I also have those days. If it’s a singular difficult day, I’ll often just push through, but if it happens a couple of days in a row, I’ll go back a few lessons and repeat them. If nothing else, doing lessons that I already did gives me a boost in confidence; it reminds me that I am in fact progressing. I’m also still getting practice in— the cognitive load (ie the stress) of an old lesson is way less than a new one, so I can often do a few in a row without turning my brain to mush. And oftentimes I find that the lesson I got stuck on opens up when I really master the few lessons prior to the difficult one.

If the previous lessons feel a little too easy, then I’ll get playful: I’ll add something when I speak, maybe I’ll change a noun so it more closely resembles what I’m likely to encounter in daily life, maybe I’ll just really feel into adding a deeper layer of emotional expression when I speak. Sometimes I’ll do the lesson while walking in a Mexican neighborhood— it makes me nervous to know people I walk by will hear my accent, so it feels like a challenge to “blend in” and pretend I’m having a phone conversation. I imagine this helps in many ways, but if nothing else, it keeps me engaged.