Anxiety about Language Learning

  I am recently reading about foreign language anxiety, and reflecting on my own fears related to learning Mandarin. I think that so much of language is tied to the sense of who one is and their sense of competence in the world. Having grown up speaking and learning English, I have gone through the ropes of fashioning identity and purpose through its various forms: via writing, texting, blogging and so on. Approaching an entirely different language and grammar, I am essentially reminded of the impermanence of this "language" identity, and how easily it can be swept away. It reminds me of an episode of the Twilight Zone which I had watched as a child, in which the adults are forced to learn a language from an alien culture, and essentially regress to the level of babies in he process of having to re-learn their world. Apparently the alien language is so foreign to them that they need to reverse the process of their own development of culture and learning to be able to grasp the new.
   Of course, there is a delight that comes from being able to recognize certain characters in Mandarin. I have noticed a few sparks of it: I can certainly see how learning a character in Mandarin can be like acquiring some kind of picture of a very different world. This is quite unlike English, whose characters tend to appear abstract and not image-based at all. But all the while, I think learning a completely different set of characters is putting me very close to a kind of powerless state, where I can't express even my most basic emotions in even the rudimentary characters. This somewhat isolates me, and makes me want to run to my first language.
   It makes me realize that the concept of beginner's mind which is celebrated in contemplative practices (such as Buddhism) has a great deal to contribute to the process of language learning. It also offers a kind of phenomenology to help people appreciate their beginnings in language, rather than seeing the process as annihilating. Going beyond "self'" is a necessary part of going back to the beginning or roots of learning. I would be interested in exploring the links between language learning and the beginner's attitude that we read about in many contemplative practices.