Practicing making mistakes

When I was planning to move to Germany back in 2018, DeepL had recently introduced its online translator. DeepL’s ability to turn German into Dutch and vice versa immediately astounded me. It was miles ahead of Google Translate and especially shone when literal translations would not be accurate, like with idiomatic expressions. DeepL quickly became my go-to tool for understanding anything from emails to legal documents. I also used the online translator whenever writing German.

At the time, DeepL had not yet introduced its present writing feature, which suggests text improvements in a language of choice. To get the text I was satisfied with, I let the translator make several round trips from Dutch or English to German and back, making changes on the go. When I started working for a German company, I wrote messages to colleagues that way.

Over time, translating entire messages became too tedious and time-consuming for me. Besides, my German was improving. I stopped using DeepL to write instant messages and emails—unless they were critical. I still looked up phrases, had my use of verbs corrected, or checked the tone of messages in a language more familiar to me. After a while, I also gave up those checks.

Then, an interesting learning phase began. Despite knowing it was far from perfect, I became confident enough to write German on my own. I inevitably made mistakes, but I didn’t care as long as I didn’t notice. I also realized that my colleagues mostly understood me. Making mistakes didn’t seem such a big deal anymore.

Yet, as my German improved, I learned to recognize more mistakes and persisted in correcting them. Then, it slowly dawned on me. I would never speak, write, or understand German like a native speaker. Disappointing as that thought may seem, I felt relieved. I am not a native speaker. Why would I have to sound and write like one? Why would my German have to be perfect?

As an experiment, I stopped correcting my messages to colleagues. Initially, I felt uncomfortable. What would they think of me? Then, I began to feel profoundly human. I am a human. Why would I hold myself to a superhuman standard of perfection?

The advent of generative artificial intelligence has only strengthened this reasoning. In contrast to perfectly written, polished texts, mistakes show that I’m a human. They show that I wrote this blog. Who would have thought that making mistakes would one day become a virtue?