Researches in language anxiety have focused on the level of language anxiety so far. This study instead, hypothesizes that the interpretation of anxiety and the recognition of failure have an impact on learning and investigates how language anxiety and intrinsic motivation affect the use of learning strategies through the recognition of failure. The results show that learners with high intrinsic motivation are more likely to recognize the benefits that can come from failure, as well as make use of a great variety of learning strategies. In contrast, learners with high language anxiety are more likely to attribute failure to anxiety and less able to make use of learning strategies to overcome this failure. (Contains 8 tables and 2 figures.)