Mistakes Are Good!
26th April 2020
Adriana Fuster

One of the many things I’ve come to realise in my years of teaching is that adults have a harder time learning. And why might that be? Does it just come down to the overly repeated phrase ‘children are better at learning than adults’? I don’t think so. 

I’ve been teaching both children and adults throughout my life, and you can have the most committed adult learning faster than a kid who doesn’t do their homework. Of course, there are many aspects to language learning. There are so many factors to account for. But today, I would like to focus on ‘mistakes’.

As an adult, and after a lot of self-observation, one of the main things that happen to all of us, is that we are afraid to make mistakes – consciously or unconsciously – there is always a little voice in our heads that is shaming us every time we take a wrong turn. And why is that? 

When we are kids, our standards are pretty low, or non-existent at times, because we are not aware of them just yet, we haven’t seen or known any better. And so we freely venture into the world making mistakes along the way and learning from them. We get dirty playing on the ground, we get hurt if we run too fast and trip, and little by little we realise there is more to what we are doing. But eventually, we get to a point where grades become a big part of our education, we start to constantly try to measure up, we compare ourselves to other classmates and get told off when we don’t reach the grade we needed to impress our parents. And so the pressure builds up. If you were anything like me, you might have been that student in the class too afraid to raise their hand because of the fear of being ridiculed by others if you get it wrong.

This type of attitude, this kind of character only gets worse when you are studying your degree, it’s like the playground for adults. But one day, you finish your degree, your masters, your PhD or doctorate, you get a job, and in your late 20s, you feel like that’s it. We are supposed to have everything figured out, we are adults! But here’s where it all goes wrong. 

This kind of attitude is what gets in the way of learning a language fast & successfully. I see it in many of our students when they get started with our lessons, and it takes some time to create new healthy habits. 

The truth is, you don’t have to be very clever to learn a language, or to learn anything for that matter. But one of the main things you need, and probably the most important of all of them is to shake off that fear and start getting used to making mistakes. Laugh about them, feel silly, and enjoy that moment. Enjoy figuring out why that mistake was made, a lot of the times you will see that it actually makes a lot of sense, you might find an incredibly interesting explanation for it. 

This is one of the main reasons why outgoing people progress faster learning languages because most of the time they are willing to risk looking silly, they don’t mind! So if you want to learn a language successfully and quickly, this is one of my top tips. Make mistakes now!