I was not good at learning languages. My experience of learning English was totally a disaster. The repetitive memorization of all the vocabulary and grammar was too tedious and challenging for my rusty hippocampus. I spent tons of time just memorizing words and this well-known method of learning didn’t seem working for me at all. When my classmates could all get over 115 TOFEL score out of 120, I was still struggling with simply not stuttering in the speaking test. 

My horrible experience with English studying not only gave me “English PTSD”, but it also developed a fixed mindset for me to believe that “I can’t learn any languages well. Languages are just translation tools which I can never figure out how to appreciate their beauty.” I waived the language requirement right after I got into the college and didn’t even try to take any of the language classes.

Things started to change after I played a video game called sky: the childran of light. It is a multi-player mobile game and its players came from all over the world. My friends in the game were all French. Even though we used translators a lot and they could speak a little bit English, our conversations still had a lot of French words mixed into. I thus, not intentionally, started to learn French from all the daily conversations with my friends.

It was during the pandemic and also my first year of college, so I had a lot of time just playing the game. My French progressed a lot during that time. When I finally came to campus in person and accidentally saw the French department placement test for French 201, I found all the questions so easy. I took the placement test, got a high score, and started to learn French with an awesome professor.

And after I got complimented a lot from my French class, my mindset for learning languages has started to switch from “fixed” to “growth”. I started to believe that I can learn every language so well if I find the proper ways to study and also proper people to study with. I became obsessed with language learning and after finishing the French class, I’ve started to learn German and will probably learn more languages later in the future. I realized that “mindset” was the only obstacle I had in my language learning journey. I was the one who set the limits for myself. I was the one who dared not to try. I was also the one who’s capable of learning everything. When looking at the projects listed below, my growth mindset made my mind to learn new skills and challenge new projects.