In the very last driving lesson just before my test, I made a couple of monumental errors. They were so bad (might have involved trying to go round a fellow learner who was reversing around a corner), my driving instructor made me pull over and severely reprimanded me by the side of the road. I panicked. Maybe I wasn’t ready for the test after all. I hadn’t actually driven for that long; what if I failed? My world was going to end in an implosion of embarrassment.
When it came to the test day, I passed. My instructor later told me that there was no doubt in his mind that I would – I was definitely ready but I just had a case of the pre-test jitters. He told me that he had given me such a royal telling-off (something he’d never done before) because he was worried I’d let the nerves take hold and that I needed reminding that I could do the test – I just needed to approach it like it was an ordinary lesson and not let it get the better of me.
I’m hoping something similar will happen with my German when I go to Berlin this week. Because right now the thought of trying to have a conversation with a German speaker in German is making me feel a little queasy. I don’t know if my German has actually taken a turn for the worst, or if the impending trip to Berlin is causing me so much linguistic anxiety that I think I’m doing a lot worse than I actually am.
It probably doesn’t help that I also feel the pressure of having to report back, to the whole internet, on whether or not I a) managed to get into Berghain and b) .
But language learning and mistakes are supposed to go hand-in-hand, aren’t they? I was a little surprised this week to see the responses to one of our online language learning challengers, who’s been getting stick for his dodgy French. I do put my hands up, admitting we missed a mistake in his copy in English, but he was also chided for his errors in French.
The writer addressed the issue in his latest blogpost, appropriately themed on the idea that making mistakes is an embarrassing, yet necessary part of language learning. I completely agree. My German teacher keeps telling us (like all good language teachers do) to relax and have a go because mistakes are OK. But when I read the comments on a piece by a language novice, I’m not so convinced people actually think so.
Let’s all try to be a little nicer to our fellow language learners and leave the telling-off to the qualified instructors among us.