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How to deal with nerves when speaking? | ||
Tags: Loss of confidence | Speaking | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| Rem Groupie United Kingdom Joined 3758 days ago 66 posts - 96 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: German, Mandarin, Czech, French | Message 1 of 17 11 June 2015 at 8:23pm | IP Logged | |||||
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In my quest to conquer my speaking/listening demons I’m attempting the italki
challenge. I've told myself that I'm not going to chicken out this time, but it isn't easy to keep going. So far I’m finding my nerves to be the main problem (I still have to take a deep breath before forcing myself to click the ‘answer’ button on the call) and I can’t seem to stop myself thinking that I'm making a fool of myself the entire time. I was kicking myself after my last session; picking out every little mistake that I had made and telling myself how useless I was and how badly I’d screwed up. Obviously this is not a helpful frame of mind to be in and it needs to stop. I’ve been trying to think of ways to combat this but if anyone else has any suggestions/advice I’d really appreciate it. :) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| James29 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5376 days ago 1265 posts - 2113 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 2 of 17 11 June 2015 at 8:28pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Are you talking about an exchange or working with a tutor? If you are talking about doing an exchange with someone you should just speak in English the first few times and tell your partner that you'd like to make up the time later after you get more comfortable. It will be MUCH easier when you already feel comfortable with the person and have been correcting them with their English for a few sessions.
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| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5263 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 3 of 17 11 June 2015 at 8:49pm | IP Logged | |||||
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In addition to James29's great advice, if it's tutoring you are talking about then there's no need to worry. A professional tutor has seen and heard it all. I find it very helpful to have a good sense of humor and laugh at my mistakes as I go. That doesn't mean to shrug them off. Learn from them. Try to reduce them, of course, but laughing at my mistakes, instead of laughing them off, has worked well for me. Dust yourself off and get back up on the horse again after you fall. After a few sessions you'll find that what you've been so worried about wasn't that bad at all.
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| BeBetter Newbie United States Joined 3492 days ago 18 posts - 22 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 4 of 17 11 June 2015 at 9:51pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I am in the same situation as you. I keep telling myself this weekend is the weekend I am
going to find a language partner or tutor. I have the same fear as you, that I am going to look stupid or they are not going to understand me. Hopefully this weekend will be the one where I do it. Just know you are not the only one! Good luck! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5983 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 5 of 17 11 June 2015 at 10:11pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Keep going, it gets easier!
And don't tear yourself apart over making mistakes. An informal Skype session with a language tutor is a really low stakes environment. It's not an important exam, or a job interview, or a court appearance. So go on and allow yourself to make a fool of yourself. Your mistakes don't matter in the great scheme of things, but they might help you learn something. Also, remember that if you could already speak the language perfectly you wouldn't be paying for lessons, you'd be getting paid for them. 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Rem Groupie United Kingdom Joined 3758 days ago 66 posts - 96 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Mandarin, Czech, French | Message 6 of 17 12 June 2015 at 4:06am | IP Logged | |||||
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Thank you all for the responses. :)
I’m only working with tutors at the moment. I don’t feel ready to attempt exchanges yet and paying the tutors for their time makes me feel slightly less guilty about subjecting them to my efforts. ;) I guess I’ll just have to get used to making mistakes. I hate saying something when I’m not sure whether or not it’s right (curse of the perfectionist). It’s proving a definite hindrance to my language learning and I’m at the point now where it’s really starting to show (and slow down my progress). One step at a time I guess. :) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5533 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 7 of 17 12 June 2015 at 12:46pm | IP Logged | |||||
Seriously, tutors exist to hear people make mistakes. That's, like, their job. Normally, a good tutor won't try to correct every mistake. They'll look for patterns, for mistakes that you make a lot, and which indicate some sort of weakness in your language skills. Then they'll pick out the most important pattern of mistakes, and ask you to focus on that for a while. Once you've mostly dealt with that, they'll help you with the next largest problem. In the real world, it's usually better to speak fairly fluidly, with occasional mistakes, then it is to speak really slowly while obsessing over every word. I fight with this all the time, myself—I have a pretty large passive vocabulary, and I often find myself asking, "Do I want to stop and search my memory for the perfect word? Or is it better to use a simpler word that conveys the same general idea, and keep speaking?" Good tutors are deeply familiar with these tradeoffs. You might need to try a few tutors before somebody "clicks", but this is what you're paying them for.
It sounds like you're mostly wrestling with perfectionism here (and not, say, with social anxiety). So here's some advice which might help. But if it doesn't help, feel free to ignore it. :-) Learning a language involves lots of mistakes: pronunciation mistakes, grammar mistakes, word choice mistakes, and—the most memorable all—mistakes where you accidentally say something hilarious and profane. So let's start with the most entertaining mistakes. French speakers learning English will probably mix up "sheet" and "shit" at some point. People learning Spanish famously say "I'm pregnant" when they mean "I'm embarrassed." Romance speakers learning French will try to use the word baiser for kiss, when it's normally a crude word for sexual intercourse. I once mixed up baisser "to lower" with baiser, which was rather embarrassing. So what do you do when you make a mistake like that? I've found that if I look slightly embarrassed, then laugh at humor of the situation, then nobody cares. I mean, imagine a French speaker learning English who says, "I need to go put the shits on the bed." What are you going to do when you hear this? You're probably going to laugh a bit (even if you try not to) and you're going point out the mistake. And if they look slightly sheepish and laugh along with you, then everything will be fine. But if they completely flip out and practically die from shame, then that will be a hundred times more awkward for everybody than the initial mistake ever was. :-) So the absolute worst-case scenario is that you laugh at yourself for a moment, then shrug it off and get on with your life. What about ordinary mistakes? Again, this is a totally natural part of the process. Native 3-year-olds butcher pronunciation, they butcher grammar, and they say hilarious things all the time. (I mean, pretty much the entire joke of the US Dennis the Menace is that Dennis doesn't understand adult idioms.) And if native kids make lots of mistakes, nobody can really expect you to completely bypass those stages. So my advice is to accept that you're going to make a lot of mistakes, and dive in anyway. Ask your tutors to point out the mistakes you make the most, and only worry about your biggest mistakes at any given time. In generally, a lot of your mistakes will go away on their own, especially if you're getting lots of input, so if you just focus on the mistakes you make the most often, you'll make rapid progress. Also, consider writing short texts regularly (100 words is fine), and getting them corrected. If you want to be perfectionist, writing is probably the best place to do it, because you can look things up at your leisure, and study each of the corrections you receive. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5767 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 8 of 17 12 June 2015 at 2:09pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm in the same boat, and trying to remind myself that the other person has probably seen all of it already doesn't actually help me. After all, the fear of making a complete fool out of yourself may be irrational, but it is there, it has a real impact on my life. And if it's bad enough that you do have to ask for advice or talk about it that's a good indicator that no matter how many rational arguments you have against it they don't help in the key moments.
I know three basic strategies to deal with this kind of thing. The first one is overlearning and drilling until you can use the skill even under pressure. That's part of how FSI works. It works. It's also quite stressful and limited in the number of situations you can cover, and unless you take part in a program like FSI I think it's best used only to overcome the most difficult situations. I do this when I skip a course in my language classes, for example. Language islands work like that, too. The important bit here is to find the right moment to stop relying on overlearning (and don't fall into the trap of telling yourself that you will shadow just for another week and then you'll have the courage to actually talk to people.) The second one is baby steps and familiarity. If you try to do too much at once you may not manage it, or if you manage it's exhausting and instead of learning that you can do it, you feel like it was really difficult and the next time you want to do it you'll feel just as anxious before. The point here is to mainly choose to get into situations where you have a reasonable chance of calming down after a while. Making friends with people who speak the language but who you care about more for their company than for their language skills can help. Building routine interactions helps. Making tasks easier by dividing them into smaller tasks or addressing your issues seperately helps too, even if you feel like you're cheating. If I decided to call somebody on italki today I would certainly sit here and think 'oh I am so bad at target language, what should I say, I hope they can understand me, what should I talk about, I'm so going to make a fool of myself' and I would completely forget that I have pretty much the same thoughts when I have to call somebody in German. And I would most likely not even consider that we might first talk in English to make it easier for me. (I'm also nervous when speaking English but it's still better than in my weaker languages.) Add on top of that a language I'm still pretty bad at - it's no wonder that I tend to find myself unable to call. In a way my choice is between "Call somebody, talk (in English mostly), maybe we get along and I find myself able to calm down (and gradually speak more in the target language)" and "Don't call anybody". So choosing English as a crutch is legitimate, you just need to challenge yourself to stop using it once you are a bit calmer. The third strategy is to get yourself into a situation in which you have to use the language and from which you can't escape. Sooner or later you'll calm down. It works. It's also pretty hard. I for one can only do that in the target language country or when a situation regularly occurs during classes or work (and I can't get out of it by blushing and being nervous and somebody taking pity on me.) I don't manage this with internet based language exchange, but I do at least partly manage it with face to face language exchange because when the other person is directly in front of me my manners take over and I concentrate more on that person and the conversation than on my nervousness. Edited by Bao on 12 June 2015 at 2:13pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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