It's paramount to set our expectations straight before we start learning the basics. Learning česky is not a straight line and instead it's an exponential one. This means that the more we learn the more difficult it gets because more and more doors will be visible/open to us and this will cause us to feel anxious. This is a completely normal and expected feeling that everyone feels and the fact that we experience it it means that we are growing and getting better. Having said that, sometimes anxiety gets the better of us and we lose all (or most) of our motivation to move forward. To prevent this, we will track our progress in multiple ways so that after each chapter we can actually see that our time and mental investment was indeed not in vain.
If you feel at any time that it's just too much for you, feel free to take a break. It doesn't matter if it lasts a day, a week or a year. We are all different with different levels of motivation, free time, and willpower. Forcing ourselves and pushing beyond what we can handle will only cause us to feel even more anxious thus it might cause us to completely stop and never touch it again. For people who have experienced and have to deal with post-exertional malaise or similar conditions please try to pace yourselves properly. There will be periods where you will feel extra motivated and there will be periods where you just cannot force yourselves to learn. This is completely normal and you don't need to worry as most of the already learned words will stay memorized for a very long time.
There are three skills that we will try to sharpen during our study:
Reading/Understanding is all about making sure that our vocabulary is big enough to read or understand what a person is saying. Knowing what words mean does not mean that we can actually produce an understandable sentence. At the same time the same sentence said in a slightly different accent can throw us out of balance. With being out of balance we will fail to process not only the current sentence but any other sentence that is followed by it.
Speaking/Writing is a measure of how confident we are in ourselves. If we know how to ask the correct questions and if we have enough courage, we really can go far with it even tho our vocabulary pool is probably really small at that point in time. Pointing at bread and asking how is that "thing" called in česky will leave a huge imprint and allow us to place that newly learned word (almost) directly into long term memory. The reason for this is quite a simple one, there are way more cues available to us. You now associate a certain bakery, smell, person, size, form, color with the word "bread" instead of just seeing some letters written down.
Listening is about being able to understand words in different environments. We might be acclimated to only one way, speed and/or placement of a word thus even tho we know how a word should sound like we cannot recognize it when a person with a slightly different accent says it. If this happens to us in a face to face conversation, we should not be ashamed to ask our conversation partner to repeat themselves but a bit slower and with more emphasis on pronunciation.
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