2025-05-02
10 分钟Perfectionism.
Is it a good thing or a bad thing?
To the extent that we rarely can be perfect,
it's probably an unattainable philosophy or the goal of perfection isn't attainable.
Should we strive for it?
In my opinion, when it comes to language learning,
perfectionism is an obstacle to progress in learning a language.
So the other evening I was with some friends, friends of my son actually,
and they were talking about their daughter who's in France and she's a perfectionist in whatever she does,
whether it be cleaning her room or knitting or homework at school.
And now she's working to improve her French, living in France and working there.
But she's such a perfectionist that she really hates making mistakes.
So when I lived in Japan, they had a term for improving your precision and reducing...
quality issues at work, increasing productivity.
And the term was kaizen, which means improve.
So the idea of constant improvement, I think, is a good idea in any field.
And I think in language learning, we always want to strive to be more precise in our use of words,
a little more accurate in our pronunciation.
But where the perfectionism comes in is where people are afraid of making a mistake.
And I'm going to explain why when it comes to language learning,