Redirect your perfectionism

So you’re a perfectionist. Are you aware that that will have ramifications when it comes to learning a language? That’s because you can’t learn a language tidily. Rather, it’s a messy business.

You’re going to make tones of mistakes. You’re going to forget stuff over and over. You’ll make a fool of yourself speaking. You’ll use the wring word, or you’ll use the right word but in the wrong place. You name it, you’ll do it.

Think of juggling, riding a unicycle, tightrope walking. With every one of them you’ll fall, only to get back up. That goes for any language too—your own also when you started out (and perhaps now too).

But there could still be a place for perfectionism. I believe that you can re-direct it towards your learning techniques and overall system. Search out the very best resources. Tweak endlessly with your routine. Just as long as you’re making gazillions of mistakes along the way.

Laugh at yourself

If you are embarrassed by your language mistakes, you’ll need to de-fang that issue—for an issue it certainly is. If you have a problem about the reality, which is that you learn from your mistakes—and that in fact it is the only way that you can learn—then you need to get real.

Make a point of collecting embarrassing incidents.  The funnier, the better. Have them ready to tell to friends and at parties. Be the loudest to laugh. That way, you reduce the hold that the Terrible Mistake has over you.

Why deprive yourself and others of a rich source of humour? Tell jokes about your very best blunders, goofs, slip-ups and howlers.

People with status and respectability are the ones that will benefit the most with this bitterest of medicines. They need their pomposity deflated.

Join a community (online)

I’ve never felt the need to follow this particular piece of advice.  However, I’ve dabbled. I’ve joined various social media sites, and enjoyed some of them to some degree. So it could be quite useful to experiment.

You can share your photographs. You can recommend books for other to read. You can ‘pin’ topics of interest for other people to enjoy. You can talk about the trials and tribulations of going barefoot.  You may comment—or even ‘troll’—on YouTube if you wish.

It can be quite addictive to follow the discussion threads that capture your attention. And it should be possible to do that in another language too, I imagine. Doing so online would afford you the anonymity that is preferable, I feel, for learners of the language concerned.

In-built variety

Learning a language, you get bored. You know you do, admit it. But only if you are doing it wrong. If you do it right, you almost never get bored.

Boredom results from either doing something uninteresting, or doing something for too long. Or a combination of the two.

So the antidote—or answer—is self-evident. Do interesting things. Never do anything for too long at a time. And that means, unless you only do a little of one thing every day, that you need to build in a little variety. You need to be doing different things.

Variety is the spice of life. (No Spice Girls, sorry.)

The good news is that a language is used for many different things. Develop a taste for several of those areas of usage and vary your language diet.

News, entertainment, music, sport, fiction, nonfiction, magazine . . .

Internal grammar and spelling

Internalize the grammar and the spelling too.

It’s a fallacy to believe that you can learn a language by studying its grammar. And to a great extent the same applies to spelling, despite the fact that schools try to teach you with spelling lists and spelling rules.

The truth of the matter is that you mostly just develop a sense what looks and feels ‘right’. This happens when you see the same forms again and again. You get used to seeing words spelled in a certain way, and words arranged in certain orders. (People who read and grade papers with a lot of mistakes find that they begin to lose that sense!)

The thing then is to get a lot of exposure to the language that you want to learn. Automatically you pick up grammar and spelling along the way. There may be a few gaps left over, but you may learn them as exceptions. It’s not the rule to learn the bulk in this way.

Even if you could learn all of the rules—quite impossible, as no one has ever managed it!—it wouldn’t do you any good, as you wouldn’t be able to retrieve and apply them rapidly enough for even ordinary conversation and texting.