"English is not an art to be mastered"

I am in a long holiday from university right now and recently spending my almost-12-hours in watching tons of videos in English, watching English movies, listening to podcast in order to improve my listening skill. I'm glad that I can still do these things while laying down on my bed (read: rebahan T_T). I don't feel like I was spending time on studying tho because it's simply just like I'm watching my favorite TV series. Hell yes, learning language is supposed to be fun, right?. So, last week when I was scrolling YouTube trying to find some videos to watch I stumbled on this TED Talks video.

"English nowadays is not really being taught like it’s a tool to play with, it’s still 

being taught like it’s an art to be mastered (to master)"

I did nod a lot when I watched it as I realize that me myself consider English as an art to be mastered and not as a tool to communicate. Spending years on Junior and Senior high school has shaped my attitude toward English like it is today. I had been taught in school that my English is good when I am able to produce sentences gramatically correct and when I'm not capable to do that then my English is not good enough. That's why when it comes to speaking, I just focus on how to express myself perfectly instead of focusing on how to achieve the result. I was thinking on what tenses I should use, how to pronounce the words correctly, get confused if I should use active or passive voice and bla bla bla. I'm so afraid that people will notice my mistakes, I'm afraid of getting judged by them when it is totally okay to make mistakes as they are a part of learning languages. I even tried to talk fast to sound more like a native speaker but ended up the people I was talking to didn’t get the point of what I was saying lol

The second thing I couldn't agree more mentioned on that video is that I tend to listen to people so that I could respond them as they expected me to respond, not because I want to understand them. So here’s the thing, most of us consider listening as the way to get us to be able in giving the best response instead of understanding the content. I know that we do this as we want to be a good listener of theirs, if they’re telling us a sad story we will think how to show our empathy so that they feel we care about them, that we do know how it feels by saying good words to encourage them and otherwise.
When they’re talking about deep thoughts, I was thinking hard to choose my words to reply so I would sound like intellectual one haha. I did it rarely, yeah because I have a few friends to have such a deep conversation. I wish I had more tho. The point is right now I find it important to listen in order to understand people. They don’t need any response sometimes, they just need to be listened. I’d rather to have someone listening to me attentively and give no response than have one who would say words to make me feel good but in fact they don’t really pay attention of what I’m saying.

Well, of course this depends on your purpose in learning English, it will be so much different if your purpose is to pursue your dreams to get a scholarship from university or to get a perfect score on TOEFL/IELTS. Being able to write in perfect (gramatically correct) English is needed.