What is the single most important thing to do when you’re trying to learn a language? The one trick that will help you to improve at a much faster rate?
Don’t take yourself too seriously!
Honestly, having a sense of humour will help you far more than hours and hours spent studying, or even having a perfect grasp of grammar.
Why? Because if you take yourself too seriously, you will be terrified of people laughing at you when you make a mistake. And if you’re terrified of making a mistake, you won’t be able to learn the new language anywhere near as quickly.
Of course, lots of people worry that they will look bad when they are trying to learn a language. They are scared that they will look stupid or that they will get into an awkward or embarrassing situation. But it is absolutely impossible to go straight from knowing nothing about a subject to being perfect at it.
While you are practising and improving, you will make errors, people will sometimes struggle to understand what you mean, and sometimes they will laugh. But that’s nothing to be afraid of!
Here’s the thing that you need to remember about laughter. People laugh for lots of reasons, but often it’s just to take the stress or pressure out of a situation. If you are struggling to communicate and the other person starts laughing, they probably aren’t trying to make you feel bad – they are just nervous. In fact, usually people aren’t even laughing at you, they are laughing at the situation.
This is a very important difference. Once you realise that it’s the situation that is funny, not you, you can start to laugh at it, too!
In fact, the best possible thing you can do when you’re having trouble communicating is to laugh. Sometimes the other person will also panic when they struggle to understand you, and once you both start to worry, it will get harder and harder to communicate. On the other hand, if you both start to find the situation funny, you will stop feeling so stressed and can focus on working out what the other person is saying, without all the added stress.
Plus, it’s much easier to communicate in other ways, like acting out what you need, if you are both in a good mood and you have got rid of the embarrassment by making the conversation funny. It also makes it easier for the other person to try and teach you a new word or correct your pronunciation if you are happy about the situation, instead of embarrassed!
Humour can make just about any situation less scary. Laughing brings people together and helps to create a feeling of friendship between people. Even if you can’t understand each other perfectly, being able to see the funny side is guaranteed to make you feel more comfortable and make it easier to communicate, or to keep trying to communicate, even when you are making some mistakes.
You might not always manage to get across exactly what you wanted to express, but you can feel proud that you managed to have a conversation in a brand new language. After all, isn’t that the reason you are learning in the first place?
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