Hi English learners! Lori here, your teacher from Better at English dot com. 

It&#39;s story time here today, something I don&#39;t think I&#39;ve done here on the podcast before. I&#39;m going to use natural English, but will try to speak just a little more carefully than I normally would, so that more people can follow along. 

You can find the full transcript of everything I say on my website: www.betteratenglish.com/transcripts

Today I&#39;ve been thinking about mistakes, mainly how the fear of making mistakes in English really holds some learners back. Believe me, I know how this feels. I&#39;ve made plenty of embarrassing mistakes myself in my target languages. Luckily, most of the time I&#39;m able to just laugh them off, and they don&#39;t really get me into trouble. But sometimes mistakes lead to a total breakdown of communication. And that&#39;s no fun at all.
I thought you might like to hear about one of my more memorable mistakes, a mistake that actually caused a real problem and made me feel super embarrassed. It happened over 30 years ago, (yes, I&#39;m that old) but it taught me such an important lesson about language learning that I still remember it to this day. 

So let me take you back over thirty years, to my first year living in Sweden. I think I&#39;d been living there for about nine months when this happened.  I&#39;d been trying to learn Swedish since I arrived, and by then I was able to understand a fair amount. I think I could speak without too much difficulty about general, everyday things. I still made tons of mistakes, for sure, but they didn&#39;t really cause problems. That is, until this one particular day. 

Here&#39;s the situation: I needed to make  a doctor&#39;s appointment for some kind of check-up. I can&#39;t remember what it was for; I just remember that it wasn&#39;t for anything urgent. It was early in April, maybe April third or fourth. I picked up the phone and called the doctor&#39;s office to make an appointment. It was scary. I&#39;d never made a phone call like that in Swedish before. I was worried that I would embarrass myself by making terrible mistakes or just not understanding, and that I would end up having to try to do it in English. Most people in Sweden speak English, which is one of the reasons I wasn&#39;t learning faster. But I was determined to make this appointment in Swedish, gosh darn it!

Despite my worries, it seemed to go well. The doctors&#39; assistant answered, and I was able to explain what I needed and make an appointment for April 18th at 9 a.m., that&#39;s nine o&#39;clock in the morning. I hung up feeling pretty proud of myself: this was the first time I&#39;d ever made a phone call like this in Swedish -- calling a total stranger to make an appointment -- and I didn&#39;t have to use any English at all. It felt like a real sign of progress!

I got out my calendar, found April 18th and wrote: Dr&#39;s appointment, 9 am. I was a bit annoyed that I would have to wait two w

044 – A very embarrassing mistake

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