Speak a Foreign Language | Why You Shouldn’t be Fearful

Sounding Funny or Having a Foreign Accent

Languages were created in order for people to communicate among themselves. As long as a speaker is understood, their accent should be considered perfect. Despite this, many people fear that they sound funny speaking their foreign language, for example, many English natives have a very hard time pronouncing the Spanish “r” or, even more so the double “r”. When this fear takes over and starts attacking your desire to practice, try to think of a few Spanish speaking actors who appear in English speaking movies. What is your perception of their accent? More than likely you find it exotic and even attractive.

Evolutionary theory says that we find foreign accents attractive because they are telling of a more exotic gene pool being added to the mix. But maybe we are just attracted to someone who says sentences in our native tongue in a slightly different, and many times more poetic or simply differently rhythmed way, than we would normally say them. Regardless, It is a common misconception that one should strive to sound like a native speaker and we should accept our badly rolled Spanish “r”s with open arms. We should tell ourselves that we are able to communicate with someone from a completely different culture and area of the world, and that should be enough. Striving for a perfect native accent should not be the goal. Do not be ashamed of your “accent” since people will be too awed by the fact that you speak another language than by the fact that we are not rolling our “r”s like a native speaker.

Fear of Failure

Our fear of failure runs deep and can be immobilizing. Many of us beat ourselves up when we make fail, but we should never forget that, making failing, especially when speaking a foreign language, only makes us better.

Our mind’s long term memory is cued to remember events better when a traumatic event happens. We never remember what we were doing at 10am, on a mundane Monday morning, three weeks ago, however, ask anyone where they were on September 11th and they will have a quick answer. When we fail in speaking a foreign language and someone does not understand us, we tend to experience a bit of anxiety at having, in a sense “failed”.  We do not want to say that failing in Spanish should be traumatic exactly, however, a little discomfort does help go a long way in really internalizing the language. This failure allows us to search for other vocabulary, more precise ways to pronounce words and other ways of getting across our message to the listener. This process really helps us get so much more practice than we would have gotten by just sitting in a classroom doing book work. So get comfortable with your discomfort and know that your failures are making you exponentially better at Spanish!