Are you shy about speaking? (General discussion) Language Learning Forum

Are you shy about speaking?
Tags: Shyness \| Speaking
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Language Learning Forum : General discussion

50 messages over 7 pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Linc
Newbie
Macau
Joined 5444 days ago
29 posts - 45 votes
Studies: English
Studies: French

Message 49 of 50

15 February 2010 at 1:00am | IP Logged

I do feel shy when I speak a foreign language. And need to improve...
1 person has voted this message useful

kyssäkaali
Diglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5555 days ago
203 posts - 376 votes

Speaks: English*, Finnish

Message 50 of 50

15 February 2010 at 5:42am | IP Logged

lynxrunner wrote:

I very shy about speaking with strangers, so you can imagine that
speaking with strangers in another language must be torturous for me.

When I went to Montreal for a week, I had to summon up all my courage just to order
some coffee at a Starbucks (it didn't help that my family was there and that they
thought my French sucked donkey posterioir, so to speak). Asking a man for video games
in French was horrible because I understood about 60% of what he said, leaving me a
little confused. I think I would have felt better if there wasn't anybody there because
I felt, throughout the trip, that I was being judged on my French. My family is very
supportive of my linguistic adventures, but I still feel nervous speaking French in
front of anyone, Francophone or not.

I guess you could say it's a matter of ego or lack thereof. There's a kid at school who
speaks Russian (he's a year younger than me, we have the same lunch, and we're in the
same club) but I'm too shy to even consider saying "Privet" because I'm scared he'll do
something jerk-ass and go all out with slang and stuff (he's the kind of person that
would do that, let me tell you :P).

I have no problem writing in other languages. The fact that I can always go back and
change it makes it better. Speaking... yes. That is a problem no matter which language
I work with.

This post is about 2 months old, but it pretty much sums me up entirely. As far as I'm
concerned, you and I are the same person! My first month in Finland I freaked whenever
I had to actually muster up the courage to use the language, and even now in rapid
spoken speech I only understand maybe 60% like you mentioned, so I'm always at a loss
of "WHAT DO I SAY?" and then get hung up over my response and freak out about THAT too
because I don't want to construct a grammatically-deformed sentence and make mistakes
worse than children of the language make.

Writing? Ha! No problem at all. As long as it's not with an instant messenger and I
have to come up with immediate responses with no chance of going back and correcting
them....
2 persons have voted this message useful

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