Just a quick catch-up this week, as I’ve been travelling for a conference. But it’s the mode of that journey I thought was worth sharing – I decided to travel over land this time, rather than fly straight to my destination (Salzburg). It’s something that turned a one-language trip into a glorious multilingual one.

German is one of my main foreign languages, as the first I really focused on, back at school, and the one I studied at uni. It’s probably the one I’m still most confident in. French and Italian, on the other hand, are more ‘picked up as I’ve gone along in life’ languages. They’re just enough to get by, particularly my sketchy italiano. But it’s been a fun challenge having to use them to get by – something I’d have missed by flying straight to Austria.

But there’s something about low stakes languages – the ones you’re not supposed to be good at – that takes away a bit of the performance nerves when trying to speak abroad. It flips the script from producing perfect utterances to achieving goals, like getting a croissant or finding out which platform a train is leaving from. My ego is bruised less when I ungrammatically get that breakfast pastry than if I mess my word order up doing the same in German.

The trick is – and I don’t have any magic advice here, as I’m still trying to do the same myself – to carry that goal-oriented focus over to your ‘good’ languages. Care more about the outcome, less about the form. Perhaps the multi-language format of the trip, serialising shakier languages alongside stronger ones, is a good way to keep that lesson in mind.