2026-07-03
10 分钟Today I want to talk about the state of flow and how it applies to language learning.
Now, some of you may have heard of this concept of the state of flow,
this sense that people who say violinists or chess players or artists, Michelangelo...
Painting the ceiling at the Sistine Chapel, I think it is, who are so engrossed
in what they're doing that they are in another world and that this enables
them to perform better than would otherwise be the case because they're totally focused.
The concept of state of flow was originally described by a gentleman by the name of Mihaly...
Csikszentmihalyi, I believe is the pronunciation in Hungarian, although he was born in what was then Fiume, Italy,
and is now Rijeka, Croatia, to a Hungarian family.
And he ended up in the States and he wrote about this phenomenon of people being so engrossed
in what they're doing that they achieve a level of expertise, mastery in whatever it is that they're doing.
And he described this as the conditions necessary for flow, is that there should be a sufficient challenge,
that the task should be sufficiently difficult and meaningful to the person doing it, and yet it was not too difficult.
So it's that sort of space between things that are too easy, not a challenge, boring,
and things that are genuinely a challenge, meaningful to the person doing it.
And yet somehow the person through mastery, through having the requisite skill set,
is able to do what it is that he or she wanted to do.
So that, to my mind, as I understand it, is this concept of flow,
which enables us to do more than we would otherwise do than when we're not in that state of flow.
It makes us better learners, period, even when we leave that state of flow.