This post actually kind of describes the exact hang-up that I used to have with language learning. I picked up English relatively young, and I spoke it fairly well. It used to be, then, that whenever I wanted or needed to pick up another language, a vague notion emerged in my head that since I could speak one foreign language with reasonable proficiency, I had to display the same deftness with the other language too before I could get down to the business of actually using it for anything. Maybe I figured that not getting it right from the get-go would've been unworthy of the task at hand, so to speak, or maybe I was just really used to getting it right.
And this wasn't useful at all. What I needed was precisely the confidence to speak and write in snippets, fragments, and muddles. It occurred to me that I wasn't going to get much better if I didn't actually use the bits and pieces I was being taught, warts and all -- and so I had to condition myself to start communicating with the awareness that I'd probably bollocks it up half the time. And I simply had to accept that I wouldn't be able to employ the same level of flexibility and nuance that I could when speaking English (or, indeed, my native Finnish).
At first it felt... really weird. I like to play with language and I'm weirdly picky about words. When I don't have elbow room to express what I want to express in precisely the way I like, it feels a bit like someone's chopped off a limb. But I've found that getting it sort of right is often a more workable strategy than gunning for perfection and ending up saying little or nothing at all.
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This post actually kind of describes the exact hang-up that I used to have with language learning. I picked up English relatively young, and I spoke it fairly well. It used to be, then, that whenever I wanted or needed to pick up another language, a vague notion emerged in my head that since I could speak one foreign language with reasonable proficiency, I had to display the same deftness with the other language too before I could get down to the business of actually using it for anything. Maybe I figured that not getting it right from the get-go would've been unworthy of the task at hand, so to speak, or maybe I was just really used to getting it right.
And this wasn't useful at all. What I needed was precisely the confidence to speak and write in snippets, fragments, and muddles. It occurred to me that I wasn't going to get much better if I didn't actually use the bits and pieces I was being taught, warts and all -- and so I had to condition myself to start communicating with the awareness that I'd probably bollocks it up half the time. And I simply had to accept that I wouldn't be able to employ the same level of flexibility and nuance that I could when speaking English (or, indeed, my native Finnish).
At first it felt... really weird. I like to play with language and I'm weirdly picky about words. When I don't have elbow room to express what I want to express in precisely the way I like, it feels a bit like someone's chopped off a limb. But I've found that getting it sort of right is often a more workable strategy than gunning for perfection and ending up saying little or nothing at all.