Some people are born into a multilingual environment – whether it be your country or community that is multilingual or your family. But for others, monolingual environments might be the only thing they know for a long time, like me who spoke only Japanese until I was a late teenager. I speak English fluently now, but it took me a lot to get to where I am today. The biggest hurdle of my journey was to overcome the fear of making mistakes – the quality that is essential in learning at large.
When I first moved to the U.S. on my own, I had a lot of English pronunciation issues, which resulted in the inability to effectively communicate with people. Not everyone was patient or kind enough to take time to understand what I was trying to say. For instance, when customer service agents either ignored me or refused to provide service because they were impatient with my English, I felt like the dumbest person on Earth, incapable of doing anything at all. This caused me to fear making mistakes. I felt tremendously nervous just ordering a meal at McDonald’s. For some time, I almost hated speaking in general, feeling useless in my inability to accomplish simple tasks. But I kept going because that was the only way to survive.
One day, I thought that I should stop being afraid of making mistakes and that I should try to speak English as much as possible. That is, the more errors I make, the better I get. From that moment, instead of dreading to speak English, I looked at it as an opportunity to practice and improve my English. I was still nervous, but I felt better. My English was still not great, but I realized what I was lacking was the ability to be assertive and strong. If people ignored me the first time because they didn’t understand me, I would try again until I got what I wanted, writing out if necessary. As I gained more confidence, my English started to improve rapidly.
Today, I learn many different languages and have no fear in making mistakes thanks to my experience in learning English. Happy learning!