I hate to be the one to tell you this, but you’re wrong. You make mistakes. But hey, that’s actually good to hear, right? Because now you know you have things to fix!
People hate to be corrected, and don’t you dare tell me otherwise. But that’s something we’ve got to get over when we learn a language. You’re going to be wrong sometimes. Deal with it! Here’s how you can benefit from making mistakes.
Fear
Before we jump into turning mistakes into tools, let’s talk about how a fear of making mistakes will be an obstacle in your language studies.
- You’ll hesitate to try speaking
- You’ll never explore the language to see all it has to offer
- You’ll produce really short sentences that don’t sound fluent at all
Basically, if you’re afraid to use language for fear of making a mistake, you won’t use the language at all. If you’re not using the language, what’s the point of studying it?
Try to come to terms with the fact that you’ll never be as good as you want to be. That’s a good thing!
Perception
Consider the job of a scientist. They experiment. And they fail. They fail A LOT. After all of those failures and adjustments and more failures, eventually they succeed. But, when you think about it, they’re not really failing – For each experiment that gets them closer to their goal, if even just slightly, they’re succeeding.
So, if experiments lead to success, and you’re not experimenting, then that means that you’re actually failing by not trying. How embarassing! Failing takes absolutely no effort at all! You better get into gear and start experimenting then!
Failure as a tool
Failure is actually a tool that you can use to improve in your language skills. The experience of failing itself creates a strong memory. You’ll probably remember the incident much more clearly than just cramming another vocabulary term in your head on any given weekday.
Failure is an experience, and experience is progress. Everyone was at sometime a newbie. Even babies. Babies are the biggest newbies ever. They fail at language all the time. And that’s why they succeed. Babies don’t have time to get disheartened at misconjugating a verb, or using an incorrect particle, or mistakenly using “street” as a verb. They just blurt out whatever they think might work, and adults react to it, and usually end up correcting the baby. Eventually, the baby wises up and learns to say it right.
The baby wins.
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I completely agree. I’m doing a project at the moment to explore this “failure as tool” thing (youtube.com/tdesdj). You’ve explained the ideas behind my experiment better than I could – thank you!
Hey Sarah, looks like you’re doing pretty well on youtube! I’m glad to see you’re getting some good feedback on your videos to help you out.
P.S. You’ve got a very soothing voice. There are a few rare voices that have this affect on me where my neck tingles and I just feel completely relaxed listening to it. You’ve got that sort of voice.