{"id":10667,"date":"2014-11-14T15:51:03","date_gmt":"2014-11-14T14:51:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/blog\/?p=10667"},"modified":"2014-11-14T15:51:03","modified_gmt":"2014-11-14T14:51:03","slug":"muddling-through","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/?p=10667","title":{"rendered":"Muddling through"},"content":{"rendered":"

to muddle through<\/strong>
\n– “to succeed in some undertaking in spite of lack of organization” [source<\/a>]
\n– “to succeed in doing something despite having no clear plan, method, or suitable equipment” [source<\/a>]
\n– “to cope more or less satisfactorily despite lack of expertise, planning, or equipment.”
\nsynonyms<\/em>: to cope, manage, get by\/along, scrape by\/along, make do, make the best of a bad job [source<\/a>]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

When learning a language, or other things, are you someone who can set goals, make plans and stick to them? <\/p>\n

I do sometimes set myself language learning goals, and often make plans, and even manage to stick to them for a while. However my goals tend to be fuzzy, my plans half-baked, and my sticking-to-it abilities somewhat sporadic. Generally I tend to learn bits and pieces of languages as the fancy takes me, and try a variety of courses and methods, at least until I get bored or find alternatives, and just muddle through as best I can. <\/p>\n

When people ask me for advice about learning languages, as they often do, I have plenty of suggestions, but the only one I stick to is to do a lot of listening. So I don’t really practise what I preach. Is my advice less valuable as a result? Perhaps it is. <\/p>\n

Do you advise people to try learning techniques you don’t use or rarely use yourself?<\/p>\n

Does the concept of muddling through exist in other languages?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

to muddle through – “to succeed in some undertaking in spite of lack of organization” [source] – “to succeed in doing something despite having no clear plan, method, or suitable equipment” [source] – “to cope more or less satisfactorily despite lack of expertise, planning, or equipment.” synonyms: to cope, manage, get by\/along, scrape by\/along, make […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[104,10,13,78],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10667","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","category-language","category-language-learning","category-words-and-phrases"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10667","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10667"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10667\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10667"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10667"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10667"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}