Examine the past

Look into the crystal ball of your past to see where you might have gone wrong (or perhaps went right). What clues do you find there? If you made mistakes in language-learning, you don't want to repeat them if you decide to make a new attempt.

If you ever tried to learn another language and quit, why was that? What did you hate at the time? What put you off? What did you lack? Was your approach (or that of your teacher) wrong? In what way? Was the timing wrong, the setting, or your expectations?

Figure it out as best as you can. Then institute changes. You wouldn't want to repeat the same mistakes.

And if everything was wrong, then do everything the opposite! 

What can that hurt? You couldn't do any worse.

Try different things, and don't stop until you latch onto the correct formula.

Think of Edison and all of those light bulbs that he went through! 

The history of my folly

Preserve your mistakes for posterity. 

Perhaps you don’t regard making a mistake as actually bad. Perhaps you are quite resigned to the need to make mistakes in order to learn, and you need no convincing as to their value. 

But there might remain a sense of embarrassment.

It feels embarrassing to blunder. You feel a fool when you put your foot in your mouth. You feel like a dick when you trip, a klutz when you stutter (I could go on . . . )

And that’s not good, because any such inhibitions have the effect of slowing you down and making you do less. So here’s a strategy that you could use.

Write down your best bloopers. Start a collection of your goofs. Turn them into anecdotes that you tell at your own expense. Trot them out at parties, and be the loudest to laugh. 

In her book, Dr Kato Lomb refers often to “the history of my folly”. She is not too shy to recount a number of personally embarrassing incidents.  

That’s one way to reduce their potency, and take away the sting. That’s how you neutralize their poison, and remove their fangs. 

The only ‘disadvantage’ with this technique is that you are much less likely to repeat those entertaining mistakes.

Prepare for a fall

Prepare for falling off the wagon

Falling off the wagon is not an issue. It’s not important. It’s certainly not a tragedy. However, failing to climb back on the wagon would be.

And so if—or when—you fall off (as most of us do), that’s the time to be helpful. Make it easy to get back on. Don’t berate yourself and feel bad. That wouldn’t serve you.

Instead, clamber back up. Take a breather. Take it easy for a while. And then, gradually, figure out where you went awry. In other words, try to pinpoint what brought about your lapse. Use your ‘failure’ as a learning experience instead. Finally, make an adjustment or two to reduce the likelihood of it happening again.

Me, I’ve fallen off and gotten back up (sometimes after a lengthy gap) more times that I can recall!

A daunting prospect

Most people can’t contemplate learning a new language simply because the prospect of doing so is too daunting. And of those who try, only 1 in 20 succeed. Why should that be?

Is it the time that’s required?

Is it embarrassment at the thought of making mistakes?

A little, perhaps. But I feel that the biggest impediment is the tedium, frustration and hard work that they imagine such a project would involve.

And that’s fair enough. Who would willingly endure such stress? Who’d try, unless they had a damn good reason? And no means of escape?

But if there was a way to eliminate, or to bypass, all of that hardship, what then?

Why then, the sky would be the limit!

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.

Make Mistakes Freely

Alan Watts talks about the freedom of making mistakes in this video:

Edit after

It's easy to obsess about making mistakes. To do so is itself a mistake, because it inhibits your output. 

The best way to prevent this is to postpone your correcting. Write a first draft for content. Then edit afterwards.