Like an ant crawling up a flight of stairs

When I joined Elevate, the President of Elevate Training shared a folder of stock photos with me that illustrate the concept of "elevate" in some way. "You can pick any of these to use for your business cards, website, etc" he told me. I was immediately drawn to the staircase because it reminds me of my favorite analogy for language learning (which those who have been learning Bangla with me have no doubt already heard!). It goes like this:

Learning a new language as an adult is like being a teeny-tiny ant trying to climb a steep and long flight of stairs. Sometimes the ant is scurrying along the horizontal plane and sometimes the ant is climbing straight uphill. If getting to the top of the stairs is the aim, both horizontal and vertical movements are actually helping the ant reach its goal. But I assume that, even for an ant, the horizontal movement (yippee) seems like real progress, and the vertical climb (argh) is harder with less measurable reward.

In your language learning journey, when you are putting in the effort but feel like you're not making much progress, just keep going - I'm confident that you'll find yourself climbing over the edge of the next step soon.