Failure: Setback or Opportunity?
We all deal with failure in language learning or in some other area of life. Consider what a few famous people said about failure:
The only man who never makes mistakes is the man who never does anything.
–Theodore RooseveltFailure is the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.
–Henry FordI have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.
–Thomas Edison
Remember those words when you think you’ll never understand the subjunctive mood, when you think you’ll never be able to use all 16 verb tenses in Spanish, or when you think you’ll never fully comprehend that radio announcer yammering away in Spanish.
Be persistent, consistent and relentless in your studies, and soon you’ll look back and ask “when exactly did I become fluent”?
Nice post David, I feel like it was written just for me.
I’ve been in an out of language learning for some time. I guess I have just been impatient and wishing I could be magically fluent..But, it’s foolish to think like that and I obviously won’t reach fluency unless I am “persistent, consistent, and relentless” in my studies.
By the way, I love the accompanying picture!
tomisimo
> By the way, I love the accompanying picture!
That’s a brand of milk they sell in Mexico, so I guess it’s not spilled milk, it’s leche tirada.
Sometimes making mistakes and having them brought to attention in dramatic ways (like your language teacher scraping herself off the floor after laughing so hard at what you REALLY said) makes the right way stick. I don’t usually find it easy to laugh at myself. But, I had to lighten up in language learning. It was easier to do once my mistake and the humor behind it was explained to me–when I saw it through their eyes, it really WAS hilarious, and being able to laugh made me feel less stressed, plus, it really did give me an emotional hook to hang the correct way on.
tomisimo
Good point Eclexia. Now you’ve got me so curious as to what your mistake was, that I think you need to share the story
But only if you feel comfortable doing so 
Well it happened loads of times, most of them funny in the moment, but not so funny in the retelling (guess you had to be there
)The funniest (and the one I was thinking of specifically) was actually a mistake I could have made, but my friend who was studying with me made it first. It was nice to have it stick without it being MY mistake. We were doing conversation practice with our teacher and my friend was talking about how she doesn’t like all the preservatives in food products. In Portuguese, you can sometimes squeak by changing an English word in predictable ways and voila, you’ve actually come up with the right word. In this case, my friend constructed “preservativos”, which our teacher responded to with great laughter. Although I’ll probably never need to use the word, I certainly will never forget how to say “condoms” in Portuguese! Funny enough, that’s the word that stuck–I’m not as certain about the actual Portuguese word for “preservatives”. It’s probably “aditivos” or something like that.
I’m thoroughly enjoying your website.
tomisimo
Nice story. I’ve run into the confusion between conservadores and preservativos in Spanish more than once.