Speaking anxiety with foreign languages

Context: Been learning Spanish in school for about 2 years (Around A2 level at this point) and I still get really bad anxiety whenever we have a speaking assignment, or I try to speak to a native.

From my experience, I’ve heard foreign language speaking anxiety is quite common, as I myself and multiple people I know suffer from it while trying to speak the language they’re learning. The annoying part about my situation though, is that it’s totally unnecessary, as I’ve gotten multiple compliments from my teacher, and even a native at one point for my pronunciation. Yet I still shake and struggle to stay calm whenever I’m asked to speak.

I’ve heard you want to practice speaking fairly early on so you can get a grip on it, but it’s so much harder to when you get anxiety whenever you’re asked to speak. Something that might factor into this though, is the rate at which Spanish is spoken (2nd fastest spoken language), which definitely does not help my case. Even (to a lesser extent) with communicating over text, I’ll still find myself breaking down halfway through a sentence because I just assume I’m doing something wrong, when in reality, all the mistakes I’ve made are minor.

The point of all this is, I’d like to know if anyone shares my plight with speaking and/or generally sharing any kind of information in a foreign language, if anyone has overcame it, and how.

TL;DR- I get anxiety when speaking Spanish (and any other foreign language) and wanted to know if this was common, and how to overcome it.

submitted by /u/Acomplaintwithaids
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