What can I do if I have been making mistakes for years in a foreign language?
What can I do if I have been making mistakes for years in a
foreign language?
Let's do a first small exercise. Fold your
hands. Leave your hands folded and have a look which thumb is the upper thumb.
Is it the left or the right one? In my case it's the left one. Now you repeat it
and have a look and, surprise, you will have the same upper thumb as
previously. If you do this quickly, 10 times, even 100 times, my prediction is
that you will have one dominant thumb that will be always above. So now try to
fold your hands the opposite way. So, with the other non-dominant thumb above. You
will realize that it will take some conscious effort to do this. Maybe you will
even hit your fingertips.
It will be strange, uncomfortable. And then
you leave your hands folded. But you probably will realize that it feels
somehow strange, incorrect. It's not right. Now the question is, imagine you
want to switch your dominant thumb from right to left or from left to right. What
would you need to do to do this quickly without any conscious effort?
Probably your answer will be, well, I need
to automatize this and to do this hundreds of times consciously so that it
becomes something automatic. But what will not help is if you just decide from
today on, I will always put the other thumb up. This will not work, and it will
especially not work if you are asked to do this quickly, unprepared. You will
always revert back to your previous dominant thumb. So, the only way to train
yourself to do it the opposite way is to make hundreds, if not thousands, of
trials of conscious movements where you put the other thumb above. Now, why I'm
telling you this?
Our mistakes are often habits. The first
thing when talking about mistakes is to do the following. We need to analyze
our mistakes. So ideally, we should record ourselves speaking spontaneously on
difficult topics, on topics that elicit mistakes. If we just make a short video
presenting ourselves, telling easy things, then we will not have interesting
mistakes surfacing.
However, want to make a diagnosis. We want
to see what mistakes we are capable of making. So, we record ourselves speaking
something complicated, explaining difficult things. Then we have a look at the
mistakes we are making and then we start analyzing them. First, we need to see
what different clusters or categories of mistakes we are making. For example,
pronunciation mistakes or vocabulary mistakes or grammar mistakes. We're
putting the words in the wrong order, for example. Or in some languages we need
to conjugate verbs, we need to modify the verb. So, we need to put them into
different clusters or categories of mistakes. Then, within each category, we
need to make a judgment whether these concrete mistakes were caused by lack of
attention, or it was caused by the lack of knowledge, or it was caused by a
habitual, a systematic mistake.
For example, we may accidentally
mispronounce a word. Some word we may mispronounce because we have seen it for
the first time, especially in English. There are lots of exceptions, lots of
silent letters. So if we don't know a specific term, we may mispronounce it. So
here it's like a lack of knowledge problem. Once we understand how to pronounce
the word heir, like heir to a throne, then we don't pronounce it like hair.
Now, many of our mistakes are systematic mistakes. For example, if we are a
Russian speaker, you may put the stress on the wrong syllable in words like
feedback or marketing instead of feedback and marketing.
So those are systematic mistakes. And if you want to get rid of those
systematic mistakes, you need to put yourself into the same situation like with
the folded hands.
These systematic mistakes will not disappear
on its own. So now the question is how to make sentences 100 times, 1000 times
consciously to create enough memory of correct sentences in your head or
pronunciation in your head so that in unconscious situations, you will not
revert back to the habitual mistakes. The most important understanding here is
that most of our mistakes, our systematic mistakes, are like habits, bad
habits, tics. And we will not get rid of them by just doing an exercise on pen
and paper, or by making the decision to change. We will not change anything.
We need to approach our mistakes as if we have
tics of touching our noses or doing strange things with our hand. If we want to
stop our language mistakes, we need to approach them like a habit.
I highly recommend you in general to study a
bit literature on changing habits so you understand the task of getting rid of
our mistakes is a serious task. That's why so many of us are frustrated that we
are at a high level but we always and always repeat the same mistakes.
It's not a problem of having our problems
explained by the teacher. It's not a lack of information that we don't know how
to do this. We know that perfectly well. So, if we approach it like getting rid
of a habit, then we get a realistic picture, we get hints what we should be
doing, and then instead of being frustrated, we approach it with a long-term
perspective. We start regularly filming ourselves, recording ourselves, writing
spontaneously, we start analyzing our mistakes, sorting out habitual mistakes
from just accidents that happen in our speech. The latter happen with native
speakers too.
What do you think?
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Do you feel a bit insecure when doing business
internationally, maybe even in a foreign language?
Profit from new strategies, insights and techniques that
will make you use foreign languages more successfully in international business
communication.
Get rid of fear of mistakes and blocks during trade
shows, presentation and sales calls.
Gerhard Ohrband is a communication consultant,
psychologist and author of 9 books from Hamburg/Germany. He speaks 21 languages
and assists individuals and companies in doing business in foreign languages.
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