A theme that has recurred several times in the last couple of chapters of Principles of Language Learning and Teaching is anxiety. The prevailing opinion: It’s not good in the foreign language classroom. This is an important lesson.

I am very shy about speaking in a foreign language. I always have been. There are a couple factors that play in to this shyness, and both of them are hindrances in and of themselves: I am overly conscious of myself when I speak, I monitor everything to make sure it’s correct. And I prefer working alone to working in groups. This is because I almost invariably end up leading the group, which always leaves me feeling like a prick.

It’s a bit paradoxical. I’m shy about being right all the time because I don’t want people to think I’m a know-it-all, and I’m shy about being wrong because I don’t want people to think “Hah! He thinks he’s soooo smart.” This really is a problem for me. I try to be modest about being right most of the time. I don’t really know if I’m successful. In any case, I try not to answer unless I’m sure that I’m right. That means that when I do answer I have pretty good odds. If I were to be a bit more impulsive, a bit more willing to experiment or throw things out there that I’m not quite sure about, the problem would go away. I would be wrong more often, and so I wouldn’t have to worry about being right all the time.

Is this more than you wanted to know about my psyche?

What I’m learning is that letting go of inhibitions is a significant part of being a good language learner. I went into my Japanese class last year deliberately not caring what other people thought about me talking too much in class or always being right. It was helpful, but it didn’t last. After a couple of semesters with the same people I started to actually care about their opinion of me and the same old demons arose. I know I was on the right track though, and I think I can get there again.

I also have a tendency to hamper the communicative process by overanalyzing things. This is to some extent overcompensating for the opposite deficiency. I used to get very bad grades in translation classes because I tended to translate with my gut rather than word for word. I knew what the author of the passage was saying, and I translated it very freely into pleasant English. The problem was that this English, although pleasant to read and maybe closer to the meaning of the author, was not exactly what the author said. When put to the task of precision, I couldn’t do it.

I have brought to Japanese class a desire to really know exactly what is being said. This desire would have been much better applied to translating Middle High German ten years ago. Right now it just gets in the way of communication. What I have failed to realize up until this moment is that my goals in the two separate environments (dead language translation class vs. Modern Japanese) are completely different. I was never going to speak to anyone in Middle High German, Gothic, or Old Norse. In that environment being “loose” with a translation was detrimental (to my grades if nothing else). In Japanese however, I realize I will never truly be literate. I don’t have the stamina to be a simultaneous interpreter either. I will never have a need to translate with the kind of precision required of me in my undergrad education. With that in mind, and with the goal of communication at the fore, I should be able to let go of the desire for precision and focus on meaning.

Children tend to focus on the truth value of a statement rather than on the details of its construction. Function over form. I could learn form this.