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Comment by theli0nheart | Hacker News Reader

> Fear of looking stupid as a beginner is something that most people have right from the start

I'm a parent of a 5yo and surprised this is your experience. If anything, I'd say child behavior is the perfect anti-example of fear of trying new things.

Take one of the examples you provide: language. Young children ages don't care about using incorrect grammar or using the wrong words. This is why they're so good at progressing so quickly. Kids are way less afraid of failure than adults.

I also wouldn't be surprised if there's a significant environmental impact to children's behavior as well; in most ways, they're blank canvases when it comes to skill-based behavior. Personality...not so much.

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Kids don’t mind listening to someone speaking a new language or reading them a story they can’t understand, and they don’t mind trying to communicate, but if you put them on the spot by asking them to do some kind of formal lesson, they freak out just like anyone else.

The most important thing I have found when trying to teach kids [and probably most other people too] is (1) break tasks into very small steps, (2) make the lesson as low-pressure and fun as possible.

I view performance anxiety and fear of looking stupid as a beginner as completely separate things.

When you put the average adult learning a new language in a foreign country, they'll pause before new words, think before conjugating a verb, etc. Kids don't do that; they just talk. They don't worry about making a mistake, but adults (on average!) do.

> performance anxiety and fear of looking stupid as a beginner as completely separate things

The same kid will happily try riding a bike if you just leave one sitting around where they can find it, but will balk if you ask them to try in front of their friends who already know how. I think a huge part (the majority) of people’s fear of learning new skills is a kind of performance anxiety. Both fear of looking bad in front of others, and to some extent fear of looking bad to themselves. The other significant problem is an inability to break the new skill down into small enough pieces to manageably tackle independently.

Speaking a language is always and inevitably a performance. But kids are typically given much more time and space to just listen without trying to speak, and are judged less when they do try. Some kids who move to a new country will just quietly listen for months before ever trying to say something in the new language; adults rarely have that luxury.

But in any event, there are plenty of adults who are willing to try speaking foreign languages imperfectly, and studies have shown children and adults have comparable ability to learn a second language (indeed adults often improve faster at the start).

Actually data shows that adults are way better at learning languages than children. Children just have 100s of hours of doing nothing besides learning languages so they succeed faster in calendar time. If you spent all day every day learning a language you’d be way faster at it than your kids.

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