Beautiful Plants For Your Interior
It isn’t technical understanding. These students aren’t unusual in their knowledge. What they do have, however, is confidence. Not confidence in the sense that they never make mistakes or anything like that. I simply mean that they are willing to take risks. Speaking another language always involves a certain degree of surrender. You have to be willing to make mistakes, and you have to be willing to accept that you can’t control every situation. Students like this are confident enough to do that, whereas other students are more risk averse.
Confidence begets confidence. Every time you have a successful interaction, you gain confidence that you can communicate successfully in the language you are learning. When you have enough successful interactions, you start to see yourself not as a student of Spanish, but as someone who can speak Spanish. Your identity changes, and you being to expect yourself to succeed, which means that your brain is less likely to freeze up in stressful situations. You still get nervous, but you function. Eventually, you get used to it.
The best way to become confident is to be supported. Surround yourself with people who encourage you to speak, even when your ideas are difficult to express. Don’t be afraid to look like an idiot, because you won’t. Most people are sympathetic when you struggle to communicate, and they will go out of their way to help you along and make you feel better. If you aren’t willing to risk looking like an idiot, you will never become fluent. It is incredibly important to find a supportive environment, which could be a language exchange website, a conversation exchange, or a class. As long as you are supported and encouraged, you will gain confidence.
There is one more thing about confidence that I want to mention. When you are speaking another language, you can’t be yourself. At least, not at first. You have to get used to expressing your ideas and opinions in another language. Everything you do feels fake, because it doesn’t feel like you. As you get more comfortable, you will feel more like yourself. You will regain your personality, your sense of humor, your opinions, your thoughts, and your feelings. You will be able to express them freely and naturally, without feeling like a phony. This is important, because until then you aren’t truly expressing your own thoughts and feelings. You are only expressing what you’ve learned. Once you can express your own thoughts and feelings, you will feel much more attached to the language. You will be more interested in it. You will feel more like it is a part of you, which will make you more interested in using it.
This is a key component of language learning. People who are only learning a language for practical purposes, like a class or a career goal, will never be as successful as someone who is doing it because they love the language. If you don’t love the language, you won’t use it as much, which means you won’t gain exposure, and you therefore won’t get better. When all is said and done, confidence is what separates the men from the boys. A student with great technical understanding but low confidence will not succeed. A student with low technical understanding but high confidence will succeed wildly. That is the value of confidence. It is what will ultimately make you fluent. Not your knowledge of grammar rules or your vocabulary. Those things are just tools to help you communicate. If you aren’t willing to communicate, none of that matters.
