A block while talking to a native speaker About a year ago I noticed an interesting phenomenon happening while talking to native speakers. I'm sure everyone is more or less familiar with it though; this phenomenon is some sort of a block sometimes encountered while talking to them. For example, now I'm living and studying in Japan, so it's quite common to talk in English to a non-native English speaker. Besides, there's such a lot of people from various countries that at times it gets a bit tough to remember everyone's nationalities and names. So, about a month ago I was talking to a girl who I remembered I had met before but I could not come up with her nationality. Our conversation was fine and I had no problems with understanding what she wanted to say. Then I suddenly remembered she was from England. After that my tongue and my ears were in some sort of a panic, I don't know how to explain that. The thing was, I got worried if my pronunciation was all right, and even though after that moment I kept understanding everything she was telling me, it became tougher than before. So, the point is when I talk to a non-native speaker no matter in English or in Japanese, I use the language just as a tool and don't care too much about the correctness and so on. But when I talk to a native speaker who I'm not so familiar with, sometimes I do have problems. Before I thought that it was all because I lacked some skill (of course, it remains one of the reasons though), but that case with a British girl is an example that shows some kind of psychological block does exist as well. And I believe that overcoming this block might be a key to developing a faster way to learn a language. I mean, probably we should persuade ourselves somehow that native speakers are not that scary and that it's absolutely normal to understand them and talk to them without any problems. Anyway, this phenomenon may be just a problem of mine not happening with the others, but I doubt so.