One of the most fashionable ideas in language learning is that we learn by making mistakes.

This idea is appealing for obvious reasons. 

Beginner and intermediate language learners, particularly those studying Mandarin, are often afraid of speaking.

Typically, this is due to feeling embarrassed and self-conscious about making a fool out of themselves. 

So to encourage you to speak, teachers reassure you that the essence of learning lies in making mistakes.

All the best Chinese learners, they point out, got to a high level precisely because they weren’t afraid to make mistakes. 

Sounds reasonable enough…But there is a major problem with this narrative. 

Learners are left with the impression that there is a causal connection between making mistakes and progress. As though the act of making mistakes in itself leads to improvement via some kind of mystical process of neurolinguistic alchemy.

This is potentially damaging for one simple reason:

Nobody has ever learned anything by making mistakes. 

We can of course learn from our mistakes.

But typically we only do so if we systematically notice them, have them corrected by others, and make a concerted effort to avoid making them again. 

As I’ve discussed on this blog, there are various ways correction-based language learning sessions can be structured effectively. 

Sadly, many teachers skip this part, encouraging you to make mistakes but failing to correct you when you do, or doing so in an unstructured way that gives you no chance of retaining the information.

Maybe they don’t think corrections will help. Maybe they’re afraid of hurting your feelings.

Whatever the reasons, follow this path for very long and you will fail to make much progress in the areas of production that require the most attention. 

Here, I speak from bitter experience. I went through a long period of speaking lots of Mandarin with tutors and language exchange partners, most of the time without being corrected. 

As a result of making the same tone and sentence structure mistakes repeatedly over a long period (without noticing I was making them), these mistakes became my default way of speaking Chinese. 

Later, I had to put an insane amount of energy into undoing the damage that speaking with little feedback had caused. 

And I’m hardly alone; Examples of this can be seen everywhere online. 

Beginner and intermediate learners on social media regularly post videos of themselves taking part in 100-day Mandarin speaking challenges. 

The logic behind them is that by committing to speaking every day for a certain time and recording themselves making mistakes, students will improve over time. 

But watching these videos an unsettling pattern emerges. 

Typically, those who take part develop their confidence, speaking Chinese more loudly and more quickly with each video. 

Meanwhile, their core productive abilities - tones, sentence structure, and word choice - remain exactly where they were at the start of the challenge. 

Over time, they feel emboldened to express a wider range of ideas in Mandarin, placing the burden firmly on the listener to decode the flurry of atonal Chinglish that emerges from their mouths at lightning speed. 

Put crudely, after 100 days of uncorrected speaking practice you can expect roughly the same results as what you could achieve in one evening with eight beers:

Slurred gibberish delivered with unbearable arrogance. 

Worse still, since you will have made the same mistakes repeatedly over a long period without noticing or having them pointed out to you, these errors will become set in stone and be difficult (though of course never impossible) to undo later. 

So the next time you hear someone peddle the narrative that making mistakes is the key to learning, remember this:

The real key to progress lies not in making mistakes, but in training yourself to notice them with the aim of not making them again.