In the Taekwondo club of which I'm a part, the yellow belt is one of the first color belts you earn after starting as white belt (complete novice). The yellow belt is a really sweet period to practice Taekwondo, because you're just starting to learn basic techniques, and not much is expected of you (at least in my club). All it takes to impress is a willingness to learn and maybe a little bit of aptitude. Because you're not expected to know that much, but are applauded for what you have learned, being a yellow belt is really fun.
At more advanced stages, everything becomes more complicated and difficult. Much more is expected of you, and you start to expect much more of yourself as well. For example, I've started to become really embarrassed that I'm not better at certain things at my stage. I was much less afraid to make mistakes and embarrass myself when I was a yellow belt.
I realized today that many things in life have a yellow belt period. Recently I decided to spend more time cultivating foreign language skills I started acquiring in grad school and last year. I searched meetup.com for language speaking groups and found a French one, a German one, and an Italian one. All of them claimed to welcome "all levels of speakers," but the only one I put on my calendar was the Italian one.
That's because I'm in my yellow belt period of Italian. My knowledge of Italian is limited to 30 lessons of Pimsleur and four days in Italy (half of which was spent asleep, exhausted from jet lag and work). I know that I don't know much Italian, but I'm not afraid to sit down at a cafe and embarrass myself in front of strangers. I figure that I'll be forgiven because I'm such a novice.
I'm past my yellow belt periods in French and German. And that's precisely why, even though the meetup groups claim to welcome "all levels of speakers," I've self-censored myself as "not good enough" to go chit chat in French or German with strangers. I know that I should know the subjunctive form of certain verbs in French, or how to interject precisely the right phrase to convey the right tone, or what gender all the nouns should take in German. But I've forgotten. So I know that I don't know things I used to know, and furthermore, I know enough French and German to know that I'm not that good. I figure that I won't be forgiven so easily because I should speak more fluently by now.
It makes me sad to remember how brave I was to speak German on my first trip to Germany. I'd had only one semester of German, but I felt undaunted to go off on my own and navigate subway systems in cities I'd never visited. I always began conversations with strangers in German, and don't recall ever switching to English with them.
Now when I contemplate trying to find someone with whom I can practice German, I feel like I have to preface it with "but my German's really rusty." As for my French, it's so far behind that I'm not sure I could really go through with a practice session of any sort, for fear butchering the language in front of a native speaker.
But I know that I won't get better at any language until I go back to being unafraid of making mistakes and embarrassing myself again. In other words, I need to become a yellow belt again.
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