Start speaking when you aren’t ready

The first foreign language I ever studied was German. As soon as I had started learning, I became absolutely enchanted by this newfound art of communication! Everything I did and everything I loved for several years involved German somehow. Every conversation I had with my friends somehow ended up coming back to me talking about the German language or culture. I. Was. Obsessed. There was only one problem:

I still hadn’t had a single German conversation.

It took me two whole years to even try speaking out loud to natives, and even then, I was way too nervous to do it regularly. What if they judged me? What if they laughed at me? What if I made an embarrassing mistake because of my lack of knowledge?

Contrast this to years later, when I started studying Spanish. My first Spanish conversation happened on day 1.

Spanish was my fifth language. I had avoided learning it for years out of pure stubbornness – everybody in the United States studies Spanish, and I liked studying languages that were a little more unique to learn. But then I fell in love with a Puerto Rican girl and we started dating, so I decided to swallow my pride and learn the language.

I was a veteran of languages at this point. My level of confidence had gone up considerably. Combining that with the fact that my patience hadn’t improved one bit, I decided to be bold and “jump into the deep end” with Spanish. I went on a language-exchange website and looked for a Spanish-speaker wanting to learn English. I looked up how to ask “do you have enough patience to speak with a beginner” in Spanish, and then I sent him a message asking if he wanted to Skype. He said he was free in a few hours, and so I decided to spend those few hours learning the most useful phrases I could.

Then we called. We had agreed to 30 minutes of Spanish and then 30 minutes of English, so I had to start the call speaking a foreign language. So here we were – the moment of truth: would my four hours of study prove useful, or would I just make a complete fool of myself? Within 20 seconds, I found my answer: He asked me to do something, and I hadn’t the foggiest idea what it was. This was going to be an awkward call.

But I still had him for another 29 minutes and 40 seconds, so I had to buckle in and just do my best. So I pulled out my first phrase: “Could you repeat that, please?” He repeated, and I still didn’t understand. Okay, I thought. Time for the second phrase: “I’m sorry, I don’t understand. Could you please write it down?” He wrote it down in the chat, and I put it into Google translate. I finally realized that he was asking me to turn my camera on. And that’s how our conversation went for the next half hour! I stumbled my way through an awkward conversation, making a complete fool of myself and stopping every twenty seconds to ask for an explanation of what he had said. It was one of the most awkward and silly conversations I had had since I was a toddler.

It was also the most valuable conversation I had ever had in my entire language-learning career.

I learned more Spanish stumbling through a 30-minute conversation as a complete beginner than I did in three months of German classes.

After learning so much from this call, I realized how much time I had wasted avoiding conversation when I was first studying German, all because I didn’t feel like I was ready. That’s when I learned a valuable lesson: we’ll never actually be “ready.” There will never be a perfect time for us to jump into speaking a new language. No matter how much we study, we will always make mistakes when we get into our first conversation, and we will always make a bit of a fool of ourselves.

So why not get that out of the way in the beginning and learn along the way?

There is nothing in this world that motivates us to learn better than necessity. If we need to learn to hunt in order to survive, we learn to hunt as quickly as possible. If we need to learn how to do a job so that we don’t get fired, we learn to do the job as quickly as possible. So when we need to learn a language to avoid spending a really awkward half-hour talking to a stranger, believe me, we learn that language as quickly as we humanly can.

As language learners, we need to get used to the idea of getting into conversations and practicing a language before we feel “ready” – jumping into the deep end and really immersing ourselves even when we don’t feel qualified, and putting ourselves in situations in which we can learn by necessity. Many of the greatest opportunities that we have to learn lie in the moments when we fear that our skills are too limited to get involved, so we need to get ourselves into the habit of jumping in when we’re completely unprepared.

So when you start studying a language, rather than focusing on learning the vocabulary and phrases that you need to discuss sports or movies, focus first on learning phrases that will help you navigate through your confusion. Ask people to write things out if you don’t understand them. Look things up if you don’t know them. Instead of looking for the exact right sentence-structure or word, just try one that you think might work and let the native speakers correct you. Learn to thank them for being patient in their language and then don’t worry about how long it takes you to arrive at the right phrase.

The great thing about this is that it forces us to focus on communication more than perfection; to get creative in the ways that we express ourselves and to communicate ideas with a limited vocabulary. The more we put off trying to speak to natives, the more we’ll have to deal with the awkwardness of stumbling over ourselves in the future. But if we get the embarrassment of making mistakes out of the way in the very beginning, that gives us a surge of confidence as we realize that we can only get better from there!

So be bold in your language-learning journey! Don’t wait to be ready – just focus on being courageous. So go make mistakes, get confused, get creative, ask questions, and learn something new! One of the greatest weapons in your arsenal is your own discomfort, so throw comfort aside and go be awkward!