Only a Fool Learns a Language

Why getting embarrassed helps you to learn.

For those who don't want to laugh, scroll past the videos and go right to the juicy language-learning psych deets.

To learn a language, you can't be afraid to make a fool out of yourself. Some of you might need to ease into embarrassment by messing up a few verb conjugations in front of your friends at a private dinner party, then by trying out some idioms in a bar, and eventually by making your way into public spaces full of strangers without the support of liquid confidence. Or, you can record and reenact all your most embarrassing moments on a platform that keeps and sells your data along with billions of other users.

That's what I did.

Go big or go home, right? Well, I’m not sure where home is, so I’m left with going big. Once I found out the slightly derogatory term for a foreigner in Spain, I realized THAT’S ME!" I’m a Guiri. As I mentioned in my article ¿Qué es un Guiri?, a guiri is Alguien que pone ketchup en la tortilla, mezcla los verbos estar y ser, deja propinas, busca restaurantes abiertos entre las 15:00 y 20:00, va al club a las diez, llora en el ayuntamiento, pide paella fuera de la comunidad Valencia, y comete otros errores graves. A guiri is someone that puts ketchup on their tortilla, mixes the verbs estar and ser, leaves tips, looks for open restaurants between 15:00 and 20:00, leaves the club at ten, cries in city hall, orders paella outside of the Valencia region, and commits other grave errors. And these errors are exactly what I show on TikTok, Youtube, and Errores de un Guiri. All the Errores de un Guiri comics are available for paid subscribers.

For those who need a translation, pollo = chicken and polla = penis. I mean, that's just setting people up for embarrassment. I assumed the penis would be masculine, but then again, you shouldn't assume gender. And if you need a transcript, you're in luck. I've realized that instead of putting the phone away at work, the dinner table, and school, many people have settled for turning it on silent, which is like buying new $100 000 Tesla after trading in a perfectly functional $100 000 BMW — we like to feel like we're going down the right road, but really, we're still on the same one as before. And to those who say, "I don’t need to put my phone away; I'm great at multi-tasking," you should read Multitasking: Switching costs and You'll Never Learn. But I'm not here to convince you to stop. Au contraire!

Juicy Psych Deets

Okay, now that I’ve embarrassed myself, it’s your turn. And here’s why:

"The generation effect is a robust memory phenomenon in which actively producing material during encoding acts to improve later memory performance." (Rosner, Elman, and Shimamura, 2013). The rest of their paper is quite interesting, but for today's purposes, you can also watch the first four minutes of this video:

Have I convinced you that getting embarrassed is essential to learning a language?

If the answer is "No, I'll stick to recording my speech, transcribing myself, and playing it back," I salute you. Not only because that's an excellent learning method but because you're going to get even more embarrassed when you do make a mistake. As you heard in the video, memorizing information better by testing yourself before you know the answers and getting embarrassed is linked to the hyper-correction effect. However, they didn't mention that the hyper-correct effect works best when you confidently think you know the answer. "The hypercorrection effect, which refers to the finding that errors committed with high confidence are more likely to be corrected than are low confidence errors, has been replicated many times, and with both young adults and children." (Rosner, Elman, and Shimamura, 2013)

I hope this article has motivated you to get out there and embarrass yourself. I would love it if you all shared some of the most embarrassing language-learning moments in the comments. And if you enjoyed the comic at the top of the page, you can find much more content on my Errores de Un Guiris section.