A language learners’ forum

Do you guys have any tips for dealing with frustration at mistakes in your target language? I just finished an italki lesson and I keep on thinking back and thinking "I said para tu not para ti", "I should have used the subjunctive there" etc. It's frustrating after learning for so long to have all of these flaws in my language? Do they ever go away? Are there ways to speed up the process?

The fact that you think back and recognise the mistakes is already a very good sign and shouldn’t frustrate you. It would be much worse if you made those mistakes not knowing that they were mistakes.

We’ve all been there, I think. I have been studying Russian for years now, but I still make grammar mistakes all the time when talking Russian. A problem many of us self-learners have, I believe, is that we do not get enough chance to practise our languages intensely. I only got over my many mistakes in Spanish by spending a year in Spain using nothing but Spanish in all my daily tasks. Sometimes people would correct me, sometimes a friend would laugh when I said something stupid but most of all I would pick up the right way of saying things by listening to Spanish all the time.

So don’t get too frustrated, learn from your mistakes and tell yourself that next time you will get it right.

As for speeding up the process, there is only one answer. More hours spent speaking, listening, reading and writing the language.

Ogrim wrote:The fact that you think back and recognise the mistakes is already a very good sign and shouldn’t frustrate you. It would be much worse if you made those mistakes not knowing that they were mistakes.

We’ve all been there, I think. I have been studying Russian for years now, but I still make grammar mistakes all the time when talking Russian. A problem many of us self-learners have, I believe, is that we do not get enough chance to practise our languages intensely. I only got over my many mistakes in Spanish by spending a year in Spain using nothing but Spanish in all my daily tasks. Sometimes people would correct me, sometimes a friend would laugh when I said something stupid but most of all I would pick up the right way of saying things by listening to Spanish all the time.

So don’t get too frustrated, learn from your mistakes and tell yourself that next time you will get it right.

As for speeding up the process, there is only one answer. More hours spent speaking, listening, reading and writing the language.

Thanks for the encouragement, Ogrim.

samfrances wrote:"I said para tu not para ti"

I recite these out loud as I walk down the street and they only take one or two sessions, after which any other version would sound odd. Eg. I remember the Italian "in + la = nella" series taking me less than my 25-min walk home.

Mistakes are annoying but you're putting effort into recognizing them, so I wouldn't worry. Keep working on them and they will go away eventually. I remember (we have the same TL) when I was beginning Spanish some words ('-ma' and other masculine nouns ending in '-a') would drive me insane but eventually I learned and I almost never make those mistakes now. I think the most annoying thing IMO is making a million mistakes in my NL, which I immediately recognize, which never happened when I was monolingual.

It's annoying, but it's going to happen and you're going to have to deal with it because you're not perfect

It gets really frustrating when you are speaking to your partner and you need stuff to be correct, though...

I simply try to catch myself before mistakes happen. I once made a thread here (okay, maybe it was one of a few) that I think some people laughed at me for, about how many mistakes one should allow themselves to make. The general response was, "You can control that?"

I thought it was something that yes, you could control. Since I started studying Spanish, I've been very strict with myself as far as catching my errors and correcting them. If I'm not sure about something, I look for all avenues to find the right answer to a question I'm having.

I search WordReference forums, read through online dictionaries, ask trusted native speaking friends to explain things to me, apply a fair amount of educated guessing and checking... I also have an equally bull-headed tutor that doesn't let any mistakes slip by, and who, in our lessons, has very stringent requirements.

I've mentioned my experience with learning through school various times on this forum; however, I won't mention them again since repetition's a killer.

Instead, I'll just say this: I wouldn't have gotten as far as I did in Spanish up until 2018 if I hadn't spent some time teaching myself and holding to those ideas I mentioned. A lot of them I didn't even hold to until after I came to this forum! But I basically jumped a level in just under a year by mixing techniques I read about with my previous ones. Then I stuck to them.

But not many people, it seems (from my experience--I could be wrong), are willing to become human spell checkers or Grammarlies. Equally from my experience, though, it does save you a lot of time later.

Chin up! You can do it. Just do it your own way