It’s GOOD to Make Grammar Mistakes in Another Language
Do you ever get embarrassed when you’re speaking another language because of all the horrific grammar mistakes you just KNOW you’re making? Like, you’re saying the equivalent of “I eated the food yesterday” when you’re speaking Spanish, or Chinese, or French — and as a result you’re too embarrassed to even want to try to say anything? Or maybe you feel like you need to know the absolute correct way to say something before saying it, so you don’t accidentally “lock in” the wrong way of saying it?
No, I’m not here to tell you “just get over it and stop being a perfectionist otherwise you’ll never actually speak the language,” although that’s certainly good advice. Actually my message is even stronger: making grammar mistakes is good. The more languages I learn from scratch, the more I realize that the baby rule of "use the simplest grammar possible" like "I eated the food" is actually the most optimal strategy to acquire a new language rapidly.
Here’s the reason: When you have too much overhead trying to think in 10 different dimensions with tenses, conjugations etc. you're never going to be able to communicate and get the feedback you need to improve your grammar naturally.
Recently I started studying Navajo. And I speak like a freakin’ baby in Navajo. I say things like "I yesterday drink coffee" because tenses in Navajo are way too complicated for me to mentally juggle while communicating right now. But the more I hear my interlocutors say "I yesterday DRANK the coffee," the more I say that too.
I used this strategy most aggressively with Arabic. Arabic is a notoriously difficult language to learn because of all the cases and conjugations, but my tutor and I devised a method where I would essentially just learn a really abbreviated form of the language: “he talk like this because he American.” Initially I just needed to learn it as quickly as possible so I would say stuff like that, but the more my tutor spoke to me in more grammatically correct forms of Arabic, the more I would imitate his speech. And it worked out…fine! If I had instead spent the time painstakingly memorizing Arabic grammar rules before opening my mouth (as most teachers will have you do), I would never have been able to start communicating and actually hear, in context, how the language is correctly spoken.
So I think since my experiences studying Arabic and Navajo I've unconsciously started imitating a baby's language learning strategy, but it's honestly been highly successful in starting to speak quickly and I can see why babies do it this way! So the next time you hear a kid saying “I drinked the milk!” don’t think “dumb kid,” think “smart kid.” Because his mom’s next reply will be “oh, you DRANK the milk?” and boom, our boy just learned to conjugate the English verb “to drink” without even trying!
Literal genius
