If you learned a foreign language in high school or college, you probably learned this early on: you lose points when you make mistakes.
So you get stuck, trying to run grammar rules through your mind before you speak.
You worry about pronunciation and how you’ll come across… to real people you’re talking to or even an invisible presence of foreign language judges grading you.
And over time, all that effort to speak stays in your head—instead of turning into really using the language.
In this interview from TalkBox.Mom Week, one homeschooling mom shares what that perfectionist path looked like for her—and what changed when she stopped keeping the language in her head and started using it in daily life.
Hi, I’m Adelaide from TalkBox.Mom, where we help your family talk in a foreign language the same day you start our program.
As you read the interview, pay attention to how Lori describes the shift—from being her own biggest obstacle to becoming someone who is brave enough to use the language with her family even outside the safety of her home. Add your thoughts in the comments as you read.
Lori: For me, a perfectionist was, I was that academic person.
I am so an academic person. Went to school. I was in a German class, in Spanish class, was in there for years. Got outta both of those classes. Couldn’t really speak any of the language and, but, hey, you know what I came out of those classes with A’s. And you were very right with the yeah, let’s not speak because our grades are gonna go down.
And it took a while just to sit there and flip that mindset and say, you know what? It’s okay to make mistakes. It’s okay to get out there and say, you know what, I’m gonna speak the language and who cares? ’cause you’re really truly correct in that no one is listening to you except that little German lady that I’ll tell you about in a minute.
So when we first started out we, we got our first box and we were so excited. So we went to this little European store and this little German lady owned it. And I didn’t know she was German, but we were practicing our food items, you know, and so, you know, va and we would go around pointing at all the items and she says, excuse me.
And I said, yes ma’am. And of course she had a very thick German accent. And she goes, are you speaking German? And I’m like, oh no, she’s gonna tell me everything I’m doing wrong. Because you know, you had those invisible people. I had people that were actually, I thought were gonna correct me, but you know what?
She was actually so fantastic. She was like, that is awesome. And she just wanted to know how we had started speaking German. But a lot of the people that you run into that actually are native speakers, they’re so awesome when you run into ’em because they’re not sitting there being judgmental like, oh, how dare you.
You butcher that word and you know what? I’ve taken away your license on being able to speak any language. You know? No, they’re not like that at all. They’re just like, oh wow, that is awesome. And they love hearing the kids speak the their language. And it is just so awesome to run into people like that.
And we’ve been doing this for a while now, and. The other day. And it, it’s, it’s weird because you were talking about just keep saying the phrases and you are gonna, they’re gonna build, and that is absolutely true. Because the other day, and you don’t see yourself building those phrases as a perfectionist, I’m just saying, you don’t, you are like, yeah, I know a little bit, you know, ambition, you know, I, I know a little.
And, and then the other day my husband was listening to a German video. And I, I was just listening in and I wasn’t seeing the video. I just heard him playing it. And my husband works all the time, so he doesn’t get to really practice, but he had the captions on and I was like, oh, so this lady is cooking white sausage, is she?
And she said, it’s good with baking fresh bread with it. And he goes, you heard that? And you know what she’s saying? And I’m like, yeah, I know exactly what she’s saying. And it just like a little light bulb came off and it’s like, you know, more than you give yourself credit for. So those negative voices that you’re always hearing saying, oh, you know, I’m not gonna try, I’m not gonna do that because, you know, I just, I just know just a little bit.
You actually are catching a lot more than what you realize. I mean, I was just watching this, or not even watching, but listening to this random video that my husband had pulled up on YouTube and I understood everything that was going on. And even though there were some words that I didn’t know, I knew enough of the language to understand what was going on.
And you’re, you’re always gonna be out there and someone’s gonna throw out a word that you don’t know. I mean, that happens in English all the time. So to think that you’re, you’re never gonna have a word that pops up in whatever language that you’re studying is. There’s always gonna be a word that you’re not gonna know.
And that’s okay. You’d be like, okay, let me think about this context. Okay, what are we talking about? And then most of the time your brain can figure out what you’re talking about. So that has just been one of those, like mind shift and flips on, saying, oh, okay. It’s okay to make mistakes and stuff. Mine wasn’t so much for Oh, pointing out to my kids.
Oh no, you’re saying that wrong. At the very beginning of my journey, they can all tell you, I emailed them about every day. Having a question about how, why was this article changing this way and why was this changing when I said it this way? Because I still had that academic ideal. ’cause I had just came out of three years in German in college and still couldn’t even speak the language.
And I’m like, well, if I say this wrong, I’m gonna be teaching my kids wrong and then it’s gonna be wrong. And then I’m gonna, I’m gonna, you, you know, the, the, the self-doubt would come. I mean, she could tell you. I, I mean, I emailed about every other day saying-
Adelaide: Let’s look at Liv’s face. Liv, true she was emailing a lot?
Lori: Yeah, Liv knows me, but I mean, we’ve never met, but I’d be like, oh, you know, and, and the, and there, you know, the people watching this was my, oh, Liv is gonna sit there and go, oh, she’s emailing again. Oh my gosh, what is her problem?
Adelaide: I see it in our customer support chat. Right. She’s like, we’ve got Lori here.
You know,
Lori: Lori’s here again!
Adelaide: Yeah. But it was nice though, ’cause the German ones, I’m like, okay, it’s this, but just verify with the, the German team. But I’m like, oh, she really wants to know every little thing.
Lori: Yes. But that,
Adelaide: how do you feel like, have you, did you leave that, that you’re like, I don’t need to know every little thing.
I’m gonna start understanding it through German. Like what’s the difference?
Lori: Yeah, so the part, that part of academia was still there, you know, just like, oh, I must learn everything and I must learn the reason why we were saying d and a and you know, in a foreign language. Yeah. But, but. At one point it just kind of flipped, especially when I went through what doing this whole week with you and it was like, you know, it really doesn’t matter. ’cause like you said, the person who speaks German is not gonna come up and say, oh, you said the article wrong. Or, oh, that’s supposed to be masculine and not feminine. They don’t, they don’t really care. They’re, they’re gonna say, oh, okay, yeah, you wanna know this.
And it’s just being able to just. Be able to just be brave is, I guess that’s the biggest one I’m saying is be brave because you are gonna be out there and people around you, you never really know what language they are going to be speaking because, I mean, I run into people here because we kind of do have a little bit of a German community, but I don’t look at everybody going, oh, they might be speaking German, or they might speak German and they might be correcting me.
No, you, you just, just whatever language you have chosen, be brave. Go to Walmart, go shopping down the cart and you know, tell everybody what you need in. Yeah. Whatever language you’re speaking, use your language and be active when you’re using it. That’s how you get that fluency going because it’s not just sitting there and, and going over your phrases every day.
It’s getting out there in the real world and using it. And let me tell you, not everybody’s staring at you. And if they are, they’re just like, Hey, what? That was that Some other language? Did you hear that? They don’t really care. They’re just interested. Kinda like, oh, you just sparked my, you just sparked my mind.
You what? What are you doing over there? Because I mean, even out here where we’re at. If we’re in a large crowd, the first thing I’m gonna go is I’m not gonna speak speaking English, I’m gonna be speaking German because my boys know if I’m speaking German and nobody else around us is speaking German, they know that it’s mama talking to them and nobody else.
So if, if they’re getting too far ahead, I’ll start spouting off German and nobody, nobody stares and nobody turns around and looks at me or anything.
Adelaide: Yeah,
Lori: I mean, they don’t really care.
Adelaide: They’re probably like, they’re probably like, she’s pretty cool. But besides that.
Lori: Yeah, so I mean, just be brave is the biggest thing I can say is be brave.
And when you go out and use your language, ’cause nobody’s staring you down and going, oh, they’re saying that wrong. I mean they really honestly are not looking at you. They’re really concerned about what’s going on in their own lives and they’re not going, oh, let’s just follow this person around. And what are they buying in foreign languages? They don’t really care.
Adelaide: Were you scared the first time you used your German outside of the home?
Lori: Oh, absolutely. I was terrified just because I felt that, you know, you were talking about the invisible people. I felt that I was being judged every time I walked out and just would say anything. ’cause like, somebody’s gonna come up to me and tell me I’m wrong and, and tell me I’m pronun, my pronunciation is horrible, and, and just, you know, just tell me, no, no, you’re doing it wrong.
Because we do have some Germans in our community. I mean, there’s not a lot, but we do have some Germans in our community. And I was just terrified that if I go out there, people are gonna stare me down, even if they don’t speak German. Like, what is she doing? What’s wrong with this girl? But they don’t, they really don’t.
And the more you do it, the more you get comfortable in doing it. It’s nothing for me to go out now and start speaking German to my kids no matter where I’m at, because German is our strongest language. We, we know some Spanish and we know a little bit of French, but German is my strongest language, so I’m gonna go to German just first off the bat.
And it, it’s, you know, just to go out and be able to talk to your kids and, and just not worry about what other other people are thinking, because honestly, who cares? That that’s the, that’s the step away from the perfectionist, you know? And so for me, the perfectionist was me, but it was me being judgmental of myself.
Adelaide: For sure.
Lori: And it wasn’t so much my kids and going, oh, you’re doing it wrong. No, it was like, oh, you’re doing it wrong. You’re doing it wrong. Because I,
Adelaide: You sound like us in our heads, like, what just happened to you?
Lori: I, I know I was my worst enemy. And when you get past. Just saying, you know what, it’s okay if I make a mistake because that’s how we learn.
And and you’re absolutely right when you say, the more mistakes we make, the faster you’re gonna learn. Because you know, one thing, one of the challenges that we do now that we’ve been through all of our nine boxes, and we’ve been through ’em a couple times now, and one of our things that we do is we’ll just pop out a phrase.
And I was like, okay, I’m not even gonna tell you what that phrase means. I want you to think about that phrase and you tell me what you think that phrase means. And you know, we may have it right, we may have it wrong, because sometimes Germans put some words together and you’re like, what are y’all thinking?
Because they’ll be like, scratchy comb and it, it’ll be something weird. Yeah. And it means totally something different. But the point being is that we know we’re gonna make a mistake when we come to a phrase that we don’t know, and we’re like, okay, what do we think we this means? And most of the time we’ll get pretty close, but we’re not gonna get it 100%.
And that’s okay, because that’s the way life is. When you go out and you’re listening to people speak, you might not always a hundred percent understand what’s going on. And it’s kind of, you know, up to you to put, put it together. So, I challenge y’all not to just, you know, always put one phrase in a box and say, okay, this is the only way I can use this phrase.
What do you want to eat? You know, you can use it when you’re feeding the dog. You can use it when you’re walking through the store, picking out groceries. Put yourself in different situations that you can use that phrase, but also. Think about when you’re out and about and you might have to change another word to what, do you want to do something else?
Adelaide: Mm-hmm.
Lori: And, but you already know part of that phrase, so don’t limit yourself by just that phrase, because that, that phrase is awesome, but it expands so much because you can interchange words. Once you start learning a lot of phrases. You can take words and, and come up with sentences that are not even in the book or not even on our
Adelaide: Yeah.
Lori: Our box. And people understand what you’re saying because you’ve learned different phrases and you’re able to piece different parts of ’em together, so.
Adelaide: Very cool. Okay. I have, I have one. This has been so awesome to hear. I can even see the chat. You have some people who are like, I think I feel ready to use this outside the home, so I’m like, yes, yes, yes.
Lori: Do it. Absolutely do it.
Adelaide: Okay, so what advice would you give to Lori when she got her first box in the mail? What would you tell little baby Fluency Family, Lori?
Lori: Oh, we when I first, I would tell you when I first got the box, I was absolutely terrified. I’m like, there is no way I’m gonna learn all this.
And there’s no way my kids can learn all this. Oh my goodness. Look at all these phrases. There’s no way I can learn all this. And the biggest advice I would say is just trust the process. Trust the process. Do what you say, because that was a hard one for me to do because as an academic person, I wanted to do the whole 10 phrases or the whole 5,500 phrases that might be on the, that challenge.
I wanted to do ’em all and then move on. Because the academic part of me was like, well, if I don’t do, if I don’t understand 90% of this, then guess what?
Uh, I failed. And it’s not. So trust the process when she tells you, when Adelaide tells you, do the 10 phrases. Move on to the next box. Do the 10 phrases, move on to the next box.
This is a process and it, the more you go through it, the more you pick up and the quicker you pick up on it. But don’t feel like you have to do everything in the challenge before you move on, because that was my biggest thing. That was the hardest thing for me to lay down, was to not want to do everything in the challenge before I moved on.
Because I was like, how in the world am I gonna learn anything if I’m only looking at 10 phrases and then moving to the next Box? But it really truly does work, so follow the process. I know it’s hard for all these like academic persons that’s like, oh no, I can’t do that because that’s, that’s an F. If I only learned 10% of this whole box, that’s only, that’s a F.
But just trust the process and just do it little by little and it, it comes faster and it comes faster and it comes faster. It, it’s just amazing how much quicker we pick up on things now that we just. Forgot that. Forgot the, try to learn everything in the box and just trust the process of doing 10 at a time and moving to the next box.
So really trust the process. It’s hard. It doesn’t sound like it’s gonna work, but it does work. Trust the process.
Adelaide: I love that. It doesn’t sound like it’ll work everyone, but it will.
Lori: It does! Yes, absolutely.
Adelaide: I’m gonna be chuckling about that. Well, Lori, it was so fantastic for you to give us a view into your life, into like your journey as a learner even.
So that was just so cool to hear and we’re just cheering you and your Fluency Family on and just, you’ve overcome so many things. It’s impressive.
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