Check Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself

How to make self corrections when speaking a foreign language

Welcome, aspiring polyglot! A leading indicator that you are well on your way to fluency in your target language is the ability to self correct. Making mistakes is part of the game, by now that should be clear, but that does not mean making the same mistake is part of the game. It should be your goal to stop making whichever mistakes you are making as quickly as possible. For those who work with me or another instructor, you may be able to rely on someone else to correct you. However, eventually it will be imperative that you learn to self correct.

The importance of self correction

When you are first learning to do this, it may feel weird. Stopping yourself or interrupting someone to ensure you are using the correct verb tense or word order is awkward. Well, it’s awkward if you allow it to be. Most of the time this will happen so fast that people won’t notice and if they do they will appreciate your effort at perfecting their language. It is only weird if you make it weird.

People self correct across domains on a daily basis. Whether it’s internally or externally is irrelevant, it is happening. Eventually you will get to a point where you can correct your sentences in your head before they come out, but until they get to that point you need to do it when you can. If that means saying something wrong and correcting it immediately, so be it. There is no shame in making mistakes, there is less than none in correcting them in real time.

The goal of this method is to ensure you stop making the same mistake over and over again. When you stop yourself and speak aloud the correction for your mistake, you are far less likely to forget it than if you are always doing these things in your head. If your ego is getting in the way, you need to fight against it as much as possible, because this is all about saving you time and embarrassment in the long run.

Speaking to someone in a foreign language is difficult, scary, and can be demoralizing. If you want to shorten the amount of time you spend experiencing these emotions, you need to self correct as early and as often as possible. The people who find themselves struggling one or two or even three years into their language acquisition journey will have spent exponentially more time feeling these dreadful emotions than someone who sucked it up and made a fool of themselves early and often.

At the end of the day, language learning is like many other things; the only way out is through. In the long run, you will save yourself a lot of time and heartache by simply being willing to look like a fool. If you aren’t willing to be bad at something you will always struggle to become great at that thing. That said, there are ways to ensure these corrections take hold quickly so you can move from one to another like a pro.

Methodology of self correction

Starting today, you can work on fixing your language. Speaking the corrections aloud is great, but if you really want it to stick you need to be writing things down. Not only will you be more likely to remember the correct approach the next time the situation arises, you will also have a record of the mistakes you have made so you can fight to make sure they are not recurrent.

I have discussed the power of a written record for a long time and tracking your mistakes is just as important as tracking your wins. Why? Because overcoming those mistakes is a win in and of itself. So having a written track record of them will help you move through your language acquisition quicker and smoother. For those who are learning French or Spanish, I have created a logbook that you can use to enhance and accelerate your language acquisition without having to format a book of your own. You can find those here:

It is impossible to solve a problem you don’t know exists and having this written record will lay bare all of your opportunities for improvement. If your goal is to speak mistake free, and it should be, then you owe it to yourself to face down your weaknesses. You can certainly ignore your weak points, most people do, but it is no way to move forward.

Whether you ignore them or not, they exist, and the longer you pretend they do not the longer you will spend either in the silent period or making mistakes that could lead to miscommunications or worse. The sooner you have a written record of your mistakes the sooner you can start to improve them. Your next step will be testing yourself.

Since you have a written record of your mistakes, you can start creating tests to see whether or not you truly understand the correct approach. Here is a step by step process you can implement today to start turning your self correction into language mastery:

1. Identify the mistakes (try to find at least 5)

2. Think of 2-3 situations where you might also make this mistake

3. Write out the questions.

   1. Fill in the blank if it’s a grammar or vocabulary issue

   2. Short answer if it’s a sentence structure issue

4. TAKE A WEEK OFF

   1. Resume your regular schedule, think about the mistakes, but don’t spend too much time dwelling on them. Go back to your regular language learning routine and keep tracking new and different mistakes, track your wins, and maintain steady progress.

5. Come back and take your self quiz

6. Check yourself again

7. Repeat until fluency

There are quite a few steps, but after you have set it up two or three times you will be able to set it up within fifteen or twenty minutes. If you knew that an extra half hour four times per month would help you start speaking, and speaking fluidly, months sooner than you would otherwise, would you do it?

Ways to level up

One of the natural ways to level up in any area of your language acquisition is to work on and with materials above your purported language level. If you are interested on specifics for that, check this article out:

Of all the choices you have, though, reading high level books is probably the best return on investment. You will be confronted with complex grammar structures, diverse vocabulary words, and concepts that you simply won’t see in many other areas. Even if you don’t end up using everything you find, the amount you will have to work with will be nearly endless. An added advantage is that one day, when you are able to read these high level works fluidly, you will know for a fact how much you have progressed.

Aside from complex books, you should be doing everything in your power to diversify your content pool. At first this can be overwhelming, but the best advice I can give is to follow your interests. Chances are you will talk about the same things in your target language that you talk about in your native language. It follows, then, that working with materials discussing your hobbies will provide you with an easy way to start and carry a conversation with just about anyone.

Keep track of the things you are working with so that you can always go back and jump back in even if you take a few days or weeks off. One of the best experiences is coming back to content you struggled with after weeks of working on different materials only to find out that the original content is now easy to understand. Since the goal is to set yourself up for success, working hard to ensure you are doing what works best for you is crucial.

Conclusion

Something I found incredibly valuable in my education courses as of late is approaches to corrections. Those who work with me one on one or in small groups already know, I will not hold your hand. I expect mistakes and I expect corrections from those mistakes to come from the students at least 50% of the time. It can be awkward, we sit in silence quite often, but it works. That is what spurred this entire article.

Watching as people learn how to correct themselves and build their confidence through it is incredible. I want everyone of you to experience this feeling, but you have to know how difficult it is going to be up front. Once you get to the point where you can self correct, there is not much an educator will be able to do for you. Of course, that makes my job difficult, but it is always worth it. It is uncomfortable, but if you are able to push through that feeling you will come out on the other side as a bilingual.

As we discuss often around here, creating is vital in second language acquisition. Speaking and practicing with written language will help you in accelerating and enhancing your language learning process, so start having conversations as early on as possible. It will be difficult, but you can do difficult things and be great. So go do some difficult things and become great.

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