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Welcome to Voices of Ancient Egypt, the podcast for people who don't just want to learn about ancient Egypt, but want to understand it on a deeper, more meaningful level. I'm Melinda Nelsonhurst, an Egyptologist with a PhD in the field and years of experience teaching at the university level, working in Egypt, and training students around the world to read real ancient Egyptian texts. I've spent decades studying the civilization in a traditional academic setting, so you don't have to. And so you can access knowledge that's usually locked behind academic walls. This podcast brings ancient Egyptian history, beliefs, and language to life and shows you that learning hieroglyphs is possible no matter your age, background, or schedule. So whether you want to read hieroglyphs in museums, on social media, or on your next trip to Egypt, you'll find the tools, stories, and encouragement to make it real right here. Let's hear the voices of the ancient world together. Hello, hello, and welcome back to the Voices of Ancient Egypt podcast. So happy you're here with me today because I have a little bit of a story for you that I think is so important. So a few weeks ago, I got this message, I got an email from someone in my community. I'm gonna call her Sarah and she said something that stopped me in my tracks. She said, I love hieroglyphs and I want to learn them so badly, but I just can't stay consistent with studying them. Sometimes I give up for months at a time, and then I just forget everything. What is wrong with me? And that's what struck me when she said, What is wrong with me? Those five words. And the thing is, Sarah is not unusual. I hear versions of this all the time. I see it from people who have tried different methods before they came to my program and told me about what happened. I've seen it in myself when I've been working on learning things too. And I see this with tons of people, people who are clearly intelligent, clearly passionate about hieroglyphs, clearly capable of learning this, absolutely, who have somehow concluded that their inability to stay consistent is a personal failing rather than a solvable problem. And every time I hear it, I want to sit down with that person and walk them through exactly what I'm going to talk about today with you. Because there's nothing wrong with Sarah. And there is nothing wrong with you if you felt the same way. I eventually learned there was nothing wrong with me for this either. What there is in almost every case is one or more of a small number of specific, identifiable, completely fixable problems that are making consistency structurally harder than it needs to be. Basically, what I mean by that is it's harder than it needs to be because it has to do with the structure that you're using or lack thereof, potentially. And today I'm going to name these problems, explain why they happen, and tell you what actually works instead. This is the episode I wish someone had made for me a long time ago. So let's get into these problems that I see so often. So there's really four main ones, and there could be sort of little sub-parts to these, but these really get to the main crux of it. The first of the four is not having a study habit that incorporates small amounts of time at a time, because this can lead to a lot of things. This can lead to, for example, waiting for large amounts of time. I see this so, so often, and I very much understand it because I've absolutely done this too, is the feeling like we can't study unless we have like two hours to do it or something, or maybe even an hour, or maybe we think we need four hours, whatever it is. And so we wait for a day when we have this amount of time. Maybe we think, oh, on the weekend, I'm going to have enough time to do this. And then lo and behold, much of the time, actually, you know, there's a lot of stuff going on in life. And so you just don't find those large amounts of time very often. So this can lead to sort of starting and stopping with your studies. So maybe you do a couple of these larger study sessions, or maybe even more than a couple over a few weeks or something like that. But it's not sustainable, right, over the long haul. And so you end up just dropping it when things are a little busier. It doesn't even have to be a crazy life event, right? Things just get a bit more hectic. And guess what? You know, there's no two-hour block for you to use, right? And I see this also as a similar thing sometimes when people take particular courses that are like shorter courses that go really fast. And so what can happen in those is, well, first of all, that could be hard to keep up. But if you do keep up, maybe it's a six-week thing, for example, and you manage to keep up for the six weeks and you're working a ton, like really fast and large study blocks and stuff like that, you manage to make it through maybe. Some people might, I think a lot actually don't make it through the six weeks, but maybe you make it through three weeks, or maybe you make it through all six weeks, but then it's like you crash afterwards, right? You've done this intensive, almost like a mix of a sprint and a marathon together where you're going really fast and you're putting a ton of time in. And maybe you're able to do that, you're able to sustain it for a little while, but it's not something just like the studying on your own and a few hours at a time, not something that's sustainable over the long term. And so this really leads to that starting and stopping and putting it down for months at a time, maybe even years, especially if your life gets particularly busy. And really the way to get past this is to have a more routine, maybe kind of almost boring or insignificant sounding studies habit. And what I mean by that is we're not talking about doing a flashy, like, study for hours every day for four weeks or a maybe a more appealing sounding initially, at least more appealing sounding until you realize you can't sustain it, of like, I'm gonna do three hours on Saturday, right? And instead look to find small amounts of time in your daily routine, things that don't disappear easily when you know you get an invite to a party, for example, um, or maybe you get uh an author coming into town whose talk you want to go to, right? So any of those could that might just be a one-time thing, but come completely throw off your idea of the three-hour session on Saturday, right? But what it won't throw off, or you know, any other life things, those were sort of specialty things, but also your kid getting sick or, you know, you having an unexpected thing that you have to take care of for a loved one or something like that, those could throw you off for a day. And if you're only studying in these large amounts every now and then, that's a huge amount of your study time that just went, right? Not to mention it's just then that knocks you off your rhythm and it's really hard to get back into it. But what those things don't throw off is when you have a smaller daily habit. And when I say daily, I don't mean you necessarily have to do this like seven days a week. I don't actually know of anybody who does. Some of my students might do five days a week, um, uh, maybe occasionally six, right? Some of them only do like once or twice a week, uh, something like that. When I say daily, I'm not meaning like you have to absolutely stick to like seven days a week. But what I mean is you're doing it really regularly. It's not every now and then when you have a large block of time. And the way you make this sustainable is you do it in a small amount of time. This could be half an hour, it could be 15 minutes. It's whatever you have on a regular basis. So, for example, one of my students said what he did is every morning when he had his coffee, so he said he would pour himself a double shot of espresso. And while he had his espresso, he sat down with hieroglyphs and he would do 20, maybe 30 minutes. And so he doubled it up with this daily habit. He's gonna have his espresso every day, right? Um, or at least on weekdays. So every day for him, I think was five days a week. But, you know, for you it might be three. But the point is, is you fit it in in somewhere that's not like having to make a new space in your life, right? It's something that you already have. Or maybe in the evening you like to have a habit of um solving puzzles, maybe sudo's or crosswords or, you know, something else like that. This could be that type of habit as well. So you could fit it in if you have a slot where you like to spend 20 minutes or something like that unwinding with a puzzle, you can do that with hieroglyphs as well. And this makes it a really sustainable, I guess you could call it low lift way of doing it. And so because it's smaller, not only does it fit into life, it's like practical in that way, but it's also less intimidating. Because one of the things that can happen with large blocks of time is we get intimidated by how much we have to do. And we think about like, oh, I got to go like two hours of hieroglyphs and then, um, what am I gonna work on? I'm not even sure. Like the last time I worked on this was three weeks ago. So I don't, where did I leave off? I'm not sure what to do. And we might end up either just not starting at all or spending a huge amount of our study time just trying to figure out what to do. Whereas if you're doing it regularly, it could even just be 15 minutes at a time. If you're doing that regularly, though, you know what you're working on, and you can do something that I talk about in my program, Master Scribes, it's called parking on a downhill slope to note for yourself exactly what you're gonna do next time. And this is a super simple, like one bullet point kind of note. This is not intricate notes, you know? Um, and it takes you all of like 30 seconds, and it makes it so much easier to do your next study session and wasting no time getting started because you know exactly what to do. So that's how you solve this first problem. Now, our second problem can kind of relate to part of what I talked about in the first problem, in terms of maybe if you've taken a course before, or maybe you've tried a book, um, or maybe you tried some, you know, some online lessons here and there. And this is something I see a lot where you start out fine, right? You're really excited, you're learning some hieroglyphs. Maybe if you're doing it from a book, maybe you've gotten through a couple of chapters and it's going really well. And then all of a sudden, the material gets incredibly difficult. And you try to continue, you just like try to trudge through it. You're like, man, my eyes are glazing over, but okay, I'm just gonna let's refocus, let's do, let's let's continue through it, let's do it. Because you really want to learn this, right? You want to continue. But the further you go, the less you find your understanding. And by that I don't mean just the Egyptian, right? That you're not understanding, but you may be getting so that you don't really understand what the author of the book or the person who's teaching the course is even talking about. And I see this a lot. I experienced this myself absolutely when I was learning hieroglyphs. I felt like I was learning a minimum of two languages at once, even though the instruction was in my native language of English. So I very much can relate to this one. And um, I kept going because I was in a structured graduate program where I had to, right? But I mean, had I been learning this on the side on my own, I absolutely would have put it down and not looked at it for months for sure with this. And the problem is that a lot of times these things are built in ways where the learning doesn't actually connect to what you've already learned. So each piece that you're learning doesn't build on itself. And instead, it's like learning random signs, random words, random facts in a vacuum. And what happens when you encounter that? And, you know, we not only in a vacuum, but the terminology usually is really difficult to understand. And so those random facts are not even very understandable, right? And so what happens with this is oftentimes you'll slowly put it down, right? And this might look like studying less and less often, maybe for shorter times, or you start to pick it up and then you're like, ooh, and you put it back down until you just stop. And it's not a dramatic ending, right? It's not necessarily like um, as people who are younger than I am say now, rage quitting. It's more of a just kind of you fade away because it's like, I don't really understand what's going on, and now I'm like kind of zaps the energy from it, right? And this is because whatever sources you're gonna learn from, you need to have lessons and exercises that actually are gonna take you step by step and build in a logical manner with each new thing connected to something else. So you don't end up with that random fact, random signs in a vacuum kind of situation, not to mention like the really confusing terminology and jargon, right? And this is because this is actually how our brains work. Whenever we learn new information, and they've found this through learning science, it's not just languages like this, it's it's learning anything. Our brain, in order to integrate it into our brains and start to remember it, it needs to attach to something we already have, right? You can technically you can kind of learn something that doesn't attach to it to something else, but it's extremely difficult. And so generally, we're not going to get it the first time for sure. And we might not even get it the fourth time, right? When it's something that really just there's no attachment to anything else in your brain. And that's gonna require a lot more repetition, a lot more trying to unpack that and have it explained before it can finally start to kind of click. So, what you need is things that are actually gonna fit together. You could think of this as kind of like building the scaffolding up of side of a building, right? You don't start two-thirds of the way up the building and expect the scaffolding to stay up, right? No, you attach it to something that's already attached to something else, like the building or the ground, um, and you build from there. Or you could think of it like a puzzle, right? You know, you could have a bunch of random pieces, like maybe there's one kind of in the center, not attached to anything, and then there's another one near the top left, but again, not attached to anything. They're not really going to get you very far when you have a few pieces like that, right? As opposed to say having a whole group of them stuck together and you attach another one to the group, or maybe you have the outline of the puzzle, you do, you've done the outer edges of a puzzle, which is a common technique, right? And now you have a place to start hooking in those other pieces and put it together. And this is exactly how learning in the brain works. So you really need to have those anchor points that you can hook into. And it's so it's important to find a method, find the lessons and exercises you're going to use that they do that rather than just kind of like a bunch of seemingly random different aspects of the language that they throw in one after another. The third problem I tend to see is, and this can be really heavily related actually to the previous one, and that's not having any way to ask questions and also not having any accountability for with others. So this can kind of go hand in hand, of course, with the previous problem because when the material gets hard, of course, one of the things you have is a lot of questions. And oftentimes what may happen is you just feel completely stuck and unable to move forward because you can't get your questions answered to help you understand what you're learning. And this is especially acute, of course, if you're learning through curriculum that really just like throws a ton at you at once or has these scattered random pieces that don't hook into each other, right? But even if you have a wonderful curriculum that builds step by step, you're still going to have questions. They're just going to be deeper questions that get you further along, as opposed to just the very basic beginning of the learning kind of questions. And so in either case, because you can't get the questions answered a lot of times and you don't understand then as much as you want to about what you're learning. And then at the same time, if you don't have anyone to check in with and help you commit to what you're working on each week, this can really cause you to kind of fade away from your studies slowly, kind of like what we talked about before. But it also can cause you to, you know, in the common slang now, rage quit one day because what you're learning just doesn't make any sense. And then you have nobody to ask. So you throw your hands up and you're so frustrated, right? And put it down. So you can kind of play out in either of those ways. And either of these are going to lead to that big gap because maybe you'll come back to it later. But now you've had months or maybe even years that have gone by because you felt so discouraged from this, whether you faded out or you had that rage quit. Either way, I can really keep you away from it for a while. And so what you need instead really is you need to have that community of people who are interested in hieroglyphs and they love them just as much as you do. This can help so much in terms of keeping you accountable, right? Because you can check in with each other of what you're working on, keep you going each week. And also, you want to have a way to have your questions answered because questions are so powerful and they deserve to be shared and to be answered. And if you want to hear more about the power of questions, by the way, check out episode number 29 called The Question Changes Everything. It's an episode all about how important questions are and the ways you can use questions and how they really play out and how my students help themselves and also help each other by asking questions. And the fourth problem I see that causes this kind of inconsistency is really simply not having a study system in the first place. So the last couple of ones we talked about, I talked a bit about sort of working with some kind of set of lessons or curriculum, or, you know, whether it's a book or a course or maybe one of these like really fast crash courses, like we talked about with the first problem. But a problem I see j just as often, or maybe more often actually, is just not having any system at all, right? And so you're not sure what to work on next. And this causes you to have to spend a lot of time looking around for videos or maybe another book because the one you had maybe didn't work, or it was just a super short intro and you finished it and now you're not sure what to do next. And you're just you're looking all over and everything, and maybe you've gotten some results. Your results are okay, but maybe not stellar. And this method really you eventually realize is like wasting a ton of your time, right? Because you're trying to cobble this all together and it takes up so much of your time that because of this, eventually life gets busy, life gets in the way, and it might be a big event that happens, like somebody in your family is seriously ill, for example, or you have, you know, just a huge project at work, whatever it might be, or it could even just be, you know, it's the holidays, it's a little busier, or something like that. But because you've had to sink so much time into finding these materials, it doesn't take much to knock you off track, right? And especially if you have any of these other problems combined with it, like maybe you're trying to study in the big sessions, right? But which you probably are because it takes you hours just to figure out what you're gonna study in the first place. And so by doing all this digging and cobbling it together, this can work a little bit in the beginning and you can get, you know, some results, but eventually it just knocks you off track because it's not sustainable. It doesn't produce the best results to start with, and then it takes so much time that it's really just not sustainable. And that's why the solution is really just to have a study session that actually has built-in lessons and practice built into it, not just that explains it to you and shows you a couple of examples, but really has you working on the real thing. So, and when I say practice, in a book that has types at practice, it's it's better than no practice for sure. But the best practice is when you can practice on real objects. So, I mean, of course, if you can go to a museum or you're in Egypt and you can look at them in person, that's wonderful. But photographs actually are when it comes to studying and learn this and for practice are just as good as looking at the thing right in front of you. And so I encourage you to find a system that has practice built into it that actually includes the real objects, like photos of real objects, and not just sort of typeset examples that all look the same black and white on the page. And not only does this improve your learning because you have these wonderful things to practice with, but when you have these set lessons and practice materials already ready to go, you know immediately exactly what to do when you have a study session, right? And so this helps you in addition to the other things we've talked about, like when you have somebody to ask questions and you have a regular study routine and all of these things. Now you know exactly what to work on each time. So when you have 15 minutes, it's easy to pick up, watch a quick lesson, work a little bit on this exercise. Whatever it might be that your next step is, it's made so much easier. It totally gets rid of so much of that friction to use a term that's often used in, of course, in the sciences and in computers, especially when like with app development and stuff like that. You know, friction is anything that makes it a little harder to do something, whether it's pushing a button or having to spend your time finding materials, whatever it might be, that's added friction. So you remove so much of that friction when you have some kind of set study system and methods that have all the materials for you. So there's no more having to schedule a whole bunch of time to study and then actually using up all of that time just trying to figure out what you're gonna study. And these four problems are the ones I see absolutely the most. And they are exactly why I wanted to create my programs for learning hieroglyphs that I have created, including my next level hieroglyphs program, Master Scribes. And it's because as an Egyptologist, professor, and hieroglyphs teacher online now for several years, who's helped hundreds of people learn to read hieroglyphs, I see these problems all the time. And one of the worst things about it is that they lead to way too many people thinking that there's something wrong with them and they can't learn hieroglyphs, just like with Sarah. And that's why I created these programs like Master Scribes. And on September 17th, I'm hosting an open house for Master Scribes that's going to take you behind the scenes of the program, show you how everything works and how my students are going from knowing nothing or having learned some hieroglyphs to reading in museums and even reading historical documents, literary stories, medical texts, and the book of the dead. And at the end of the open house, I'll be opening applications for Master Scribes. And I'm doing something special this time I've never done before, which is when you apply for Master Scribes, you'll unlock the option to book a consultation call with me, where we'll build your custom study plan for you right on the call. It will be me personally doing that. This is something I've never done before, and I'm not sure if I'm gonna do it in the future. So I would encourage you to apply and book your call. And after the call, your custom study plan is yours to keep no matter what your future plans hold. So make sure you're there at the open house to learn all about MasterScribes and get your application in first. You can save your spot for the open house at voicesofancientegypt.comslash open house so we can get you up and running with a system for learning hieroglyphs that really works. I can't wait to see you there.