Make 200,000 Mistakes
How to learn a foreign language
In the spirit of my “Do Ten Times As Much,” here’s a guest post from former Mormon missionary Jedediah Russell on how to learn a foreign language. Reprinted with his permission.
Hello Dr. Caplan,
I grew up in a white, English-speaking household. However, I am now fully fluent in Spanish as a result of serving a full-time two-year mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in East Los Angeles (about a year in the barrios of Lincoln Heights/Highland Park and a year in Chino/Pomona) from 2012-2014. I now live in a primarily Spanish-speaking household homeschooling three bilingual children. We attend a Spanish congregation for our Church and most of our friends (and most of my wife's family) either exclusively or primarily speak Spanish.
A missionary's first 6-10 weeks is spent at the Missionary Training Center where they undergo intense days of 8-10 hours of instruction, the majority of which is on basic grammatical structure and vocabulary. If you ever pass through Provo, Utah, I highly recommend you call and schedule a tour of the Missionary Training Center. It's something to behold.
A teacher of mine framed the challenge of learning a language in an immensely helpful way. Instead of a question of time, he invited us to look at it as a question of quantity of mistakes. It essentially states "to learn to speak, read, and write a language well it takes 200,000 mistakes made by you in front of others, many of which will be funny, frustrating, and even embarrassing. But there is no getting around that number, so you might as well get them over with as soon and as fast as possible."
This framing was immensely helpful for me. Missionaries are always in pairs (called 'companionships'), so my experience isn't just based on me learning a language, but the 15 other missionaries I witnessed trying to learn a second language. The level of comfort with making mistakes was, in my observation, the key to how well and how fast a person learned Spanish. Missionaries diligent in their language study still struggled to become fluent if they did not put themselves in situations where they would make mistakes. Missionaries that had a hard time sitting still enough for study but were able to recognize that a mistake isn't the end of the world thrived.
I can confirm that a similar principle of “make 200000 mistakes” exists in learning any form of art.
“Walt Stanchfield — 'We all have 10000 bad drawings in us. The sooner we get them out the better.'”
It takes 200,000 costly mistakes made by you in business, many of which will be funny, frustrating, and even embarrassing. But there is no getting around that number, so you might as well get them over with as soon and as fast as possible if you want to be a millionare.