There are sometimes quite unobvious obstacles which can really hold us back in terms of language learning. And one of the most irritating ones is having the inner editor. It’s the one who is always trying to double-check our words and answers before they come out. You might ask, ‘Ok, but isn’t it a useful thing, actually? It helps me to use grammar and stuff more properly. It helps me to avoid mistakes. So what’s wrong with that?’ Well, if we talk about writing it’s not really the case here, but as to speaking it can be a real hurdle sometimes. It seems like double-checking things we want to say helps us articulate our ideas more accurately and consequently improve our Speaking. And it does help you in a way, but the side effect of it is that it’s robbing you of fluent speaking. You try to be more accurate at the expense of your fluency. And, funnily enough, it can actually have you make more mistakes, because when you have a real life conversation you can’t think for too long to respond, you’re expected to do immediately which of course makes you feel nervous and tense and as a consequence there are more errors than it would have been if you were calmer.
First, speak then check
Ok, but how can we resolve this issue? And the trick is to actually allow yourself to make errors. And only by doing that can you reduce the number of mistakes you make and also develop your fluency faster. Just start speaking almost as soon as thoughts occur to you, without too much hesitation. Yes, there might be loads of errors at the beginning, but in the process, there will be fewer and fewer of them.
How does it work? First, you make a mistake. Alright, let it be, but next time you will try to say this same word, phrase or whatever correctly when there’s another chance to use it. And if you still happen to screw it up, maybe just a little bit this time, there’s a third chance to get it right and so on. And a fourth or fifth time you will say it accurately.
The usual pattern students tend to follow to avoid mistakes is like, ‘Ok, first I construct a sentence carefully in my mind and then pronounce it’. Sounds wise, isn’t it? But doesn’t really work. And what works is quite the opposite. And this is what you should do. First, you speak. No matter how many errors occur, no matter how much elementary, terrible, disgusting or whatever they are. First, you speak, anyway. And when you do you just casually spot your mistakes. Don’t correct them on the spot too much, especially if the mistakes are just slips, not serious ones which can prevent others from understanding what you exactly mean. Just remember them and next time say correctly the word or phrase you got wrong. Even if you don’t remember all of them it’s not too bad. They will be repeated until you get them right. As a result, your speaking will be getting more and more accurate. And at the end of the day, speaking in another language is not about rights or wrongs. It’s about enjoying a nice conversation, sharing your experience and impression with another person. If you understand him or her and if he or she understands you then everything else is secondary.
It’s the case, though, that mistakes can distort the meaning or impede the communication, but the majority of our mistakes that we tend to be worried about they are just slips, no big deal. Remember the time when you were a small kid. Were you concerned about your errors? Not too much I expect. Indeed, when we were kids we weren’t that bothered. We just spoke a lot. Enjoyed ourselves. And picked up everything in the process. Sometimes we were corrected, but sometimes we were not. We just came across the same situations in which the same phrases or constructions were used and we were like, ‘Right, for some reason they say this or that. Ok, fine, I will do likewise’. And we did and this is how we improved. First, we spoke and then corrected ourselves rather than the other way round. Sometimes children are smarter than we. We should copy them.
But can we say that we never make errors or we never slip up in our mother-tongue? No, we still do. Not like in a foreign language, of course, but still. There are mistakes and will always be. Do I mean that we should completely discount them? No. Surely we should correct them, but casually, in an emotionally detached way. So let us enjoy the process itself and see mistakes just as part of our language learning journey.