Why You Need to Make Mistakes When Speaking a New Language

Hi there, Steve Kaufmann here. Today I want to talk about mistakes. We all make mistakes. Some people are upset when they make mistakes. I'm not, and I want to go into some detail on how we can take advantage of this, the mistakes that we make to do better in our language learning. Remember if you enjoy these videos, please subscribe.

You can click on the bell to get notifications. And by all means join me at LingQ where I learn languages. So, you know, we can not understand when things are said, or we can not understand when we read, because we didn't quite hear, hear it properly or we've forgotten the word, or we don't know the word. So there are all kinds of ways that we can simply not understand, but that's not a mistake.

There's no anxiety there. There's only anxiety if you don't understand when you're in a conversation. In other words, somebody says something to you and you don't understand what they're saying so that you can reply. You can't say anything. There there's anxiety. But if you are engaged in input activities, such as listening and reading, certainly I can tolerate a lot of vagueness, ambiguity, misunderstanding. It really doesn't bother me because I know that through continuing my input activities, I will gradually see things more clearly, understand things more clearly. There's no great pressure on me. However, as soon as you start speaking with someone, things change, as I said, if you don't understand what they're saying, that's quite intimidating.

In fact, to me, that's the most intimidating thing when I don't understand what people are saying, I can't even attempt to reply. However, there's also the problem when you say something and you say it wrong, you use the wrong word, you use the wrong tense, you use the wrong form of the verb or the noun, whatever it might be or, or the structure, the phrasing is incorrect.

And so your conscious... Or you might pronounce poorly and you're conscious of the difficulty that you have. Uh, sometimes you can watch a video or listen to an audio of yourself and you will notice mistakes that you made, that maybe you weren't aware of while you were engaged in the conversation. And that's often very useful because then you can really then zoom in on those areas and try to improve or, you know, pay attention to them when you next come across them and in listening and reading.

But, um, It is a bit unsettling. There's a fear. People don't want to make mistakes. Um, when we study of school, we make mistakes on our little test. And so we get marked down for them. And so we, we sort of develop this habit, this sense that mistakes are bad. Uh, if I get a test at school and I go 10 out of 10, I'm good.

If I go five out of 10, I'm bad. But the reality is that he's in my experiences that I can get something right one time and wrong the next time, wrong the first time and right the next time. Uh, it depends what the brain is doing at the moment. Sometimes it remembers it correctly and sometimes it doesn't.

And so I think it's not a good thing to train ourselves, to think of mistakes as bad things. To me, a mistake is an opportunity to improve. You make a mistake very often you're aware that you made a mistake. You're either aware that, uh, you might be aware of what the correct usage was. Or you might simply not be sure what the correct usage is.

And so you are bothered by that, that being bothered by mistakes, potential or actual mistakes, it drives that curiosity, that desire to focus in on that structure, that use of words or whatever, and to get better at it. And so to that extent, mistakes are a sign that we are pushing ourselves outside of our comfort zone.

Uh, it's an opportunity to become aware of the gaps we have in what we have learned. It's a, it's a very positive thing in the process of learning a language. That's why I'm not a fan of tests. Uh, there are people who can score well on tests who can get certain fine points of grammar correctly, but cannot communicate properly,

don't understand very well. I think if you throw yourself into the idea of communicating for the sake of communicating and gradually building up your comprehension, building up your vocabulary, building up your ability to marshal the words, uh, produce the words in the correct sort of usage pattern. All of which the brain will gradually do.

The brain will not be able to remember a specific rule. Uh, if you try to force it to remember the, you know, the specific usage patterns, but the brain will gradually get more and more used to these patterns, possibly reminded by a grammatic, uh, grammar explanation, and very often reminded by the fact that you got it wrong.

And so the, the fact that you got it wrong triggers this desire to get closer to what that usage is. Now, there are people who continue to make the same mistakes over and over again. And I think that's a lack of, of attentiveness to the language. Uh, you have to want to notice what's happening in the language.

So I definitely do recommend recording, say a conversation or doing a video even, in a foreign language and then listening to it and see, seeing if you can pick out your own mistakes. And even if you pick them out and you look up the rule or you pay attention to it, that doesn't mean you're going to get it right. The next time there is no immediate correction.

Teachers may think that they can correct you and that therefore you'll get it right. That has never been my experience. When I taught English, say, as a tutor at LingQ, I could correct the person three, four times. They would still make the same mistake. When I go through my, uh, tutors reports at lingQ I'll see that I get the same correction from them, the same phrase or word that I used wrong.

I use it wrong week after week, but eventually I get it right. So it doesn't bother me that because my whole, the whole learning process is a continuing, a continuum of knowing less, understanding less, making more mistakes and gradually understanding or having more words and making fewer mistakes. So at a given point in time, that I'm making a lot of mistakes

that's an indication that I'm learning. You know, if I were to limit myself to a very narrow range of words and only ever talk about the weather or things that I'm comfortable talking about, where I have got a sort of a routine that I know is more or less correct. That's not learning the language. It's only when I push myself into, you know, ever, you know, broader, uh, range of subject matter,

and try to express my views on those things that I'm learning. And of course, inevitably, if I do that, I'm going to make more mistakes. So mistakes are valuable. Mistakes are an indication that you're pushing yourself beyond the comfort of a limited range of subject matter. If you're paying attention to what you're saying, paying attention to what the native speaker is saying, then you are able to then focus in on these areas.

When you are listening and reading and all of this is part of the gradual process of improving yourself. And as I have said, often in quoting Manfred Spitzer, the brain cannot do otherwise than learn. If you expose the brain to the patterns of the language, you expose the brain to try to say things and getting them wrong, and then reminding yourself of what the correct usage was,

and you keep, keep on doing these things, the brain will gradually develop. Patterns for using the language that are more and more correct, more and more, uh, based on the standard usage of, of what you've been listening to and what you've been hearing people say, but that process of learning is a slow process.

It's not because you are taught something that you're going to get it right. So we need to have patience. We need to be indulgent with ourselves. We need to recognize mistakes for what they are, valuable mind milestones as we progress in our language. So there you have it. That's my take on mistakes and, um, I'll leave you with a couple of videos that might reinforce this message.

Thanks for listening. Bye. For now.