Perfectionism.
Is it a good thing or a bad thing?
To the extent that we rarely can be perfect, it's probably an
unattainable philosophy or the goal of perfection isn't attainable.
Should we strive for it?
In my opinion, when it comes to language learning, perfectionism is an obstacle
to progress in learning a language.
So the other evening I was with some friends, uh, friends of my son
actually, and they were talking about their daughter who's in France and
she's a perfectionist in whatever she does, whether it be cleaning her room
or knitting or homework at school.
And now she's, uh, working to, uh, improve her French living in
France and, and working there.
But she's such a perfectionist that uh, she really hates making a mistake.
So when I lived in Japan, they had a term for improving your precision
and reducing quality issues at work, increasing productivity.
And the term was kaizen, which means improve.
So the idea of constant improvement, I think is a good idea in any field.
And I think in language learning, we always wanna strive to be more
precise in our use of words, a little more accurate in our pronunciation.
But where the perfectionism comes in is where people are
afraid of making a mistake.
And I'm going to explain why when it comes to language learning, this is particularly
harmful because errors are the driver of success in language learning.
And I'm gonna explain that in some detail with reference to what we
know about how the brain works.
So if you are designing a bridge or if you are a neurosurgeon, you
can't have too many errors, so there should be a major emphasis on being
as accurate, as precise as possible, even if you don't achieve perfection,
but that's striving to be as close to error free as possible makes a lot
of sense in those fields of endeavor.
In language learning, on the other hand, errors are good, mistakes are
good, and I've referred to it in the past, this probabilistic error- driven
process of how we as humans acquire language, which is in fact very similar
to how AI, artificial intelligence uses massive exposure to language to come up
with increasingly accurate, you know, ability to answer questions and so forth.
Not only is perfectionism counter to the way we learn languages, but it
introduces a lot of negative feelings, fear of failure, procrastination, anxiety.
In the pursuit of perfectionism we do things like staring at conjugation
tables over and over again, studying lists of words over and over again
in the hope that somehow we will
be able to master points of grammar or vocabulary.
And of course it's very difficult to do that.
And the more we try to force ourselves to do that, the
less likely we are to succeed, particularly in language learning.
But I think in many areas, learning is a process of expectations, and
then if what we encounter is what we expected, there's less of a learning
opportunity, if what we encounter is very much against what we expected,
there's a larger learning opportunity, and this is based on research on how
the brain learns, and I'm going to leave a lot of links here so that
you can do reading on your own.
It's really very interesting, but the degree of learning is
proportionate to how different the result is from our expectation,
and what that results in is the fact that as we progress in the language,
we are more confident in what we are expecting to see in the language, and
so we have fewer opportunities to learn.
We make fewer errors.
Making fewer errors means we learn less or we learn more slowly.
And this relates to some extent to what we call the plateau or the doldrum.
So in the initial period, everything is new, everything is uncertain.
We don't know what to expect.
Big difference between our expectations and, and what happens in the language,
and so we learn more quickly.
And this learning from error applies to all aspects of the language.
As you will see if you go to some of these links that I'll leave in the description
box, you know, it used to be thought, for example, that irregular endings of
words like verbs or nouns would be learned by memorizing or learning those words,
but it turns out that's not the case.
In other words, by sufficient exposure, by a sufficient number of events where
we have certain expectations and the result is different, if we have enough of
these, we learn the vocabulary, we learn the structure, we learn irregular words.
Everything is learned from the language.
It doesn't require a teacher to teach them to us, and this is a
surprising result of recent research.
In other words, prediction and prediction error is how we learn.
Therefore, the more errors you make, the better.
So the more you venture out of an area where you are confident you
know what's going to happen, you know what the word is, you know what the
structure is, the more you learn.
So let me give you an example.
Not so much of my exposure to language, but of a situation.
That I've mentioned before, and that is I had been learning Russian, I
felt I was not bad in Russian, I was in St. Petersburg, wanted to
buy a train ticket to go to Vyborg.
And so I'm finally, you know, waiting in line and finally there I am and
there's this lady, and I say, I wanna buy a ticket to go to Vyborg.
And she came back with an answer that I couldn't understand because I had
not been in that situation before.
I couldn't predict what was going to happen.
And so what did happen was quite contrary to what I had expected.
But I learned from that and I think if I were to go back to that situation
again, maybe I will somewhere have stored the kind of things that I might
expect a person like that, uh, teller at the railway station to say, or maybe I
would just be mentally better prepared.
However, it was an error that I have learned from.
Now it is true that we can react in different ways to our errors.
We can be saddened by them, we can be upset by them.
I think to some extent, traditional language teaching at schools makes
us wary of making mistakes since we get the tests and if we make
more mistakes, we get poorer marks,
so it conditions us to not like errors.
However, if we understand that the driver of our learning is our mistakes, in other
words, if we use a word incorrectly, if we misunderstand something, if the
sentence that comes at us has a word in there that we didn't expect, or
when we go to speak, we stumble all of those gaps in our expectations,
actually help us learn gradually, slowly.
Now.
For that to work, we have to have a positive attitude.
If we are frustrated or nervous about making a mistake, we can't take advantage,
and there is research to show that to some extent, a disappointment can
also help us to learn some degree of negative response can help us learn.
Obviously, a positive reaction helps us learn, but if we are too
frustrated by our inability to get things right, that can actually
prevent learning, prevent retrieval.
Now that may be how the brain works, but many people who are
perfectionists probably still prefer to be perfectionists.
So let's you know, look at the reason why perfectionists are perfectionists.
It has to do to some extent with their belief system.
And I would recommend two books again that I've mentioned before.
One is The Mind and the Brain by Jeffrey Schwartz, where he shows how people
who have obsessive compulsive behavior.
And I'm not saying that being a perfectionist is a form of
obsessive compulsive behavior, but maybe it is to some extent.
And he demonstrates how we can use our will, our mind to persuade our
brain to not have this circuitry of this ambition to be perfect.
And the other book that I think could be relevant is one that I've also mentioned
before, which is Live More, think Less by a Danish writer Pia Callesen,
and she talks about metacognitive therapy, where she says, there are
three levels of thoughts in our brain.
The lowest level is the thousands of thoughts that bombard us throughout
the day, many of which are negative.
The middle level is what we think about these negative thoughts.
In other words, do we, you know, get totally wrapped up
in them and, and dwell on them?
And, uh, are we absorbed by these negative thoughts or are we able
to organize them, let them go?
Limit them to certain parts of the day.
And this ability to deal with the negative thoughts at that sort
of middle level in our brains is determined by our belief system.
And so I think it's important in language learning to have a belief system that
says, I wanna learn this language, I will do whatever is necessary and therefore
I'm not gonna allow perfectionism to stand in the way of my learning.
That is my belief system.
And that way we can deal with negative thoughts, anxiety, desire
to be perfect and so forth when these thoughts arise, at least perhaps.
So then the third point is, so what should we do?
Uh, what actions, what goals should we have in our language learning
that will maximize this opportunity to take advantage of, you know,
error prediction in our learning.
Well, I think the first thing is to have as a goal that you want to interact
with the language as much as possible.
You wanna provide as many opportunities as possible for you
to interact with the language.
There are many ways, and you can, as I mentioned before,
you wanna introduce variety.
You can go at it sentence mode, you can, you know, try to reconstitute the
sentence and see if your expectation is different from what happens.
But a great variety of interaction with the language and with vocabulary items and
structures, the ability to interact with them in a variety of different contexts
is going to help develop the sense of how the language works, which is ultimately
more effective in learning grammar and learning vocabulary than any deliberate
study of the rules or lists of words.
So the variety of context that you expose yourself, two.
And the way in which you do that using different content, content of interest,
hopefully a variety of different activities, including, for example, I use
the matching pairs, flashcards at LingQ.
Again, not with the idea that I'm gonna master them or remember them,
but simply to expose myself to these and see how my expectation matches
what is in fact the meaning of the word in the case of those flashbacks.
So I've said many times that, uh, language learning is a
matter of motivation and time.
So you wanna ensure that you spend a lot of time, therefore you wanna do
things that you enjoy doing, and you wanna maintain your level of motivation.
Here again, you wanna do things that you enjoy doing.
Enjoy talking to people, talk to people.
Don't worry about your mistakes.
Enjoy listening.
Don't worry about what you don't understand.
Read you enjoy reading.
Don't worry about what you don't understand.
Again, if you enjoy doing flashcards, just do them.
Don't worry about whether you're able to recall a particular flashcard.
Just keep yourself going exposed to the language.
The more exposure to the language, the more time you spend, the more you
enjoy yourself, the better you will do.
And part of that is accepting and enjoying your mistakes.
Because errors are the driver of success in language learning and
perfectionism is something that we should try to avoid if we can.
Thank you for listening.
Bye for now.
