Day 463 of German
In yesterday’s post, my loose quote of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s ideas bothered me, so I checked Antifragile. While flipping through the book, I found a passage on language learning:
“Another forgotten property of stressors is in language acquisition – I don’t know anyone who ever learned to speak his mother tongue in a textbook… You pick up a language best thanks to situational difficulty, from error to error, when you need to communicate under more or less straining circumstances…” (pp. 61-62).
I can relate to these stressors across all the languages I’ve learned, including my mother tongue. I believe the temper tantrums toddlers go through are partly caused by their inability to verbalize concepts and get what they want.
This type of linguistic stressor—unlike the passive consumption of news—is the kind that makes a person antifragile and actively facilitates growth. This passage resonates because it confirms that one learns through struggle. The necessity of communication under pressure is what truly forces progress.
Making mistakes and being laughed at (or with; though I may not be laughing) can be genuinely unpleasant, but that temporary humiliation must be seen as a source of fuel. If one is serious about language learning, the pain of being corrected is precisely the mechanism for growth. I have always appreciated people for correcting and helping me through situational difficulties.
I know the day will come when I’ll have to endure a barrage of socially uncomfortable and humiliating moments in German. I will do my best to embrace those moments and actively be antifragile.