Warning: this post is essentially a string of disjoionted, stream-of-consciousness thoughts that may or may not be interesting. Read at your own risk.
Over the last few days, I've started writing a few sentences of the occasional journal entry or other short personal document in a conlang. Again. For the millionth time, in full knowledge that I'm going to stop at some point and never actually use the language as much as I would have liked to.
At some level, this is just a natural consequence of how I conlang and how I go about trying to learn those of my conlangs that I actually try to learn. I have a bad habit of starting numerous projects and not taking the majority of them very far; among that many scattered projects, it is almost impossibly difficult to pick one to commit to for long enough to actually be able to use it.
This makes logical sense, but is also intensely frustrating.
I've tried a number of different strategies, such as writing a sentence or two in the language every day (as mentioned above) or otherwise trying to use it just a little bit, often enough to get used to it. While that should theoretically work — the only way you ever learn a language is by using it a little bit at a time — it usually falls apart within a few days or weeks, when I get lazy about it one day and then find that this has given me "permission" to stop caring about the project.
All of these strategies also suffer from that fact that, in addition to being a strategy for learning the conlang, I am typically also using them as a way of developing it. This is, hopefully, understandable, as languages don't just appear fully formed out of thin air, but it does add an additional dimension of difficulty not present when learning a natlang. Too often, I get bogged down in the details of how I should express a particular concept, and lose track of the sentence I originally wanted to write.
And this, on top of that, is only one half of a vicious cycle. When developing a language for real-world use, it's hard to enumerate all of the words you'll want without actually using the language. And when use of the language stalls due to lack of vocabulary, this begins to feed back on itself. As such, while waiting until the language is more fully developed might sound like a good idea in theory, in practice, it usually breaks down when my attention shifts to a new project before "more fully developed" ever actually happens.
Sometimes I wonder if I should be looking for a conlang learning "accountability buddy", or something like that. Or just try and commit to posting regular updates on my progress, as I'm currently trying to do with a software project.
I know several other people in various fora who have learned their own conlangs to an impressive degree of fluency. Is there some trick to it, or is it just the kind of hard problem that everyone has to solve for themselves?