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Give yourself permission to make mistakes in French (#347)

9 December 2011 by OffQc

In fact, give yourself permission to make A LOT of mistakes in French.

And if giving yourself permission to make mistakes isn’t something you do very easily, then I give you permission to make a lot of mistakes!

That voice inside your head, you know the one — the one that tells you that your accent is horrible, that you don’t know enough words, that they’re going to laugh at you… Learning to ignore that voice is just as important as getting lots of exposure to French.

I spend a lot of time with people who are learning French. I pay attention to how they go about it.

Compare these two native Spanish speakers that I once met, who were both friends —

The first one would only speak after she had run the entire sentence that she wanted to say in her head first. Then, when she spoke, she made sure that every single word was pronounced as correctly as possible.

The second one had less vocabulary, less mastery of grammar, but he said whatever came to his mind without worrying about forming the perfect sentence. Some of the things he said were even just fragments of sentences. He was accused by his friend of speaking horrible French.

I understood everything the perfect girl said, but the conversation was really slow. As for the more daring guy, I didn’t necessarily understand everything he tried to say, but the conversation had movement. I enjoyed speaking with him more than with the perfect girl. He was more fun to talk to because he kept the conversation moving by allowing himself to make a lot of mistakes and by not taking himself so seriously.

There’s a time and a place for dealing with mistakes. When you’re at home working on your French on your own, that’s a good time to focus on details. But when you’re out talking to other people, just let it all hang out.

School drilled into our heads that making mistakes is bad. This is horribly false. I even recall a teacher who once said that if you’re good at mathematics then you’ll be good at languages. I think this reveals his idea that language learning is all about the “rules.” I prefer to think of language learning as being more like art class than math class. Cast off your inhibitions and let yourself out.

Give yourself permission to make mistakes, and do it every day. I force myself to write in this blog every day. If I obsessed over every entry I wrote, revising and rewriting until my fingers turned into bloody stumps, I’d never publish anything here. I write an entry, read it over a couple times, and then I hit the blue PUBLIER button.

I look back at some entries and think, “surely my blog got hacked when that steaming pile of merde got posted.” Then I look at other entries and think, “hmm, not too bad for a wannabe blogger.” The point is that the blog keeps moving.

And that’s what you need to do too when you’re out speaking to people — turn off your inner critic, hit the blue PUBLIER button on your mouth, and keep things moving!

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Posted in Entries #301-350 | 8 Comments

8 Responses

  1. on 9 December 2011 at 11:49 sara

    merci pour cela
    ma peur la plus grande parle
    et
    merci pour ce site!!!!!!


  2. on 9 December 2011 at 12:11 Kate

    Thank you for your encouragement. This is really my biggest problem – finding the courage to speak even though I know it is not going to come out perfect and that sometimes I just won’t be able to express myself the way I would like. I just feel SO BAD about making mistakes and I know that my French would be so much better if I didn’t. I have found on a recent trip to Quebec that with some people (the ones I am more comfortable with?) I am nearly fluent and with others I keep stumbling.

    As a professional mathematician, I just had to respond to your comment about mathematics 🙂 Mathematics is most certainly not about ‘rules’, but about reasoning, logic, figuring out patterns, creating new ideas… Unfortunately, it is all too often taught in a rule-based way, which completely kills the beauty of the subject (not unlike a rule-based language class.)


  3. on 9 December 2011 at 12:28 Dejah Léger

    Thank you for permission! It’s certainly hard to give it to ourselves when we’re learning a new language!


  4. on 9 December 2011 at 21:42 Jody

    The one thing I regret from going to Montreal last summer. Not speaking enough. I’m really stringent about grammar in English, so when I do anything in French, if I’m not sure if the grammar is right, I really won’t say it. It’s really a problem for me to overcome. Thanks for the words of encouragement Felix!


  5. on 9 December 2011 at 22:17 keith

    Salut, dans l’espirit de ton poste je vais ecrire ce reponse sans consulter bonpatron.com ou spellcheck :). J’apprecie tes mots et je les trouve encouragant. J’ai beaucoup de mal à me sent assez comfortable pour parler en français.

    -Keith


  6. on 10 December 2011 at 10:06 OffQc

    Most of your mistakes probably won’t even be heard if you’re just talking away because the other person will be listening for the message of what you’re saying, not your grammar. Be good to yourselves — relax and have fun.

    @Kate: You’re absolutely right about mathematics. I wish my classes at school had been more the way you described. (I think the teacher who said that really was referring to rules, though. He was kind of a dictator in class. Maybe I misunderstood him.)


  7. on 18 August 2012 at 09:18 Maxime

    J’aime bien votre analyse. Je fais comme exactement comme ça 🙂


  8. on 5 February 2013 at 21:20 Dorie

    YES I have that voice in my head too, thanks for the confirmation that I’m not alone with it. I’ve been living in Québec for 6 months, and although my understanding in French is quite good, I just don’t dare to speak. 😦 I need to give myself that permission soon..



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