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.

Institute a routine

If it takes, say, a thousand hours to learn your target language, then that’s at least a thousand times that you’ll need to decide to sit down and ‘do’ an hour. That’s a thousand times that you need to remember, and a thousand times that you’ll need to exert your will power.

Of which everyone has a limited daily ration.

Unless, of course, you get a habit going—a habit that goes under the name of a routine.

Now personally I have problems with routines. I’m good a designing them. I enjoy that part of the process. But I’m no good at following them. I resist them. I resent them.

The trick is to get it slowly into place piecemeal. You can’t afford to have it feel like am imposition or compulsion. You need to retain space to manoeuvre. It needs to be loose. It ought to leave room for doing things on impulse.

A routine that is integral to what you’d do anyway must work best. It needs to fit in with what you’d be likely to do anyway. So it ought to help you, not force you. It should remind you, not order you about. 

You don’t need another parental figure.