Making progress in English ≠ Feeling more confident (Let me explain)

I have seen this pattern with many, many people over the years.

They start to improve — but they feel worse.

Even though they know more vocabulary and their pronunciation has gotten better, they feel more self-conscious and less confident.

Slice of life: Enjoying the long summer evenings

One of the crucial stages that people must pass through on the journey from Je me débrouille en anglais to I feel confident and excited about speaking English, is the ability to notice and correct your own mistakes.

When I was learning French, that meant saying a lot of things like this:

• Quand je lui ai vu, ah non pardon, quand je l’ai vu …

• Je préfère celle-là, ah non, je voulais dire, celui-là.

• Il m’avait en parlé, oups, il m’en avait parlé …

It doesn’t feel good to notice yourself making a mistake, but I think we can all agree that correcting yourself is better than not noticing at all, right?

This is what’s happening:

A graph by yours truly

What’s interesting about this is that the skill level is continuing to improve even when the confidence is going down.

This is very common, and a normal part of the learning process.

Whenever we’re learning something new, we all have to go through this phase where we start to realize how much we have left to learn.

We know enough to get by… but mastery still feels far away.