What is the most important factor for reaching your language goals? It’s not perfect grammar or a big vocabulary. From my experience, it is your attitude towards mistakes.
Students who are not afraid to make mistakes learn much faster than those who are.
What I Saw in My Classroom
This was shown clearly in the classroom throughout my teaching career. When I first started teaching in Canada, I worked with mixed groups of students from many different cultures. Later, I spent years teaching students mostly from one cultural background, in Ukraine. I noticed one important difference. It was like watching two different ways of finding a path through a forest. The first category went right in and stumbled through it together, sometimes losing their way and finding it again with each other’s help. The second mostly wanted to check with me after every step to make sure they were still on the path.
Group 1: The Talkers and Learners
In my mixed classes, students from places like South Korea, the Mediterranean, and South America were often very sociable. They came to class to talk, laugh, and have fun. They made friends during our class activities. In the process, they actively used new grammar and vocabulary in group activities and didn’t worry very much about errors. Because they spoke so much, they got a lot of practice, not to mention that the whole class had the opportunity to hear and correct mistakes together. They gave themselves so many opportunities to use what they had learned and make corrections that they didn’t have to wait long for results.
Group 2: The Perfectionists
On the other hand, my students from Ukraine and other Slavic countries often had different motivations: they wanted a good grade for showing their knowledge of the subject. As a result, they often didn’t speak up until they were sure they knew the right answer. They were afraid of being judged by others for making a mistake. Because of this fear, they didn’t spend much time speaking with one another. They quickly compared their answers and then turned to the teacher for feedback. Their progress was often slower and required more effort because they focused on getting the right answers instead of using the language as much as possible. Even with good test scores, they often found it hard to use the language in real life because they’d missed out on multiple opportunities for practice and correction.
Where Does This Fear Come From?
This fear often starts in school. My wife went through the Ukrainian school system. She confirms that students are often punished or laughed at for mistakes from a young age. This teaches them to feel shame for being wrong. As a result, students speak up in class only when they’re sure that they have the right answer and avoid being put on the spot by the teacher for being wrong. The classroom is not a safe space for students to try, fail, and make small adjustments until they get it right. This takes away the motivation to learn and use the new language, where mistakes are no big deal.
The opportunities for practice are also limited because students aren’t encouraged to compare answers with each other. They do the work assigned by the teacher individually, and then the teacher checks their answers. Actually, asking each other for answers is forbidden, and students get punished for it, only missing out on another opportunity to use what they’re learning. In this system, every opportunity to use the language and make corrections comes down to occasional approval for the right answers from the teacher. This completely misses the social component of learning: building confidence through trial and error while speaking to different people many times over.
This is a real problem because the best way to learn a language is to try, fail, and make small corrections. Especially a language classroom shouldn’t be silent, with students trying to sneak notes past the teacher to ask one another for the right answers. They should get plenty of opportunities to speak to each other while they complete interesting tasks, use the language as much as possible, make mistakes, and correct them long before they’re graded on the result. In fact, there is science to support this.
The Surprising Science of Mistakes
Cognitive scientists have found that mistakes actually make our memory stronger. When we get something wrong and then see the right answer, our brain remembers it better. So, mistakes aren’t just for getting practice—they actively help reinforce the correct language in our minds. This means the students who were laughing and talking were not just practicing more; they were creating stronger memories with every small error and correction in conversation with one another. The students who want to skip this process to check their answers with the teacher just miss the main point of learning. As already mentioned, it’s like finding a path through the forest. Each wrong turn that makes you check your location and find your way back gives you a much better understanding of your surroundings than standing on the edge of the forest and looking at a map. The same way, each mistake only makes the correct path that much more memorable.
Your Turn: What Should You Do?
So, what should you do? Don’t wait until your language is perfect to use it.
Dive in. Don't be afraid to make mistakes. Just have fun using the language even if you get some things wrong. This is the best way to get practice and improve.
Making a mistake is not a big deal. Most people will still understand you, and they won’t judge you for it. Remember, every mistake is a step forward, not a step back. It’s how you find your way through the forest and become familiar with the terrain.
