was 5 years old, my parents and I moved from Bucharest, Romania to Montreal, Canada. After the initial excitement of my first time on a plane, I struggled to understand why my parents had made this life-altering decision to move as I tried to adapt to a place without my grandparents, in a language I didn’t speak (French) with no friends and other family nearby.

One day, I asked my parents:

It took me a couple of years to track down the lie I’d been telling myself that was holding me back (there are lots of them and like you, I’m a perpetual work in progress). The first year I lived in Finland was tough. Honestly, what helped me through the uncertainty loneliness was something I told myself over and over again…

Fear is good teacher but all students can, at some point or another, be resistant to its teachings…

Last week, I posted about how to tell whether you’re thriving or surviving in your life (abroad or at home) and shared with you my own my core desire feelings: connected, fearless, truth & simple.

In response, one of my readers wrote to me with some deep, deep questions. Among them were these two gems:

What does fearlessness represent for you? Would feeling fear prevent you from feeling connection?

Do you remember thinking: “What do I want to be when I ‘grow up’?” I do.

In fact, well into my adolescence (erhm, early adulthood), this question used to plague me. Conversations in my family sounded a bit like this as university applications approached:

Mom and/or Dad: What do you want to do when you ‘grow up’?
Me: Speak German.

This post is for you if:
you’re a beginner or intermediate language learner struggling to remember vocabulary,
you feel overwhelmed by ALL OF THE WORDS you could be learning,
end up not learning most of them because you forget what you learn,
end up not learning most of them because you’re so overwhelmed by the massive amounts of vocab.

At the 2015 polyglot gathering in Berlin (an event for those who love learning languages), I gave a talk called ‘Beyond Language: Lessons about life, self-understanding and transformation.’

During the talk, I shared what I had learned from living in Finland for 5 years, and how I had adjusted (the ups and downs I went through) – basically the messy process of personal growth abroad.

Ever have those days where it seems that everything would just be easier if you’d stayed home or moved back there? Me too. There’s some growth involved, and with it comes some pain as well, but fear not! I wrote this post to help you understand 2 things: why we get into bad moods/funks in the first place (and why you’re especially likely to develop them if you live abroad) and, how to shift out of them when they happen.

This week I did an interview with Oliver from learnwitholiver.com where I answered 10 questions about language learning and living abroad, among other topics. Of the 10 questions, my favourite was: What is your single best non-obvious tip for language learning? This was such a great question (thank you Oliver for asking it!) that I decided to write a whole post about it.

Kris Broholm and I sat down to talk about identity, finding home and learning Finnish. We’d met at the Polyglot Gathering in Berlin back in 2014 but it was only this year that the idea of doing an episode of Actual Fluency came up. We carved out time in our schedules over Easter and had a great conversation! Kris was living in Budapest at the time and learning Hungarian, and though we didn’t plan for it, we found a lot of common ground about the weather. Kris runs the Actual Fluency Podcast and regularly interviews multilingual and multicultural people to further his own quest to speak 10 language, which you can read more about it here.