English Podcast for Easy English Conversation | Why You Quit | Learn English Fast

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]Hello, we are so excited to show you our native speech capabilities. Welcome back to the English Journey. Today, we are exploring a very honest topic. Why you quit? My name is Anna and I am here to guide you through understanding the psychology behind our struggles. And I am Abel. I'm so glad to be here with you, Anna. We have all started something new like learning English with so much fire only to lose that feeling a few weeks later. Today, we want to talk about why that happens and how to break the cycle. That is exactly right, Abel.

[00:00:36]And I want to start by saying something very important before we go any further.

[00:00:41]If you have ever quit learning English or any language or any new skill, please do not feel ashamed. You are not lazy.

[00:00:51]You are not weak. You are human and what happened to you has a name. It has a psychological explanation. And once you understand it, you can finally stop fighting yourself and start building something real. That is really what I needed to hear, Anna, because honestly, I've quit so many times. I remember when I first decided to get serious about improving my English. I downloaded three different apps on the same day. Three. I was so motivated. I did lessons every single day for about 2 weeks and then one day, I just did not open any of them. And then one day became one week.

[00:01:29]And then I told myself I would start again on Monday. But Monday came and went and I never really went back with the same energy. That story is so common, Abel. And I think almost every single person listening to us right now has experienced exactly that. So, let us begin at the very beginning. Let us talk about why we start so strong. This is what psychologists call the honeymoon phase. When we begin anything new, a language, a fitness routine, a diet, a new hobby, our brain releases a chemical called dopamine. Dopamine is often called the reward chemical. It makes us feel excited, motivated, and optimistic.

[00:02:11]It makes us feel like we can do anything. Oh, I know that feeling. It feels almost like falling in love with the idea of something. That is a beautiful way to say it, Abel. And it is very accurate. In psychology, we actually use the word infatuation to describe that early stage. You are infatuated with the new thing.

[00:02:32]Everything feels fresh and interesting.

[00:02:35]You learn 10 new words and you feel incredible. You have a small conversation in English and you feel like you have conquered the world. The progress feels fast and visible and your brain loves visible progress. It rewards you immediately for it. So, what goes wrong? Because that feeling does not last forever. For me, it started fading around the third or fourth week. Things started feeling harder and the excitement just wasn't there anymore.

[00:03:02]What you experienced is completely normal and it's one of the most important things to understand about human motivation. The honeymoon phase fades for a very simple reason. Novelty disappears. The brain stops releasing dopamine just because something is new because it is no longer new. Now, the brain needs actual results to stay engaged. And in language learning, real results take time. Much more time than a few weeks. So, there's a gap. There's a gap between when your excitement runs out and when your real skills begin to show. That gap is where most people quit. That gap sounds dangerous. How long does it last? It depends on the person and it depends on their habits.

[00:03:50]But for most language learners, that gap begins somewhere between 3 weeks and 2 months of study. And during that gap, you enter what researchers and learning coaches often call the valley of despair. The valley of despair. That name alone sounds discouraging. It does sound difficult, but understanding it actually makes it less scary. The valley of despair in language learning is essentially the plateau. A plateau is a period where your improvement feels invisible. You've been studying. You've been doing the work. But you look at yourself in the mirror or you try to speak and you feel like you have moved not at all. You feel stuck. And that feeling of being stuck is one of the most psychologically damaging experiences a learner can have. Because when you feel stuck, you start to question everything, right? You start thinking, maybe I'm not smart enough for this. Maybe English is just too hard for me. Exactly. And here's the painful truth about the plateau. You are almost certainly improving. You're just not improving in a way that you can easily measure or see yet. Language learning is not linear. It doesn't go in a straight upward line. It happens in layers. You study vocabulary for weeks and it sits in your brain quietly. It's building.

[00:05:12]And then one day, you hear a word in a podcast and you understand it immediately. That word was there all along. Your brain was just processing it. The plateau is not emptiness. It's preparation. That actually changes how I see those difficult weeks. I used to think I was wasting my time during a plateau, but you're saying my brain was actually working even when I couldn't see results. Precisely. Neuroscientists call this process consolidation. Your brain is taking the information you've been giving it and organizing it, connecting it to things you already know, building neural pathways. This process is invisible from the outside, but it's absolutely real. The problem is that human beings are not very patient with invisible progress. We live in a world that gives us instant feedback. We post a photo and we see how many people liked it in 30 seconds. We search for something online and we have the answer in 2 seconds. Our brains have become accustomed to speed and language learning simply doesn't work that fast.

[00:06:20]It never has and it never will. That makes me think about something you mentioned earlier, Anna. You talked about how I downloaded three apps on the same day. I think there's a specific problem there, not just the excitement.

[00:06:34]I think I was also doing something else wrong. I was looking for the perfect method before I had even tried one properly. You have just identified something very important, Abel. That behavior has a name. It's called shiny object syndrome and it's one of the biggest hidden reasons why language learners never make real progress. Tell me more about shiny object syndrome. I feel like I've been living with this problem for years without knowing what to call it. Shiny object syndrome is the habit of constantly chasing the newest, most exciting tool, method, or resource instead of staying consistent with what you already have. In language learning, it looks like this. You start using an app and it feels great for 2 weeks. Then you see an advertisement for a different course or a friend tells you about a new method or you watch a video that says, this is the only way to learn a language. And suddenly, your current method feels wrong or incomplete. So, you abandon it and you run toward the new shiny thing. And then the cycle repeats. I've done this so many times.

[00:07:42]I've bought online courses I never finished. I've started workbooks I abandoned on page 30. I've used maybe eight different vocabulary apps and every time I switched, I told myself this new one was better. And here's the real damage that shiny object syndrome causes. Every time you switch, you reset your foundation. Language learning requires deep repetition. When you use a resource consistently, your brain starts to recognize patterns, to build a rhythm, to feel comfortable. That comfort is not boredom. That comfort is the beginning of mastery. But if you switch before you reach that stage, you never build the deep layer. You only ever build the surface. And after months of switching, you have many thin layers of many different things, but no strong foundation in any of them. That's such a clear way to explain it. It's like trying to build a wall, but changing your bricks every 3 days. You never actually build anything solid. That is a perfect analogy, Abel. And the solution is not to find the perfect resource. The solution is to choose one good resource and commit to it long enough to feel the real results. No app, no course, no book is perfect, but any decent resource used consistently over a long period of time will produce results. Consistency is the ingredient, not perfection. Okay, so that brings me to the big question. How do we stay consistent? Because I know I should be consistent. Everyone knows they should be consistent. But knowing and doing are very different things.

[00:09:22]This is where we need to have a very honest conversation about motivation versus discipline. And this conversation might challenge some ideas that you have had for a long time. Most people, when they think about learning a language or building any new habit, they think they need to feel motivated to do it. They wait for that motivated feeling to arrive. They think, when I feel ready, I will start. When I feel energized, I will study. And the problem is that feeling does not arrive on a schedule. I am definitely guilty of waiting to feel ready. I have said to myself, "I will study English tonight when I feel less tired." And then I am tired, so I do not study. And the next day I feel guilty about it. And that cycle of waiting, not doing, and then feeling guilty is genuinely exhausting. It drains your mental energy more than the actual studying would. Here's the truth that psychologists and behavioral scientists have confirmed through decades of research. Motivation follows action. It does not come before action. Most people have this completely backwards. They think they need to feel motivated in order to start, but in reality, you start first and the motivation comes after you begin. Can you explain that a little more? How does motivation come after starting? Of course. Think about a time when you really did not want to exercise. You were tired, you had a long day, but you forced yourself to put on your shoes and walk out the door. And then 5 minutes into the walk or 10 minutes into the gym session, something shifted. You started to feel a little better, a little more energized, maybe even a little proud of yourself. That shift is your brain responding to the action you took. The action created the motivation, not the other way around.

[00:11:12]Language learning works exactly the same way. On most days, you will not feel like studying and that's completely normal. The question is not whether you feel like it. The question is whether your system, your routine, your environment supports you in doing it anyway. So, how do we build that kind of routine? A routine that works even on the bad days. The most important principle is this. Make it as small as possible, especially at the beginning.

[00:11:41]One of the biggest mistakes learners make is setting an intense schedule from the very start. They say, "I will study English for 2 hours every day." And for a few days they do it. But 2 hours every day is a very heavy commitment. It requires a lot of willpower and willpower is a limited resource. It gets used up throughout the day. So, when you're tired in the evening, you have very little willpower left and the 2-hour goal feels impossible. So, you skip it and skipping it feels like failure. So, what is the alternative?

[00:12:14]Study less? Study consistently, even if it means studying less. The research on habit formation, particularly the work of behavioral scientist B.J. Fogg, shows that tiny habits attached to existing routines are far more sustainable than large habits that require daily willpower. So, instead of saying, "I will study English for 2 hours every evening," you might say, "After I make my morning coffee, I will spend 10 minutes reviewing five new vocabulary words." That's it. 10 minutes, five words, every single day. That sounds almost too small to matter. That's exactly what most people think and that thinking is why most people quit. 10 minutes of genuine focused study every single day is 3,650 minutes of study in 1 year. That's more than 60 hours of learning and 60 hours of consistent focused study will absolutely change your English. Now compare that to someone who studies for 2 hours three times, feels overwhelmed, and then stops completely. Who made more progress? The person with 10 consistent minutes every day. When you put it in those numbers, it's very convincing. But I still think about all the times I quit and even understanding everything you just said, I feel like I have failed too many times to build real trust in myself again. How do I deal with that feeling?

[00:13:41]This is perhaps the most important part of our conversation today, Abel. And I want you to listen to this very carefully because I think it can genuinely change how you see yourself as a learner. Quitting is not failure.

[00:13:54]Quitting is data. Every time you stopped studying, something caused you to stop and that cause is information. It's telling you something real about your habits, your environment, your schedule, or your mindset. If you can identify what caused the quit, you can design a better plan for next time. So, instead of feeling ashamed when I quit, I should be analyzing it? Exactly. Think of yourself as a scientist studying your own behavior. A scientist does not feel ashamed when an experiment does not work. A scientist looks at the results and asks, "What happened? What does this tell me? What should I change?" So, the next time you find yourself drifting away from your English study, instead of collapsing into guilt, try asking yourself a few honest questions. Was my goal too big? Was my schedule unrealistic? Was I using a resource that I genuinely did not enjoy? Did something external in my life take priority and use all my energy? These are all valid reasons. None of them make you a failure. All of them give you information you can use. I like the idea of asking those questions because usually when I quit, I just feel bad and then I kind of avoid thinking about it.

[00:15:10]I don't actually try to understand what went wrong. That avoidance is very common and very human. When something causes us pain or shame, we naturally want to move away from it, but that avoidance prevents us from learning the lesson that the experience is offering us. In psychology, we call this process reframing. Instead of labeling the experience as I failed, you reframe it as I collected data about what does not work for me. That shift in language is not just words. It genuinely changes how your brain processes the experience and it makes it much easier to try again.

[00:15:49]It makes starting again feel like a continuation rather than starting from zero. Beautifully said and that brings us to one more strategy that I think is essential for sustainable learning. It is something I call the tiny wins strategy and it works because of the very same brain chemistry we talked about at the beginning. Remember dopamine, the chemical that made the honeymoon phase feel so exciting? Yes, the excitement chemical.

[00:16:16]The challenge with language learning is that natural dopamine rewards become less frequent as you move through the beginner phase. In the beginning, everything is a win. Every new word is exciting. But as you progress, the wins become less obvious. So, the tiny wins strategy is a deliberate system for creating your own dopamine rewards on a daily basis. You stop waiting for big achievements like, "I can now hold a full conversation." And you start celebrating small daily milestones. Can you give me some examples of what a tiny win might look like? Of course. A tiny win might be understanding a joke in English for the first time or recognizing a word in a movie that you studied last week or finishing your 10 minutes of vocabulary review without checking your phone or successfully explaining something in English even if it wasn't perfect or even just completing your study session for the day when you really didn't want to. That last one is enormous because on the days when you study despite not wanting to, you're not just learning English, you are proving to yourself that you are someone who keeps their commitments and that identity shift is incredibly powerful. I love that idea. Making the completion of the habit itself a win regardless of how well I actually studied. Precisely. And the way to capture those wins is to make them visible. Keep a simple paper calendar and put a red mark on every day that you complete your habit. After a few days, you have a chain of red marks and that visual chain becomes motivating on its own. You don't want to break the chain.

[00:17:53]This technique is so old and so well documented that it has its own name.

[00:17:58]It's called the Seinfeld strategy named after the famous American comedian Jerry Seinfeld who used this method to make sure he wrote jokes every single day. I love that it has a name and a real person behind it. It makes it feel more practical and less like abstract advice.

[00:18:15]That's the beauty of behavioral psychology, Abel. Most of these strategies are not theoretical. They've been tested in real life by real people and language learners around the world have used these exact principles to go from absolute beginners to confident English speakers. It does not require genius. It does not require perfect memory. It requires a system that you trust and that you maintain even imperfectly over a long period of time.

[00:18:42]Anna, I want to ask you something a little more personal. Do experts ever struggle with this? Do you ever feel like giving up on something? Absolutely.

[00:18:52]I think anyone who claims they never struggle with motivation is either not being fully honest or they have simply never challenged themselves with something truly difficult. I remember when I was studying for a very advanced professional certification years ago.

[00:19:07]There was a period of about 6 weeks where I felt completely overwhelmed. I was studying every day and still feeling like I understood very little. I was in my own valley of despair and there were several evenings where I closed my books and thought, "Maybe this is not for me."

[00:19:24]But I had a system. I had my tiny daily goal written on a card on my desk and I had my calendar with the chain of completed days. And on those discouraging evenings, instead of looking at how far I had to go, I looked at how many days I had shown up already and that was enough to keep me going to the next day. That is such a real and honest answer and it reminds me that even the most knowledgeable people go through the same struggles. The difference is not that they never want to quit. The difference is that they have tools to help them continue.

[00:19:55]That is perhaps the single most important insight of everything we have discussed today. The goal is not to eliminate the desire to quit. That desire will always come. It's a natural part of any long-term challenge. The goal is to build a structure around yourself. So that when the desire to quit arrives, as it absolutely will, your system carries you forward rather than your willpower. Because willpower is fragile and temporary. But a good system, a small daily habit, a visual record of progress, a realistic goal, and a compassionate understanding of your own psychology, that kind of system is durable. It survives the bad days. It survives the busy weeks. It survives the plateaus. And it is the only thing that truly gets you to the other side. So if I were to summarize everything we discussed today and try to put it into a plan someone could actually follow, what would that look like? It would look like this. First, understand that the excitement you feel at the beginning will naturally fade and plan for that moment in advance. Second, when you hit a plateau and feel like you are not improving, remind yourself that your brain is consolidating. The growth is real even when it is invisible.

[00:21:10]Third, choose one resource and commit to it fully before even considering something new. Depth beats variety every single time. Fourth, stop waiting to feel motivated. Start your study session anyway and let the motivation arrive after you begin.

[00:21:27]Fifth, make your daily habits so small that missing it feels harder than doing it. 10 focused minutes every day is a life-changing commitment. Sixth, when you do quit or pause, do not retreat into shame. Treat it as data. Ask honest questions. Identify the cause, adjust your plan, and restart without judgment.

[00:21:49]And seventh, celebrate every tiny win.

[00:21:53]Every completed session. Every understood word. Every small moment of progress is worth acknowledging. Because those small moments accumulated over months and years become fluency. That is an incredibly clear and practical roadmap. And what I love most about it is that none of those steps require you to be a genius or to have unlimited time or energy. They just require you to be honest with yourself and to keep showing up. Showing up imperfectly, repeatedly, and with self-compassion is the entire secret to language learning and honestly to most meaningful things in life. The learners who succeed are not the ones who never struggled or never quit. They are the ones who understood why they quit, forgave themselves for it, and found a way to begin again that was a little smarter, a little kinder, and a little more sustainable than the time before.