Talking and making mistakes

I really don’t like to talk. Small talk is painful although I can do that now. It easiest with people your never going to see again as you can say anything and it won’t come back to you. However the problem that you might and they might recall can strike fear into the heart of anyone. I have generally found your ok in this regard because people are not listening in the first place. I have written about this too before so I don’t want to sound like a broken record.

I was always told to enunciate my words correctly which is not a thing I can really do but I’m told I talk a lot better than I used to. I guess practice makes perfect here. I’m quite anxious when it comes to socialising and social communication hence my reticence to speak. Also using words like that, which surprisingly people don’t understand. What is happening to the English language when most of the foreigners I come across who learnt it as a second language etc speak it better than the majority of us?

I don’t like making mistakes which is an essential part of learning a language. I was critiqued a lot as a child about my poor diction. Who even says stuff like this anymore? Sometimes I sound like I’ve walked out of Downton Abbey with the way I talk. No wonder people are often confused not only by what I’m saying but also how it is said.

I need to get over my fear of talking to others which I mostly have done but unknown people are difficult as you don’t know the boundaries. On the flip side people you know are also as they can always reveal a new side to confuse you. Them taking unexpected offence to something you said is always a worry to me as I’ve done it so many times before. Therefore talking to people in a foreign language that you don’t fully understand is excruciatingly painful for me. Language evolves so I’m never going to know all the nooks and crannies that people use as shortcuts. Even now my English is so full of references that probably don’t even translate just like in other languages.

Talking takes quite a lot of mental effort just like reading requires a lot of cognitive effort. It just depends which is easier for you. For me since I’m a very visual person it’s reading but that doesn’t allow you to communicate your present informal needs to a person in order to become friends with them. You can learn a language through talking and be unable to read and write as one of my friends recently is like that or you can be the opposite but it’s difficult to do both. Yet this is what we all manage in our native languages very quickly. It’s fascinating how our adult brains can accomplish so much but with something like this they struggle enormously.

Best wishes

Angela