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Making mistakes. It’s something that many of us learning a second language hate to do. We don’t want to sound stupid, or worse, seem stupid. For many of us, we grow up receiving a mixed message from our parents, our teachers and basically our society, and that message is: Making mistakes are a fact of life but we should avoid making them at all costs.

Most of us can’t help it. We want to be perfect. When speaking Spanish, we want to speak it as fluently as we speak English (or French, German, Dutch, Japanese) or whatever our first language is. But the truth is is that we’ll never get to that level of fluency until we risk something and that means looking and sounding like an idiot from time to time.

Once at a party in Madrid, I was talking to a new mom about her baby and I kept saying pañuelos when I should’ve been saying pañales. Finally the mom, unable to take it anymore, said to me in Spanish, “Quieres decir pañales.” ¡Qué vergueñza! (How embarrassing!) But that one experience cemented in my brain the two words and I know I will never use them incorrectly again.

Don’t beat yourself up if you don’t have the precise vocabulary to express what you’re thinking. Talk around it or talk through it and use the vocabulary you already have. Let’s say you’re telling a Spanish-speaking friend about your job. In the middle of recounting the story, you suddenly realize you forget how to say the word “boss” in Spanish. Instead of freezing, keep going and talk your way through it. Although you may not know or remember the exact word for boss (jefe), you probably know how to say “la persona para quien trabajo.” Hey, it’s not concise but it gets the job done!

So the next time you feel the urge to zip it when you’re not 100% sure how to say something in Spanish, déjate llevar (go with the flow), and go ahead and say what’s on the tip of your tongue. It may be that you’re not as far off base as you think. And in the worst case scenario you make a mistake, but you will definitely learn from the experience, even if it is something as simple as the difference between a scarf (pañuelo) and a diaper (pañal).

Have you ever made a whopper of a mistake in Spanish? What was it? Do you get uptight about making mistakes when speaking Spanish? What helps you get past that anxiety? Tell us your story in the comments section below.

-by Eleena de Lisser

Eleena also writes about the Spanish language at her bilingual blog “Voices en Español.”