Listening to others make mistakes...

[陳德聰]

I am just kind of curious...

Do you have any opinions on whether or not listening to other learners make mistakes is useful? I know that in learning making mistakes is key blah blah blah, but when I hear other people mistakes, I don't know if I necessarily learn anything from that (since I already know whatever it is if I am able to tell they're making mistakes, right?)

But I'm wondering if anyone has found it helpful to hear others make mistakes. My only really good example would be for people who take language classes I guess... A lot of my international friends complain that they don't want to talk to non-native speakers 'cause their speech is full of mistakes and I tend to kind of agree but it's based on just maybe my tolerance for people making grammatical/pronounciation errors...

Any thoughts? I've been surfing youtube for videos of people vlogging in different languages they're learning and it got me thinking.

[歐博思]

When I was at Qinghua last year, I had some Korean friends whose English was not as good as their Chinese. Thus, our mutual language was Chinese, regardless of grammar errors. So in that case it was necessary.

I feel different about speaking Chinese with other native English speakers, though. If the other English native speaker's Chinese is similar then we will code switch a lot just for fun. If they have weaker Chinese than mine, English will emerge very quickly. Likewise when the other party's Chinese is better than mine.

To sum up my point, I definitely feel relative smoothness of communication is an important deciding factor on language of communication, and your friends' source of their opinion.

Slightly unrelated sidenote: I think its helpful when some Chinese people make mistakes in English and maintain Chinglish type grammar. It helps to see how they are forming their sentences and arranging thoughts, all based on their native Chinese experience.

[imron]

A lot of my international friends complain that they don't want to talk to non-native speakers 'cause their speech is full of mistakes

Actually, when I see people saying this, often I find the reason is more likely that person is embarrassed by their own Chinese rather than there being a serious problem with the other person.

I don't think it's as big an issue as your friends make it out to be.

[navaburo]

It might be instructive to hear some mistakes made by others.

However, you should beware of having too much non-native input, because you may unconsciously start internalizing the bad grammar, semantics, or pronunciation of your interlocutor!

[edelweis]

IMHO it is instructive only if there is a teacher to correct the other person, and the mistake is one you could have made yourself (or the structure or word usage is new to you).

If you are able to detect and correct the mistake by yourself, there's no point...

Actually in some music schools, students are expected to attend same level or slightly more advanced student's "private" classes. That's the principle of master classes as well.

Edit:

Regarding talking to other non-natives: it can be useful in some other ways, for instance when learning English for international communication (i.e. you don't care how poorly you speak as long as the other party understands your point, and you don't care about the mistakes of the other party, as long as you can communicate effectively). Some training agencies specifically set up phone classes with "teachers" (not necessarily English teachers, they can be professionals in your area of expertise) from a lot of different countries (not necessarily native English speakers).

Edit#2: I think the equivalent when learning Chinese would be to speak with Chinese people whose native language is a dialect, or who have a strong non-standard accent, or Asian foreigners, whose Mandarin is not perfect, but whose mistakes will be representative of a lot of people you'll have to deal with in your professional life. An example is the professionals interviews at http://www.laits.utexas.edu/orkelm/chinese/