Are you afraid to speak another language?

Thinking about it this way can help

Have you ever tried to learn a language? How far did you get? If you succeeded, what do you think was the reason?

For me, language study was always fraught with terror.

In high school I took two years of Latin (yes, I know…but they told me it would help) and three years of French. Every class was a study in discomfort for me. I felt incompetent, overwhelmed.

With the Latin, I at least tried to organize myself, see the grammatical patterns, do the memorization. It overwhelmed me. When I got to French, where I was actually expected to speak, I ran screaming.

It never occurred to me how much fear was interfering with my success.

I made many attempts to learn languages: German in my early 30’s, Spanish in my early 40’s, going all in, reading grammar books and listening to courses and studying flashcards. It felt a lot like trying to get a car out of the mud. The back tires kept spinning and spinning.

Is any of this ringing a bell with you? What do you suppose I did about it?

When my family took a trip to Italy, I decided I was going to learn Italian, and that nothing was going to stop me. Seven years after that trip, I was still studying Italian, and was still having a hell of a lot of trouble even getting basic sentences out. Fear, fear, fear.

I understood by then that I was simply terrified of trying to understand and speak another language. I’d been through the process so many times that I recognized the sensation of shut-down. I fought back.

I tried many things to immerse myself, to jump into the water and swim. I went to a speaking-group full of Italian speakers. I had regular conversations with native Italians via Skype.

And all the while, I was studying hard. An hour or two a day, flashcards, podcasts.

Nothing was giving. Fear, fear, fear.

You can imagine my frustration.

I’m happy to say that something has changed and the tide has begun to turn. I can now listen to Italian without freaking out, and although I still talk like Frankenstein’s monster, words come into my head better than they used to.

Do you want to know what made the difference?

I figured out what the fear was masking, what it was protecting me from. Most of the time, it was protecting me from absolutely nothing. So learning a language became a question of listening through that fear, and the key was knowing what to listen for.

The acquisition of a new language is a matter of tuning into this specific frequency in your brain. There’s a sweet spot where you can pay attention and work on making sense of the noise of foreign sounds and words. If you hit that spot, you can focus on the task at hand.

Anything less than that spot, and the whole thing washes over you like a huge wave, overwhelming you, leaving you floundering in a sea of nonsense. Anything more than that spot, and you are working too hard, beating yourself up for not understanding, getting hung up on every word you don’t know. You have to hit it right in the middle.

Now hitting a sweet spot isn’t just something you can “do.” If you think about baseball players at bat, the sweet spot means getting a hit, and the very best players only do that about 1/3 of the time. It’s unrealistic to think you’re going to find that spot and stay there for the rest of your life.

You don’t even hit the sweet spot in your native language every time. Haven’t you ever been driving, listening to something on the radio, and you just kind of fade out? Haven’t you ever been in a class and you’re just not getting what the professor is saying?

So what you’re really after is developing the skill of locating that sweet spot.

Every day you try to do that, it will be a different experience. You will be more or less stressed out, the circumstances will be more or less favorable. You want to get better at navigating the current circumstances to do what you want, like a sailor sailing the sea they have.

Fear is keeping you from developing that skill.

Once you realize that your job is to find that sweet spot, you can actually set the fear aside, just to the left over there, let it sit. It can talk to you all it wants, express its concerns. You can listen to those concerns or you can ignore them.

If you’re chronically anxious like me, you have to do an extra step of filtering the messages that fear is offering, deciding what’s real and what’s just fantasy fear. It’s hard to ignore alarm bells. Try sitting in a theater with the fire alarm going off and not moving.

The point is, the fear is there. It’s going to be there, part of the picture. Some days it will be quieter, some days it will be louder.

The fear is only relevant to the extent that it offers you useful information. If you’re in Italy speaking Italian to someone selling you a train ticket, it’s wise to be afraid that you might misunderstand and buy a first-class ticket going the wrong direction. You listen to that fear, you’re extra careful, and the sweet spot skews towards working harder.

If the fear is just babbling about how you look like an idiot and you’ve never been good at languages and you’re boring the person you’re speaking to, then that’s probably neither accurate nor helpful. Put it aside. Focus on the task at hand:

Where is the sweet spot today?

Using gesture, inflection, context, and the words you know, what is being communicated? What can you say that will matter?

I’m not currently fluent in Italian. The point is, I no longer have that expectation that I should be. Instead, I have a sense of purpose, that I will find the sweet spot today and it will move me closer to my goal of being a fluent speaker.

That’s a much more pleasant and fun way to live.