OffQc | Québécois French Guide

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!