Great message Allison. My wife spent the majority of her youth growing up in Singapore and has similar feelings of regret and embarrassment when it comes to her limited ability to speak Mandarin. Even though her Mandarin isn’t bad, in her head she always compares it to the standards of the Singaporean school system and she feels ashamed as a result. This only makes her even less confident in her abilities and discourages her from wanting to pick it up again.

Recently I’ve been learning some Mandarin as well. One reason for this was to satisfy my curiosity about the language. The other was to surreptitiously increase her confidence with her Mother Tongue. It always helps to hear someone worse than you are and I figured we could improve our Mandarin together.

I like you message at the end of the piece. Too often students of any language let that first major class failure or the first time some one asked them to prove that they knew a certain language and they couldn’t form a complete and correct sentence, define their actual ability to learn a language to fluency. This is a damaging mentality that if I had not pushed past in my early college days I would have never become fluent in Japanese or Spanish.

The fact is that learning a language deliberately takes time, patience, and a lot of trial and error. We just need to be a little kinder to ourselves and the people around us that are learning to give us the space to fall flat a few times so that we can emerge in few months or even years with the kind of language skills that will make our parents, and more importantly ourselves, proud.