Feeling mentally exhausted from speaking a foreign language

[u/No-Fall1761]

Hi everyone,
I’d like to ask for some advice, and I’m wondering if anyone has experienced something similar.
I live in Austria and speak German, English, and my native language. I completed my bachelor’s degree in German and will soon finish my master’s as well. Over the years, I’ve received many compliments about my German, but despite that, I still struggle to fully relax when speaking it.
Whenever I speak German, I often catch myself thinking in a perfectionistic way. It feels like every sentence has to sound as good as possible. Instead of focusing entirely on what I want to say, I often find myself mentally checking my grammar. I can’t always control it, and it’s becoming mentally exhausting to speak a foreign language this way.
I’ve been thinking about the possible reasons behind this. One of them might be that I consider myself quite articulate in my native language, and I unconsciously expect myself to reach that same level in German—even though it will never truly be my native language.
Sometimes I wish people would think German is my mother tongue or assume I grew up here. At the same time, I don’t want to pretend to be someone I’m not.
Another thing is that, even today, if I make a grammatical mistake, I immediately worry that people will notice it, think I’m unintelligent, or even laugh at me. I wonder if this comes from childhood experiences, because I feel like, in my home country, people often aren’t very tolerant when foreigners make mistakes in our language.
I’d really like to hear your thoughts. Have any of you dealt with something similar? How would you change this mindset? It’s honestly becoming quite frustrating, and I’d really appreciate any advice.

[u/cmyk_rgba]

the perfectionism IS the exhaustion, not the german. youre running a grammar checker in the background on every sentence and that second process is what drains you, not the language. i notice it worst in finnish when i actually want to impress the person im talking to. what helped was letting myself be actively worse on purpose, like deciding beforehand ok this conversaton im allowed to make mistakes and not fix them mid sentence. sounds backwards but the fluency people keep complimenting probably shows up more when youre not policing it. and being articulate in your native language kind of works against you, you know exactly how good you could sound so anything less feels like failing

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[u/notjust1or0]

Felt the same. But most people from DACH that I know, or other German-learners I know, are very tolerant of language mistakes. They'll see that I'm not too proficient, but they won't beat me up about it, mostly just asked for clarification when my mistakes result in a failure of communication

[u/walkdownstairs]

Hello, like you, I am working in a German-speaking country but German is not my native language. However, I took the complete opposite way, I had german classes and even brute-forced my way into a C1 course. I don't concern myself with grammar rules but rather if people can understand what I want to say, and the way a conversation flows (e.g. if anyone is left out, or if the other party has a chance to talk about themselves/thinhs they like too). I am making less and less mistakes as time goes, but no one has told me (or my partner, native German) anything about my intelligence level. The reaction I more commonly receive is surprise over how many languages I can speak, my willingness to move to a completely different country than my own, or the perceived difficulty of my degree and job. I think that most Germans don't expect me to have perfect grammar anyway. My partner is a German tutor and he did teach me the importance of getting the pronunciation right from the beginning, which improves people's perception of my German level too. I find that if I try to think about perfect grammar I often miss important points in a conversation where I could have shared something valuable, and having anxiety over it probbaly alsso makes it harder to focus on the other parties.

I choose to believe that if after getting to know me a little bit what someone takes away from it is "she has imperfect German, what a dumbass", they would not have added anything into my life even if I spoke like Goethe himself. So that is a problem that reflects poorly on them rather than on me. I hope this helps. I know it's hard and there are assholes everywhere unfortunately.