Goofs aplenty

You can’t help making ’em!

One of the most important adjustments most people have to make when learning a language is to change their attitude toward mistakes. In school, most people pick up a habit of avoiding error, because it can cost them dearly on tests, in their overall grade average, and therefore in their class ranking, which torpedoes their chances to get into the best university, and then their whole future is ruined! At least that’s how some people imagine it.

Because of this institutionally induced fear of mistakes, a lot of people don’t try things they’re not already good at, and they lose the opportunity for a lot of personal development.

The real world outside of school treats mistakes much differently, as evidenced in these oft-repeated words from Winston Churchill, one of the most revered statesmen in history.

Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.

This quotation is used so much nowadays that it’s floating around in scores of different wordings. You can find similar quotes from corporate leaders. Here is one from Thomas J. Watson Sr., the man credited with saving the CTR Company, which we now know as IBM:

So go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can. Because that's where you will find success. On the far side of failure.

And here’s a famous quote from Henry Ford (or “ẽh-hee forjee”, as some of my students from Brazil used to arrive calling him):

Failure is the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.

The idea behind these quotes is obvious. Succeeding at something other than book-learning requires trial and error, and learning to speak a foreign language is no exception. Gilzaar, an Iraqi computer engineer in one of my English classes, has written this advice for you:

Do not feel ashamed when you make mistakes, and do not let this put you down and stop you from talking. Making mistakes is one of the greatest keys to improving your language, especially when there is somebody who can correct them for you.

Notice that she does not say, “It’s too bad you can’t avoid making mistakes when you learn a language, but that’s life.” She said — I’ll repeat — that making mistakes is one of the greatest keys to improving your language! In other words, goofing up is how you learn.

If you followed Gilzaar’s idea to its logical conclusion, you would think that you were actually supposed to look for chances to make mistakes. That’s exactly right! In order to succeed, you have to set yourself up for failure!

Mistakes make your language better

Since textbooks and classes, or the mass media, don’t teach you everything you need to know to speak a language well, the most productive way to progress to fluent, articulate speech and writing is to jump into situations that are over your head. You have to sit in on conversations where the people are speaking above your present level. You have to get into predicaments where you need to express things that you have not been taught to say. This practice quickly points up holes in your vocabulary and ability to communicate that you will need to fill.

In fact, there are terms for those holes. A communication gap is a situation where your overall ability to speak and write doesn’t match the thing you want to say. A lexical gap is a hole in your vocabulary that prevents you from getting your idea across. Studying will not always alert you to these gaps — especially if you’ve got the sort of materials or instruction that only makes you take in or use language you’ve already been explicitly taught. The best chances you will have to find and fill these gaps will be through interaction with the real world, in situations you are not prepared for. This guarantees that you’ll make mistakes, and this is exactly why you need to seek out these opportunities to detect your deficiencies and get corrected.

Correction

If you’re going to become competent in your new language, those mistakes you can’t avoid making will have to go away. This will happen little by little, a lot of the time thanks to casual exposure to the language. (Your mind doesn’t have to be studying in order to learn.) Very often, though, your improvement will come through correction by other people.

Correction takes time to kick in

One thing you have to know about correction is that it doesn’t usually work right away! This is true in both children and adults. Because your mind is creating its own language system, and not taking a fully formed one from someone else, your mind will need time to rearrange its system and incorporate the correction. This means that you will usually make the same mistake again and again, even though you know intellectually that it’s wrong.

Take my friend Marek as an example. When he was first assigned to me for English lessons, he had been in the US for more than eight years, and still never used the word if. Instead of if, he would say “when I gonna,” “when she gonna,” “when you gonna,” etc. A sentence like, “If you come over, you can eat with us,” would come out, “When you gonna come over, you can eat with us.” Now, keep in mind that this error had had many years to solidify, and it wasn’t going to leave without a fight. It’s what linguists call a fossilized error. You could even say the correct sentence with if in it and ask him to repeat it, and because Marek perceived its meaning more than its structure, he would give it back with when I gonna instead. He was corrected countless times, so he quickly knew the right way to say things, but his mouth did not immediately cooperate with what his mind knew. It’s lucky he’s a goal-oriented, tough-it-out, trial-and-error kind of guy, or he might have been humiliated by all the correction and quit.

At this point, some teachers would decide that “correction doesn’t work” on Marek and drop the whole thing. They would decide the error was stuck there forever, and that there was nothing to be done about it. These people think too short-term! With frequent feedback, Marek exterminated the problem within six months, and when I gonna is no longer to be heard in his speech. He was using if correctly.

So, don’t expect any correction to sink in right away. You’ll get lucky with some of them, but with others you will need vigilance and persistence.

Improvement typically takes about four months

A Chaldean friend of mine from Iraq wanted me to correct her English whenever we talked. Obviously, if I corrected all the mistakes she made, she wouldn’t be able to say anything, so we just selected the worst mistakes. As she improved, we kept shaving down and down to more and more minor mistakes. She had an interesting perception about her errors: Once I corrected a certain mistake, and she said, “You don’t need to correct that one now, because I can hear myself doing it. When I start hearing myself making a mistake, that means in four months it will be gone.”

This actually jibes with what language acquisition experts know. Once you become aware of a habitual mistake, it typically takes four months or so for your subconscious to realize the error and fix the mistake permanently.

This is why some “studies” you read are foolish. I once worked with a woman who did a “study” that concluded that there’s no point in teaching grammar, because students don’t learn it. The problem was that, like many “studies”, hers was done over one academic semester. One semester is just short of the amount of time it takes for habitual improvement to kick in, so of course she didn’t notice the students getting better.

Correction enhances noticing

The role of correction in making you notice language is one thing ignored by a lot of language instructors who think correction is futile. While it is true that your mind is creating its own language on its own terms, and that correction often won’t pay off immediately, what they don’t consider is that being corrected helps you notice things about the language that you didn’t know before. Noticing increases your chances of improvement, and noticing begets more noticing. You’ll find that once you’ve begun to really hear people say the thing you’d been goofing up, this will start to spill over into other aspects of the language you hadn’t perceived.

When people laugh at you, you’ve hit the jackpot!

Most books and teachers tell you, “Don’t be afraid that people will laugh at you when you speak the language,” or, “Don’t worry about people making fun of you,” and go on to explain how good-natured people really are, and how appreciative they will be of your attempts to learn their native tongue.

Well, the fact is that some mistakes are hilarious, and people really are going to laugh. Even if they respect you, sometimes they just can’t hold back. A friend of mine taught some lessons to professors and graduate students of English in the Soviet Union, when there still was one, and he was trying to teach them to use phrasal verbs, such as “take out”, “put off” or “hold up”. The Russian students refused for days to practice them, and instead insisted on Latinisms, such as “remove”, “repel” and “delay”. Their grammar was okay, but never using the two-word verbs made their speech sound excessively snooty. After a few days of frustration, my friend finally explained again that these phrasal verbs were completely normal and asked the students why they refused to work on them. The answer came back in a perfect aristocratic British accent, “Why, these verbs are so informal! You can use them perhaps with a strumpet or a brigand!” English straight out of the 18^th century! Up until then, my friend had maintained his professional demeanor well, but this was just too much, and he started laughing.

There will be times when you are just as funny, so be ready and don’t take it personally. I was already teaching in a Czech high school, explaining grammar, making assignments and giving class announcements in Czech when I was still at the high beginner or low intermediate level. You can just imagine how many times I stood before rows of teenagers who were squealing, snorting and guffawing over some real gut-buster that had come out of my mouth. I even became famous for one or two, but somehow it did not erode my authority over them, thank goodness. It was at moments like this that a great revelation came to me:

When people laugh at you, you’ve hit the daily double!

A goof that people laugh at is a twofer! A huge opportunity! Once people regain their composure, they provide you a double lesson. You learn (a) what was so funny, and (b) what you should have said. That’s two expressions for the price of just one mistake, and one of them is a good joke to boot! It may be so funny that you repeat it to a few other people later on, just so that they can get a kick out of it too. So always realize that the mistakes people laugh at represent some of your best chances to learn.