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Making Mistakes | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5766 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes  Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 9 of 12 10 January 2013 at 10:08am | IP Logged |
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If your first guess was correct, just make sure to remember it so you can use it the next time. Don't beat yourself up over not saying it. The next time you will feel more sure about that one construction.
Learning how to use language is neither only memorizing items, nor guessing arbitrarily. It's a process that constantly refines itself, everytime you use a language actively as well as passively. Yet, when you are too perfectionistic, your reaction to mistakes will be a stress reaction. That means that you will remember the incident rather well later on - but you can only correct a few mistakes like that every day. When you are relaxed and curious about why you came up with something wrong instead of attaching the emotional value of a mistake that should never be repeated again, it's possible to use your time conversing with other people more effectively. Actually it can be fun to go ahead and guess and look at the other person's reaction and be proven right, or proven wrong and get a chance to try again, and to figure out what went wrong. It's not easy to change one's mindset like that, but it helps to try and create situations where curiosity is stronger than perfectionism. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| renaissancemedi Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Greece Joined 4358 days ago 941 posts - 1309 votes Speaks: Greek*, Ancient Greek*, EnglishC2 Studies: French, Russian, Turkish, Modern Hebrew | Message 10 of 12 10 January 2013 at 10:35am | IP Logged |
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I agree with Bao so much.
I am not being a perfectionist on purpose. It's just pride getting in the way. When learning I try to be humble, for my own sake. Personally I don't have a problem speaking and making mistakes at all. It's the only way to really loosen your tongue. However, I am very alert to how the native speaker will respond, to pick up the correct form of whatever is being said. I believe there is a secret code among language-consious people, that you reply using the same phrase, correcting the mistake of the foreigner so as to help, but without becoming rude or obvious. When I write I try to be a perfectionist though. But that's different, if you think about it. I am afraid it doesn't apply on this forum, because I view it as a conversation, rather than a written thing. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Darklight1216 Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5100 days ago 411 posts - 639 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German | Message 11 of 12 10 January 2013 at 5:00pm | IP Logged |
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Mistakes are a part of learning. I decided from the get go that mistakes weren't going to stop me from learning French. I make mistakes, speak with inproper grammar, misspell things, and forget the word that I want to say in English so I can be absolutely sure that it will happen in any future languages that I study. That's just a part of being an imperfect human being.
Now that I have a greater awareness of how things should be said, I find that I have become a bit more impatient with myself, but I try to channel that into something productive like figuring out exacty why something is wrong rather than simply dwelling on the problem and feeling humiliated by it. I think that Dr. Seuss said it well, "Be who are you and say what you feel. Those mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind." Edited by Darklight1216 on 10 January 2013 at 5:02pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Fuenf_Katzen Diglot Senior Member United States notjustajd.wordpress Joined 4369 days ago 337 posts - 476 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Polish, Ukrainian, Afrikaans | Message 12 of 12 14 January 2013 at 2:31am | IP Logged |
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It may not be avoidable, but I do try and keep mistakes to a minimum, because for me, mistakes can only be helpful if you receive feedback, or if you know you just said something incorrectly. Usually, native speakers won't correct you--especially if what you said doesn't have any real errors, but it just doesn't sound quite natural. I know I certainly don't correct speakers if I can make out what they're saying.
I'm very self-conscious of it because German has a reputation of speakers whose English is generally a higher level. If they hear a mistake combined with whatever they hear as an American accent, my thought is that they will immediately default to English. Now, I don't think my accent is very obviously American, at least not to the extent I normally think of when I think "American accent." Really though, a large part of the frustration for me is that my spoken mistakes tend to not happen when I'm writing. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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