My Results

By listening to native Chinese speakers speak English, I began to understand my own mistakes better and my grammar improved drastically as a result.  More importantly, by understanding what “mistakes” actually are, I stopped fearing them and started embracing them – which helped me to become more optimistic about my studies and learn more even faster.

What is a Mistake?

A mistake is when your brain uses the wrong set of reference data to make a decision.  When speaking a foreign language this usually means we’ve transposed rules from our native language into the new language (such as reversing subject-verb order).

As a humorous and only vaguely related example, here’s a classic music video where an Italian musician reproduces what American English sounds like to other people in the world (a bit weird but very entertaining):

The Bright Side of Mistakes

Wired magazine recently ran an article discussing important discoveries which have been made due to “mistakes.” Imagine what would happen if these scientists had just decided “whoops, we were wrong!”

Everything else aside, there is a bright side to making a mistake in any language (even if you start misspeaking your own language after studying another).  Making a mistake means your brain is trying to understand the material and is rearranging itself to accommodate the information.

Need proof that mistakes are a natural part of the learning process?  Here’s a passage from the book “Essentials of Psychology” discussing early-language development in children:

Children often … over-apply this rule to irregular verbs they had previously used correctly, saying, for example, “it breaked,” “it broked,” or “I eated” (Marcus, 1996).

- Essentials of Psychology

(Emphasis Added)

There are a lot of interesting things to be gleaned from the way children learn things.  Here is a basic breakdown of the stages of language development in a child, for example.

In What Other Ways are Mistakes Useful?

Making a mistake is not bad – failing to understand that you made a mistake is where the potential problem lies (or, even worse, failing to get over the mistake).  As long as you know that a mistake is made (and that it is no big deal) you are refining your comprehension – turning bad connections into good connections.

Think about when you heard someone foreign speak English and (s)he made a grammatical mistake.  The mistake more than likely came from their own native language.  With a little deduction, you can actually infer some key rules of that language.  If you pay attention to what mistakes are the most frequent and which ones have the most detrimental impact upon their speaking, you can avoid making the reverse mistake yourself when speaking their language.  Here are a few common mistakes:

• Reversing subject order
• Using the wrong tense
• Using the wrong gender
• Placing temporal words in the wrong location

In addition, a person’s native accent can give you clues to how their language is spoken.  It may seem obvious, but if someone seems incapable of making a sound it is probably because their native language doesn’t have that sound.

Quick-Fix?

I’m not claiming this is going to fix your grammar or pronunciation in a foreign language instantly.  Still, being aware of where you might make a mistake is a very good way to avoid making it altogether.  When I started paying attention to this my own understanding went up drastically, and my mistakes slowly began to decrease.

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