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| Where the lesson began: standing in front of a bakery counter in Brugge, unable to find the simple word for bread. |
Last winter, I stood in front of a bakery counter in Brugge and could not remember the Dutch word for bread.
Brood. One syllable. I had practiced it a hundred times.
The woman behind the counter waited. Behind me, someone shifted their weight. I opened my mouth, and what came out was a mix of Dutch, English, and silence. She smiled, switched to English without making it a thing, and handed me what I pointed at.
I walked out with the wrong loaf.
I want to tell you this bothered me because of the bread. It didn't. It bothered me because I have crossed borders my whole adult life. I left a village in Nepal that had no paved road. I built a life in Singapore, then London, then Lisbon, then Denmark. I have filled out visa forms in four languages I didn't grow up speaking. And there I was, forty-something years old, unable to ask for bread in the town where my sons go to school.
That night I sat down and asked myself an honest question: why does this feel harder than anything else I've done?
The answer took me a while to find, and it's the reason I'm writing this.
Competence Makes You Forget What Beginning Feels Like
By the time you've built something, whether that's a career, a business, a family, or a life in a new country, you stop remembering what it felt like to be bad at something in public.
I had gotten used to being the person who figured things out. New country, new job, new systems. I had a track record of adapting. So when Dutch grammar refused to cooperate with me the way English or Hindi once did, I wasn't just frustrated by the language. I was frustrated by being incompetent again, in front of people, on a regular Tuesday.
That's the part nobody warns you about. It's not that starting over is hard. It's that you forget it's supposed to be hard, because you've spent years being good at things.
Being a Beginner Feels Different When You're Older
When you're young, being bad at something doesn't feel like a statement about who you are. You expect not to know. You expect to ask questions. You expect someone to correct you.
Somewhere along the way, that changes.
As adults, we collect evidence that we are capable. We learn how to do our jobs. We learn how to manage money, relationships, responsibilities, and problems that once seemed impossible. We become the people other people come to when they need something figured out.
Then one day, you walk into a bakery and forget a word you have practiced a hundred times.
Suddenly, all that competence feels very far away.
I think that's why starting something new can feel strangely uncomfortable when you're older. You're not only learning the new skill. You're also temporarily giving up the identity of being someone who already knows what they're doing.
And nobody really prepares you for that part.
You can read about patience. You can understand that mistakes are necessary. You can tell yourself that nobody becomes good at something without being bad at it first.
But none of that changes how it feels when you're standing in front of another person and your mind goes completely blank.
You have to experience that discomfort yourself before you understand it.
What I Actually Did About It
I'm not going to tell you I had a breakthrough that fixed everything. I didn't. What I did was smaller and slower, and it's the only part of this worth passing on.
I stopped trying to learn Dutch the way I once crammed for exams as a student, in long sessions, all at once, hoping volume would substitute for consistency. Instead I built a system around three rules.
I Had to Stop Measuring Progress the Wrong Way
At first, I measured progress by what I could remember.
If I learned twenty new words, I felt like I had made progress. If I forgot ten of them the next day, I felt like I was going backward.
That way of measuring learning made everything harder.
I eventually realized that learning a language isn't a straight line. Some days you understand a sentence you've never understood before. Other days you forget a word you've known for months. Sometimes you can recognize something immediately when someone else says it, but when you need to say it yourself, nothing comes out.
That isn't necessarily failure. It's part of the process.
So I stopped asking myself, “How much did I learn today?”
I started asking, “Did I show up today?”
That was a much easier question to answer, and strangely, it became a much better way to measure progress.
Five Minutes a Day
First, five minutes a day, every day, no exceptions. Not thirty minutes twice a week. Five minutes daily, using a spaced repetition app on my phone, reviewed at the same time each morning, right after I make coffee.
The goal wasn't to learn a lot in one sitting. The goal was to never let a day pass without contact with the language.
One Real Conversation a Week
Second, one real conversation a week, badly. Not a lesson. Not an app. An actual conversation with an actual person, at the bakery, at my sons' school gate, with a neighbor, where I would inevitably say something wrong and have to sit in that discomfort instead of avoiding it.
Write Down What You Get Wrong
Third, I wrote down every word I got wrong that week, by hand, in a small notebook I keep in my jacket pocket.
Not to memorize them through repetition alone, but because writing something down by hand after getting it wrong in public creates a kind of memory that an app notification doesn't.
None of this is clever. It's the same advice you'd find in any language-learning guide.
What made it work wasn't the method. It was that I finally let myself be bad at something without needing to fix it immediately.
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| Small systems over grand intentions: the daily notebook and morning routine that changed how I approach being a beginner. |
The Hardest Part Was Not the Five Minutes
The five minutes were easy.
The difficult part was accepting that five minutes was enough for that day.
I was used to thinking that serious progress required serious effort. If I had an hour available, I felt I should use the whole hour. If I missed a day, I felt I needed to make up for it with a longer session.
That mindset had followed me from studying as a young person into adulthood. I had confused intensity with consistency.
But five minutes gave me something a long study session never had: a reason to return tomorrow.
There was no dramatic feeling of achievement. Most mornings, I simply finished the small routine and moved on with my day.
Then, slowly, those ordinary mornings started adding up.
A word I had forgotten yesterday became familiar. A sentence that once sounded impossibly fast became understandable. A conversation that would have terrified me a few months earlier became merely uncomfortable.
Nothing changed overnight.
I just became slightly less afraid of the next attempt.
The Bread Word Came Back
Six months later, I went back to that same bakery. Same counter, same woman, different order. I asked for what I wanted, in Dutch, and she answered me in Dutch back, no switch to English, no pause.
It wasn't a big moment. She probably doesn't remember it at all. But I do, because it was proof of something I needed to relearn: skill returns through repetition, not through willpower, and definitely not through the story you tell yourself about how you shouldn't need to practice something this basic at your age.
The Mistake Wasn't the Problem
Looking back, I think I had misunderstood the embarrassment.
I thought the uncomfortable feeling meant I wasn't ready. I thought I should practice more privately until I could speak confidently in public.
But that would have kept me stuck.
The only way to become comfortable speaking was to speak while I was still uncomfortable.
The only way to stop being afraid of mistakes was to make enough of them that they stopped feeling like emergencies.
That lesson has stayed with me because it applies to almost everything worth learning.
You don't become confident and then begin. Very often, you begin badly, repeat the process, survive the uncomfortable moments, and confidence arrives later.
I had been waiting for confidence to give me permission to practice.
I finally understood that practice was what would create the confidence.
Why This Matters Beyond Language
I think about this bakery moment whenever I start something new now, whether it's a new tool for my work, a new habit with my sons, or a new skill for the business I run.
The instinct to feel embarrassed about being a beginner again is strong, especially once you've built a life that looks, from the outside, like you have things figured out.
But competence in one area was never going to transfer automatically to a different one. My ability to move my family across four countries didn't make Dutch grammar easier. My work building an online business hasn't made me a better parent by default.
Every new skill asks you to start at zero again, and the people who keep growing are the ones who let themselves stand at that counter, mispronounce the word, and come back the next day anyway.
If there's one thing worth taking from this, it's not the three-rule system, useful as it's been for me.
It's this: the discomfort of being new at something is not a sign you're failing. It's the actual cost of learning anything real, and paying it is the only way through.
I still don't speak Dutch the way I speak English. Some days I still point at things on a menu instead of saying them out loud.
But I no longer walk out with the wrong loaf.
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| The quiet streets of Brugge, where patience, repetition, and showing up every day finally brought the words back. |
With love ❤️
- Bitty
Brugge, Belgium 🇧🇪
1 September 2026
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