Becoming a Better Student

How to adjust your mindset with regards to language acquisition

Welcome, aspiring polyglot! One of the things you will notice if you watch performers closely, be they athletes, musicians, or actors, is that they are not perfect. It is rare to see someone complete a task perfectly and perfection is often something we only expect of ourselves. The reason it is often imperceptible, however, is because high caliber performers understand that the mistake is only obvious when it is made obvious.

That is to say, if you are in the middle of a musical performance and you hit the wrong note, you are the only person who knows you hit the wrong note. So long as you continue playing, no one will notice that you made a mistake. The same is true for the language that you are learning. People will often ignore or even go without noticing a mistake so long as you yourself do not point it out.

Perseverance

This will come as a shock to exactly no one that one of the key traits of high performers in any industry is perseverance. What may be difficult to wrap one’s head around, on the other hand, is precisely how to become someone capable of persevering. It may or may not surprise you to find out that most people who I work with, that is to say most people I know who are actively learning a new language, are high performers.

Barring the extremes, most of the people who are considered high performers are people who decided to become an expert at something and never gave up. “I have made more mistakes than you have made attempts” is something I tell my students from time to time because part of reaching a point of excellence is failing hundreds, if not thousands, of times along the way.

In fact, operating at an extremely high level is so difficult and so impressive that when the best athletes in the world make a mistake the people watching have the wherewithal to take a step back and think, “There is even beauty in their imperfect execution.” This is exactly what native speakers will think of anyone who is trying to speak their language with them.

Yes, there are people, just like the people on the couch eating a pint of ice cream while criticizing the best athletes on planet Earth, who will scoff at you for trying. That is never going to go away. Ignoring them is best for both you and them. They will forget your mistakes as quickly as you do, or should.

Bad short term memory

Another aspect to performing at an Olympic level that many people seem to overlook is the power of a bad short term memory. When you are doing anything that requires multiple steps, the odds of something going wrong increase with each additional step. The best athletes in the world are great at forgetting any and all mistakes that happen during a performance.

Yes, review the game tape (record yourself), strategize around weak points (write to expose your deficiencies), and rehearse (practice conversations) over and over and over again until they become second nature. But when you are in it’s game time, the only thing that matters is the present. There is no past to worry about, there is no future for which to plan, there is only the moment.

Musicians know this all too well. In fact, if you have ever been to a concert the odds that one of the band members played the wrong note once during the set are incredibly high. Did you notice, though? No. Because they kept playing through the mistake and that continuity made the mistake imperceptible to everyone except the most fervent fan, or perhaps someone who plays covers of their music.

The same is true in language. You can make countless mistakes, particularly when it comes to gendered words, and so long as you do not stop, it is highly unlikely that someone stops you to correct you, let alone remembering the mistake after the conversation. You will always be your own harshest critic.

The show must go on

Another sign of greatness is the ability to play through injury. Of course, when it comes to speaking a new language, the risk of physical injury is next to zero. Unless you don’t learn what you need to avoid saying. But that doesn’t mean there is no risk to being emotionally or mentally hurt. In fact, this is one of the primary reasons language education in the US is so horrendous.

I know far too many people who have told me they never want to learn a new language because of how badly their high school teachers made them feel when they failed. There was no safe place for them to be wrong because the education system as it is does not reward failing forward. Instead they were nitpicked over the most innocuous mistakes until they had completely given up.

For as much as I think Lindsay Vonn made a mistake coming back to compete at these Olympics, if I could distill her courage, tenacity, and slight delusion into a serum I would mass produce that serum and give it out for free. If you approach every opportunity to use your target language with that much confidence, even if you are missing vocabulary (she didn’t have an ACL while trying to race on skis) nothing will be able to stand in your way.

Conclusion

I love the winter Olympics. Alpine skiing used to be my event until I had a bad crash, too. While I may have decided at that time that there are better ways to die, I still love stepping into my skis and racing down the hill at 50mph+ whenever I have the opportunity. I can’t say for certain, but it definitely feels like this skill transferred to my language learning where the stakes are much lower.

Having a bad short term memory may be bad in every other case, but when it comes to performances, there are few tools quite as useful. That, combined with the ability and willingness to review your game tape, will make you an absolute powerhouse in anything you do, foreign language acquisition included. It will be difficult, but you can do difficult things and be great. So get out and do some difficult things and become great. I am rooting for you.

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