How many mistakes should one make?

[annelions]

If you don't make mistakes then you're not learning or you're only learning very slowly. Admittedly, it's something I struggle with, but it's better to speak 2 or 3 languages with some difficulty than it is to only speak 1 with perfection.

It's even worse when some apps (Duolingo, I'm looking at you) actively penalize you for not being completely proficient with a language as you progress. What they do (not allowing you to move to the next topic) makes sense but how they do it (for Duolingo - the heart system) makes it feel like you shouldn't be making any mistakes at all. Memrise isn't the best app but at least it doesn't make me feel awful for missing a word or two here or there.

When you're working through a grammar book or a textbook of some description, the feedback isn't going to be as instantaneous but mistakes are still okay. Mistakes when talking to someone else are also fine. Again, you're not learning if you're not making mistakes.

Why do you feel like it's somehow wrong or bad to make mistakes? It's not shameful to say the equivalent of something like "I is to be going to the store yesterday" in your target language, especially when you're just starting out.

[gsbod]

I don't think fossilized mistakes are necessarily as big an issue as some people make out. If you need to make active use of a language early on (which for some people, for practical reaons, is essential), then fossilized errors will be inevitable. Even in more cautious learners who are able to hold back production until they feel really comfortable, there are going to be some consistent errors which creep in. If you want to really perfect your language, you'll need to put the effort in to tackle those errors. I don't think this is technically harder to achieve when you are already comfortable communicating in a language, it's just perhaps psychologically it's harder as you'll need to fight against natural laziness and make more effort to push beyond your comfort zone. But that's probably an issue for most advanced learners anyway.

I’m learning a new language where finding the answer to why something is wrong is quite a bit more difficult than the first language I learned, so that’s why I ask. I like to research and correct myself before I let my work be seen, so this is quite a shock.

Looking at this part of your post, I think you may have started by asking the wrong question. As many others have commented, mistakes are at one point or another inevitable, and the important thing is to try and learn from them. I get the impression that the real problem here is that you can't learn from your mistakes if you don't even know you are making them, and you are learning a language which doesn't have the same quality and/or breadth of resources available as, say, the FIGS languages, so you are struggling to put in the groundwork independently.

Here I can only advise the following:-
- Look for advice on decent resources or even strategies specific to the language
- A decent tutor or language exchange partner who is willing to point out your mistakes and able to explain why they are mistakes is incredibly valuable in this situation, but I appreciate at times can be hard to come by
- Working with native materials intelligently will help you develop a feel for appropriate phrases/forms for given situations, but can be difficult to get the most out of until you're at an intermediate level, especially if the language is not related to any you have previously studied to a reasonable level

[ASEAN]

Antimoon has tips on how to reduce mistakes.
http://www.antimoon.com/other/myths-mistakesbeg.htm

[rdearman]

Antimoon has tips on how to reduce mistakes.
http://www.antimoon.com/other/myths-mistakesbeg.htm

I don't know about this. If I waited until I was 100% sure of everything I said was absolutely correct I still wouldn't be able to speak to anyone even after 20 years of learning. Plus I would have given up about 19.9 years ago.

I don't think I would be able to speak in my native language either.

[Cainntear]

This is a subject that keeps coming up, and I feel there's a lot of mythologising about it. I find this thread interesting because it started out with the biggest weaknesses in the "mistakes are good" narrative: they say mistakes are good and that you learn from your mistakes, but the only mistakes you can learn from are the ones you know you've made.

In an ideal world, with the perfect teacher, you would never make a mistake; but we live in the real world and there is no such person as the perfect teacher. Michel Thomas is the teacher, even having just studied from CDs, that has led to me making fewest mistakes in the language I learned from him, and he's far from perfect. In the Language Master documentary, he describes teaching object pronouns in French and claims his students never make mistakes with them, that it won't even "occur to them" to say it wrong and use the English order with the pronoun after the verb, yet in the documentary itself you hear an example of a student doing exactly that.
No-one's perfect, but the fewer mistakes, the better.

In the real world mistakes are inevitable and the further your learning situation is from ideal, the more mistakes you will make, so you have to just accept that you'll make mistakes and be open to noticing and fixing them.

I think a more useful question isn't how many mistakes you should make, but how many mistakes you should fix. Your brain has limited attentional resources, and if you're trying to consciously think about dozens of grammatical rules at once, you're going to fall apart. When it comes to fixing errors, I start by identifying the most immediately useful error to fix and working exclusively on it.
I force myself to correct that one single error every time I make it.
What happens is I hear myself say it, then I stop and repeat the sentence with the error corrected. People tell me it's OK, they understood, but I do it anyway to train my brain to say it right first time (if I let my brain off, it'll get lazy; if I make it more work to make the mistake than to get it right, my brain will learn).
Over time (and not a lot of time, if I'm using the language frequently) I hear myself saying it quicker and quicker.
So at first I hear myself after I've said it and repeat.
Later, I hear myself as I'm saying it and stop mid-word, then go back and correct it.
Soon I reach the point where I "hear" the incorrect form as it forms inside my brain and stop myself before I say it. Sometimes that means a slight pause, sometimes it means starting the sentence again.
The last stage of "error" sees me making the error in my own head but my brain's already working on the correct form at the same time, so there's no outward sign of any error or error correcting process.
From there it's a very small step to my brain stopping ever producing the erroneous form.

This works because the brain is lazy and doesn't want to go to any unnecessary effort. If I've proven to my unconscious brain that making the mistake is an active waste of its time, it'll stop doing it.

The reason errors fossilise is because the brain isn't getting the input that tells it these errors are a waste of time. Sometimes it doesn't get any feedback to tell it there's been any error, sometimes it gets the feedback that the error doesn't matter because the other party understood anyway, and quite often it gets the feedback that correction is a bigger waste of its time than the error was... and us teachers are often part of that. Repeating the same conscious explanations of grammar every time students make the mistake... that's a total waste of time.

So... I'm waffling and lecturing again.

TLDR: Don't worry about your errors. Just when you find them, fix them one by one, starting with the most common one.