The fear of mistakes costs more than the mistakes.

Errors rarely break communication. The silence you use to avoid them almost always does.

Picture two people at the same level. One speaks quickly and imperfectly, mixing tenses, choosing the wrong preposition, occasionally starting again. The other checks each sentence before releasing it. The second person makes fewer errors and communicates far less, because the checking costs seconds that conversation will not give them. Their turn arrives, they are still preparing, and the moment passes. Over a year the gap between those two people becomes enormous, and it was never about accuracy.

Most errors simply do not matter. Say I go there yesterday and everyone understands you completely, because yesterday has already done the work. What breaks communication is not a wrong ending, it is a sentence that never gets finished, or a whole thought that stays inside. Judge yourself by whether the message landed, not by whether it was clean.

And expect to be corrected almost never. Adults do not correct other adults. They answer the meaning and move on, exactly as they do when someone stumbles in their own first language. The examiner you imagine sitting there is not present. The person in front of you is thinking about their own afternoon.