How To Stop Anxiety When Speaking A Foreign Language

I had an interesting thing happen to me recently that prompted me to write this today.

I was out walking here in California and came across a Lebanese food truck on the side of the road. I thought to myself:

“This is a great opportunity to practice some Arabic and meet some new people.”

I stood in line waiting to be served by an older Lebanese woman and there were lots of people standing around within earshot.

As I got up to the front of the line to be served where I was planning to introduce myself in Arabic, the nerves hit me hard. I was suddenly very nervous to talk to this woman.

This was something I noticed straight away and even asked myself:

“Why the hell am I nervous?

I’ve done this a million times all over the world.”

Not to mention that Arabic is my best language after English.

I couldn’t tell at the time if it was nerves to speak to her in general, fear of screwing something up or concern about using Arabic in front of a bunch of English-speaking strangers and what they might think.

Long story short, we ended up having a wonderful chat (the nerves went away after I started speaking to her) – I met her husband and kids and we exchanged contact information. I got to practice lots of Arabic that day and considered it a successful encounter.

But I went home and reflected on what happened earlier.

What caused me to feel like that?

Has it happened before and I just didn’t pay attention to it at the time?

This may come as a surprise to some of my readers that I still get very nervous at times when practising foreign languages with other people.

Both in person and online.

If you met me, you’d probably think “this guy’s an extrovert”. I come across as incredibly confident and talkative but I’m very much introverted.

I’m what I call a ‘sociable introvert’.

This means that while I crave ‘me time’ like every introvert does to recharge, I have no problem with sociability itself (see this post where I explain the important difference).

If you’re afraid of talking to people in general, this has nothing to do with introversion.

It’s social anxiety (a more serious problem).

On the other hand, if you just don’t like being around other people, then that’s a lack of sociability. If you fall into this category then my question is: why bother learning to speak a foreign language at all?

As far as social anxiety is concerned, I don’t believe I have major issues with it. Meeting new people has never bothered me or been hard for me as it is for some people.

But…

I have always struggled with performance anxiety.

Most of us hate public speaking which is one form of performance anxiety.

But even when I was a kid, though I was excellent at sports for example, whenever I had to play a game in front of a crowd and all eyes were on me, it was crippling. If there was ever a skill that I was great at and could do perfectly in private, put me in front of people and I felt like an amateur again.

It was tough.

This even affected my employment in the past where I once opted out of a job interview because the process required a performance test (even though the task itself was a piece of cake).

I threw away a potentially high-paying career back then because I didn’t have the nerve to do a simple task in front of a group of strangers!

Performance anxiety is a huge hurdle for a lot of language learners that I can relate to.

Practical steps you can take to overcome nervousness when speaking a foreign language

So here’s where I give you profound insight into how to solve this problem once and for all.

Not exactly.