Dec
3
Déjate llevar: Making mistakes is no big deal
Making mistakes. It’s something that people learning a second language are loathe to do. We don’t want to look stupid, sound stupid or seem stupid. A fascinating piece in the New York Times got me thinking on this topic. The article, entitled “The Many Errors in Thinking About Mistakes” isn’t specifically about learning languages, but many of the basic points of the piece are applicable. Here’s one: “We grow up with a mixed message: making mistakes is a necessary learning tool, but we should avoid them.”
Most of us can’t help it. We want to be perfect. When speaking Spanish, we want to speak it as fluently as we speak English (or French, German, Japanese, etc.) or whatever our first language is. But the truth is is that we’ll never get to that level of linguistic nirvana until we risk something and that means looking and sounding like an idiot from time to time.
Once at a party in Madrid, I was talking to a new mom about her baby and I kept saying pañuelos when I should’ve been saying pañales. Finally the mom, unable to take it anymore, said to me in Spanish, “Quieres decir pañales.” ¡Qué vergueñza! But that one experience cemented in my brain the two words and I know I will never use them incorrectly again.
Don’t beat yourself up if you don’t have the precise vocabulary to express what you’re thinking. Talk around it or talk through it and use the vocabulary you already have. Let’s say you’re telling a Spanish-speaking friend about a news story you heard about on TV. In the middle of recounting the story, you suddenly realize you don’t know how to say “witness” in Spanish. Instead of freezing, keep going and talk your way through it. Although you may not know or remember the exact word for witness (testigo), you probably know how to say “la persona que vio lo que pasó.” Hey, it’s not concise but it gets the job done!
So the next time you feel the urge to zip it when you’re not 100% sure how to say something in Spanish, déjate llevar, and go ahead and say what’s on the tip of your tongue. It may be that you’re not as far off base as you think. And in the worst case scenario you make a mistake, but you will definitely learn from the experience, even if it is something as simple as the difference between a scarf (pañuelo) and a diaper (pañal). 
Do you get uptight about making mistakes when speaking Spanish? What helps you get past that anxiety?
Foto by Oscar Alonso
I can’t get enough of this topic. You gotsta make mistakes. Laowai Chinese has a great post on this; I have my own lame little commentary on my own blog.
I had been agreeing with a friend about how so much of my vocabulary is learned through embarrassing, semi-embarrassing, or even slightly-awkward-only-to-me mistakes. My friend E was listening to us, and thinking we were crazy, but then weeks later told me he realized it was totally true, that mistakes are a great mnemonic device. He calls the words he learned through mistakes “idiot-learned.”
My best one was probably in French, I was learning how to pronounce the French [ü], so I overgeneralized it… and yah, my host brother, using exaggerated pantomime to bridge the language gap told me I should say “merci beaucoup” (thank you very much), and not “merci beau cul” (thank you, nice butt). Whoops.
A friend of mine was eating at a big family breakfast in Spain, and she wanted to put jam on her toast. She didn’t know how to say “jam” so she did what we all do, take the closest latin-sounding word and put a Spanish ending on it. The closest latinate word to “jam” is “preserves,” so she asked them to pass the “preservativos.”
They were all horrified. And when she finally understood what had just gone down, she tried to explain what a funny mistake it was, but they didn’t think she was funny. At all.
On the upside, she never got that word wrong again!
hee,hee. Those are great stories! I know a guy who also made the same “preservativo” mistake in front of his Argentine mother-in-law while he was referring to a jar of peanut butter. She had asked him why he wasn’t putting the peanut butter in the fridge and he said he didn’t need to because the peanut butter had plenty of preservativos inside of it.
Too funny. Fortunately, she wasn’t at all offended and thought it was very funny. After all, peanut butter isn’t known for having any spermicidal qualities, at least none that we know of. 
(Note to any non-Spanish-speaking visitors to this blog who may be reading this….”preservativo” means “condom” in Spanish. )
Hello, I am Spanish 100% and I love this page of yours, let me tell you some Spanish sayings I love like “El que tiene verguenza ni come ni almuerza”, I agree with you we have to make mistakes, not only that but I think it is necessary to achieve some level.
Once I was on a private group and a priest was speaking about the personal relationship with God, I was feeling that my personal relationship had not been very good since I started cuting my visits to the church quite early as a teenager, and I didn’t feel as going back until 30 or so; to my surprise he said that the people who had cut out with God and come back were closer …like if you had cut a real cord and later you would have made a knot with the same broken one and so you are closer. Somehow I got the idea and ever since I think about it and I really think that making mistakes help us people to know better and deeper in all senses. Bye for now.
Bestinduy,
Saludos.
Yes, you are so right. One has got to make mistakes (and learn from those mistakes!) in order to advance. Thank you for sharing your perspective on this. I hope you’ll become a regular visitor here.