You can discuss as long as you want, but the fact remains: if you are ashamed of your mistakes you will get no where.
I studied French for 3 years and Spanish for 1, but due to the fact that Spanish is very similar to Italian (my native language) I can have a med-level conversation in Spanish.
If I were ashamed I would have had to use none of those languages (back then I knew English in a very low school level) in my 4 years at a hotel reception job. Instead I tried to speak the more I could and had people speak to me freely...good for the hotel's name having someone who can speak more lnaguages and very good for the customers. Back then I knew very few words of Japanese learnt from video games and grammar was way above my knowledge. Yet I even tried to speak to 2 Japanese girls who knew only Japanese. I still remember it...I see them coming towards me early in the morning and I thought they were coming down from the room (which I knew there was only one of them sleeping in it, thus paying for 1). I tried to ask them in English, Italian, French and Spanish if they both slept in the bedroom. I gathered my courage and uttered the following phrase talking to the hotel customer (my face alone was saying how sorry I was for what I was saying...not knowing if it was offensive or not): あなたの部屋一人。。。ここに二人. I felt so bad, but they must have understood because she showed me the entrance door and her friend saying in Japanese (I guess) she just got in from outside. I remember when a customer asked me where the restaurant was and I told him we didn't have an inside one and gave him direction to a very good one only 2-300 meters away. His look was unique, he couldn't believe I was making fun of him. Only after a little bit of talking (well, him asking me again and again) I figured out what he said was not restaurant, but rest room. Not to mention that poor Australian guy to whom I asked "pardom me, can you say it again" at his check-in, when he just told me "good day mate".
But my English and Spanish got much better by not being ashamed and trying. My last year there at the hotel a south Amrican customer asked me if I was Spanish coz mu grammar was so good
As per English I have been living in the USA for 8 years now and it got much better. Still I make a ton of errors...but if I were ashamed the only result would be shutting up all the time
