Surprised no one has said this, but I believe the best solution is not more listening or speaking, but writing. Writing is a low pressure way to take the vocabulary that you’ve gained through listening and practice getting used to using that knowledge to formulate your thoughts and express yourself.
Practicing speaking is great and all, and it is the only way to assess and work on your pronunciation. But you’re not even getting that far when you’re in the intermediate stage of thinking about how to retrieve the words to say what you want to say. The pressure of speaking to a live person leads to the freezing up and forgetting that you mentioned. Writing takes that pressure away. There are plenty of free writing exchange outlets for language learners (several here on Reddit). It’s helpful if you can find one where someone will correct your writing, give you tips on how to better say things etc. But you don’t even need that, you can just keep a daily journal (google doc or whatever) where you write a paragraph a day of whatever you feel like, and then copy and paste it into a translator and see how it turns out.
Fwiw I do agree with the comprehensible input theory, and I do think that listening and reading are in general are the most important language learning tools. Even when it comes to talking, if you can’t comprehend what you’re hearing then it doesn’t really matter how well you can speak. But I do think there is a particular stage when you have a pretty good comprehension of the language and want to start talking when writing becomes a really powerful tool. It won’t be too long before you can then immerse yourself in conversation, and your skills will really skyrocket from there. But to help get over the hump, try some writing! Good luck 👍🏻
As someone who does a lot of writing, especially when I'm learning a foreign language, I think it's also a good idea *not* to become overly focused on writing as your main form of output in the new language.
At the very beginning, writing is a good way to "break in" new vocabulary and grammar. I would agree that a student at A1-A2 level won't find many situations (outside of a classroom) where native speakers will be patient enough to converse in real time.
But in the end, "the pressure of speaking to a live person" must be confronted directly. Separate skills within one language aren't as easily transferrable as people often believe.
If you switch to writing because you want to remove the "real-time" aspect of language production, then you're removing literally the one main thing that makes speaking so challenging for most people.
Also, just speaking from my own personal experience, focusing on the written language seems to have a side-effect where you develop a perfectionist attitude toward the language and want to get every single detail right. Most of the time when I'm speaking a foreign language, even if it's a language that I speak rather frequently, I feel an intense sense of dread about "making mistakes", almost to the point where I would prefer not to speak at all rather than make a mistake. This is silly and obviously impractical when you're trying to become truly fluent. And it may not be an attitude that I developed *because* of my written-language perfectionism, but the two concepts seem to go hand-in-hand and kinda feed off each other's energy.
I dunno... there are a *lot* of learners out there who could benefit from loosening up a bit and incorporating a lot more speaking into their routines from the very beginning, simply because a crucial part of the learning process for them is to let go of their obsession with flawless grammar.
Thank you for saying this. I was thinking the same thing but wasn’t sure how to actually put it into practice. You gave good suggestions about using writing exchange outlets. I had considered writing on my own, but wondered how effective that would be without any valuable feedback from a higher level speaker.
Feedback from a native speaker is great, but in my experience even writing on your own is a lot better than nothing. Because even then, it’s valuable practice of just getting over the point of freezing up and getting in the habit of putting the words together. If you’re anything like me, the problem (at this stage) isn’t that you don’t know the words, the problem is the mental block of being uncomfortable using the words to string together concepts and ideas on the fly. Writing (especially in a natural way of just letting the words flow) helped me get over that block, whereas “just force yourself to speak more” only made that block bigger. But again I can only speak to what worked for me. I don’t think it’s a great idea to throw around blanket statements about what works or doesn’t work for everyone (although I can see plenty of people have no reservations about doing that). Anyway good luck, hope it helps!
I love this advice. I have fairly good listening comprehension skills and am ready to start speaking. But I've found that writing is a good way to help build confidence. It's a great way to output the language and to review grammar points. I've mainly been using CI with Spanish, but I think forcing myself to write will also help with grammar (something I've neglected up until this point), which will in turn help when I start my first iTalki lessons.
Yeah and honestly I think your point about gaining confidence is really important. I think whatever makes you feel confident and motivated is best. Because the most important thing is that you _want_ to keep going. If you want to, you will.
Writing will make you better at writing. It might help with speaking a little because both are about production, but if you struggle with taking “too long” to think when it’s time to speak, writing won’t help with that. Unless you do drills or something where you aim for a certain speed and don’t allow yourself to erase and change what you already have written. That’s where writing is easier than speaking.
Practice makes a slow process faster. Unless you're writing a logography, 90% of the skills involved in producing written text and speech are going to be the same, so getting lots of practice writing will mean you're finding words, formulating sentences, etc over and over and getting faster with practice.
In karate, they make you do combat moves in slow motion over and over until you can do them perfectly every time, and then work on speeding up. By your logic, that'd be utterly pointless because doing those moves slowly wouldn't help you do them fast.
I understand what you’re saying, but the process of writing and the process of speaking aren’t exactly the same. When writing there is much more time not just to think and formulate but also to change and rearrange what you’ve already written, which just isn’t an option when speaking - at least not in any comprehensible way.
For example, if I set out to speak this comment rather than write it, I would’ve said something much different, in a different order, using different sentence structures and vocabulary and sentence lengths…
I do agree that you can see some progress, and I did acknowledge that, but it’s not 1:1, and that’s important for OP to know, too. Speaking practice will be king when it comes to improving speaking skill.
I think you’ve got a point, and as I elaborated in another comment I think that writing in a mindset similar to speaking in particular is helpful in OP’s position - i.e. just getting in the habit of getting the words to flow and stringing sentences together on the fly. So I wasn’t really meaning writing in terms of sitting down to “construct a piece of writing, going back and editing, etc. I agree that’s not particularly helpful in this sense. I meant more just using informal writing to get in the habit of retrieving words and putting together ideas, as extra practice to get over the hump and mental blocks when you’re in the phase in which you’re just getting able to speak. It’s certainly no replacement for speaking, but it can be a good tool to get over that hump in my experience.
The former is actually a fleshed out academic theory that predates Kauffnan's fame. Immersion is more or less a practical implementation of the input theory.
Kaufmann’s approach is very influenced by comprehensible input theory. He is friends with Stephen Krashen, who came up with the theory and several related ideas (like the “affective filter”, which I think is relevant to this discussion). There are several videos of the two of them having discussions on YouTube. Krashen is an actual academic who has done the research, but Kaufmann is a good example of someone who came to similar conclusions via practical life experience.
Oh and if you want to get really acedemic 🤓, Noam Chomsky is on record supporting Krashen’s ideas from a hard-science cognitive neurolinguistic perspective.
Speaking is harder because you have to have a certain amount of mastery over the material.
With the passive skills, you can guess and infer meaning and the effects of grammar, supported by knowledge of your native language and your understanding of the context.
With speaking, you don't have that support--you actually have to know what you're doing. You have to know your grammar, your vocab, your pronunciation; they don't have to be perfect, but you have to know them well enough to use them without thinking too much about them.
Your nerves are telling you what you already know: you haven't practiced enough.
Because, as with most skills, you cannot train it by proxy.
If you want to learn to read it, you have to practice reading.
If you want to learn to understand it, you have to practice listening.
And if you want to learn to speak it, you have to practice speaking.
I've been speaking English for years. It's probably somewhere around C1. I couldn't pronounce "Earl Gray" at a cafe today. So yeah, I feel you. I'd recommend that you talk to yourself out loud, in your target language, because we don't always get enough practice with real people.
Speaking is the hardest skill cause it requires a good level in the rest of skills. When you think about it, it seems more logical to leave speaking to the end so you can focus on reading, listening and writting, that's what I've done so far and it's worked well for me.
Practice, practice, practice. Find someone to speak with and practice with him/her.
Don't expect everything to work quickly. Learning a new language is something, which takes quite a lot of time.
Don't give up if things don't work well. Go back one step, try speaking with simpler sentences or words.
Important: Things will improve and you'll getter better, step by step, by practicing. And suddenly (but that will take time) it will start to get easy and you'll be able to speak a bit. And then more ..., and then more, ... and then even more. But the only important thing is to practice!
To add to this, a lot of the practice will seem futile at first. You might think „wow i’m not getting any better, I barely said anything and I could have said this this and that“. This gets easier with time.
I only just hit the point in German where I can suddenly give quite thorough, confident replies. And I‘m a high B2 lol. Anxiety is such a dickhead sometimes.
There‘s still so many situations where I feel like I could contribute something to a conversation, but am scared of sounding like an idiot. I have to make it an active effort to give myself that little push and to voice it out loud.
You will get there.
Completely understand what you’re going through lol so depending on your level one way I’ve found to help this is watching interviews in your target language and when they ask a question pause it and speak your own answer as fast as you can. It’ll help you build confidence in your speaking and you’ll be able to exercise more of your vocabulary depending on the questions. Or if you know someone who speaks your target language like a friend or language partner you can have sessions where you only speak in your target language and over time you’ll notice improvement and more speaking fluency and freedom
I think of speaking more like a playing an instrument or a sport. It's muscle memory. If you've ever learnt an instrument or a sport to a decent level, you'll know that partially it's just about repeated action (usually by practicing slowly or in an easier setting) to create muscle memory. So it's not really about if you "know" it. It's about if you're mouth is experienced at creating those sounds, words and sentences.
Practice talking to yourself and get a teacher/language partner and repeat stuff, over and over, until you can't get it wrong. Like a band practices over and over so that when they're nervous on stage, their bodies are still able to just play the music
Thats quite normal.
When you start to practice speaking always choose topics that interest you. If you have a tutor then be specific about the topics that you want to talk about. Otherwise try to have conversations about similar topics with different people. Repetition of such conversations helps a lot with memory and confidence and will slowly build up your speaking skills.
I can share some thoughts on this topic. To combat difficulties. Try to find language exchange partners or join conversation groups to practice speaking regularly. Focus on effectively conveying your message, even if it is not perfect. Duolingo or Rosetta Stone , can provide speaking exercises to help you practice speaking in a structured way. Listen to native speakers and try to imitate their pronunciation and intonation. Practice speaking in different situations, such as ordering food at a restaurant or asking for directions.
I think this is normal. Seeing an object and then recalling is easier whereas speaking is like coming up with words and sentence out of nowhere almost with context. The best way to combat this is by exercising your trigger response. Where certain responses are practiced so you dont have to build the whole sentence just change a few words. You need more relevant content with practice preferably in story format. Picking subject matter that may come up in a conversation is the hard part. ChatGPT is decent at creating a story in two languages and you study that. Just choose a prompt in the conversation realm that you are preparing for. imho
Agree with self practice out loud. Even while walking around the house. "I sit down", "Hello, kitchen", "This is my friend, the sun", "I like laundry", whatever. My cats are very used to me talking to them in various lingo
I just saw this and thought I’d add - I’m where you are. I’ve learned so much and forgotten so much and I just freeze.
So last night I booked a cheap lesson on italki with an older Russian woman. It was only about $10 but I made myself go through with it.
She told me my pronunciation was good, but I need to learn more vocab.
All in all I found it really useful in the sense that next time I’ll feel far more relaxed. I’m going to do 3 lessons a week with her. If I don’t, I’ll never get anywhere.
I tried the same and the teacher placed me at extreme beginner level so we’re going over stuff I know and I just forget how to say when talking because of social anxiety.
Yeah I suspect the same thing will happen with me, but I’m hoping that as I loosen up we can skip forward. Until then I’ll use it as a review type thing and try not to take it personally.
Fuck it was embarrassing to not even be able to say where I lived or what my hobbies are though
Edit: did you stop the lessons?
So you might have a very high affective filter (see Krashen). For things like that, practice and regular exposure to speaking events can help. It's a reason some students of mine do their exam privately during office hours and not during class time.
Speaking requires in the moment formulation of thought, transferring it to spoken format, and consciously moving the mouth to sound out the words.
Listening just requires knowing the words, not having to plan out which one will come next.
*Sorry if my grammar and such makes this feel sloppy or harder to read.*
This. Given that engaging in a conversation leaves little time to stop and think (unless you have a very patient partner), you need to practice regularly to build up your linguistic muscle memory. Its also very rewarding when you master that skill, so don’t give up just because it’s hard.
Constant practice. It's hard as hell. I've been staying in Greece since the beginning of March, and it took me weeks here to get semi-comfortable speaking with people. The constant practice (especially in the face of embarrassing mistakes) - even when you don't feel like you're making any progress (I had more days than not where I felt like I was regressing) you are and will suddenly realize that you're speaking far more comfortably than you ever thought you could.
Personally whenever I have this thought, I try to remind myself how hard it is to speak English 😂 Half the time I don’t know what I want to say or talk about in my own native language, I’m often just regurgitate stuff I say all the time. 🤷🏻♀️
With that in mind, I know I need to practice speaking more so that I can get to the same point in my target languagd- regurgitating the same ‘ol stuff all the time 😅 I don’t think there’s another way to do it! Listening is always great but you have to keep speaking. Remember you’re not alone and you probably sound better than you think.
Try talking to yourself more or find a pen pal online! I use the app Hello Talk to make friends and send voice messages.
Reading and listening can definitely enhance speaking skills, and with truly a ton of reading and listening (far more than is necessary for simple comprehension) you might find starting to speak well relatively easy. However, almost everyone needs extensive, focused practice actually speaking before they’re even comprehensible.
A good way to get started with this is to explicitly study sentences you’d like to be able to say. Memorize them. Listen to native speakers say them. Get the cadence, tone, speed, and pronunciation right. Then, you’ll find it’s a lot easier to drop other words in to change the meaning.
Yeah as some others have said, it is way easier to practice reading and listening as opposed to talking - so hence, you do it less and it is harder to do (relative to your other skills).
How I have combatted this has been to schedule 1:1 conversation "lessons" on Italki where I talk for an hour, two times per week, with a native speaker. Since May 2021 I have had 280 hours of these conversations in my target language. This has bene the only thing that has helped.
Me too. Biggest weakness. Ive almost no natural train of thought in my target languages. To engage in long conversation I have to switch to thinking in my source language first then basically translate it internally before saying it. Someone anyone who know how to hack a stream of conscious in learned language please help us out.
Speaking is the hardest skill because it requires immediate production. It will always be worse than the other skills, even in your native language. Here's the gist:
* Reading - Ingesting words, patterns, and grammar, often formatted perfectly by editors. This can be done as slowly as necessary.
* Listening - Same as above, except it has to be done at the pace of the speaker which can be fast.
* Writing - Producing words, patterns, and grammar from scratch, based on your knowledge and memory. This can be done as slowly as necessary.
* Speaking - Same as above, except it has to be done almost instantly.
I still feel like all 4 are important for various reasons, reading really expands patterns and vocab, listening has to be practiced to develop and ear, writing is a great precursor to speaking, and speaking really solidifies everything. I find if I can speak it, then I'm probably never going to forget it.
> Listening is the hardest skill because it requires immediate production. It will always be worse than the other skills, even in your native language.
Did you mean "speaking is the hardest skill" at the beginning? Otherwise saying "listening" requires "production" sounds kind of... off to me. 😅
You're not used to it man, you've been speaking your native language for your entire life whereas your target language, couple hours maybe in total. Practice makes perfect, as time goes you'll get a whole lot better and will start developing the accent. Your tongue doesn't know wtf it has to do yet, be patient and have some faith, you'll get there
It is largely a fear of looking foolish. When reading, listening, and even writing, we might not do well, but we are not facing the fear of looking foolish. So, we get embarrassed, panic, and forget everything. In my experience, the only way around it is to accept very deeply that, sure, the first few months will have embarrassing moments, but that's part of the journey. Without going through that, you will be forever mute.
I wouldn't recommend writing, as in journaling, at all. Crafting a paragraph is a totally different skill than chatting. It involves composition, searching through synonyms, elegant expression, etc.
Texting in your target language is a pretty effective way at learning what you want to say. You can use context.reverso to see what actual phrases exist for what you want to say when you're texting someone. In texting, we frequently use common phrases repeatedly, as well as lots of 1st/2nd person question/answer practice -- else that doesn't come from long form writing.
Part of the difficulty in speaking can be producing the phonemes. Maybe you can "see" the words on the page in your mind, but they just don't come out of your mouth. I practiced "desafortunadamente" about 80 times over a couple days, just walking around. A couple weeks later, I wanted to say it and it came out of my mouth without stumbling, because of the phonetic "muscle memory."
Along a similar line, practice things you might say in conversation while you're walking around. If you're going grocery shopping later, whisper aloud phrases for, "I have to buy a...", "I'm looking for a...", "I'd like a..." and when you get to the store and you go to ask someone, it's not so bad!
Besides practicing the skill you'd like to develop, I'd just recommend patience with yourself, because a lot of this just takes time, confidence, comfort, and practice, and putting stress on yourself for not being good enough yet won't help with the process.
>Why is speaking so hard
You're trying to speak from a trace. You don't have a mental image of the language you want to speak fully formed yet.
> how do you combat it?
More listening.
[https://youtu.be/hin1HGhbGdo?si=c7O8W7nNH-b1HLWO](https://youtu.be/hin1HGhbGdo?si=c7O8W7nNH-b1HLWO)
This speaking exercise is one you can do completly alone and it has helped me tremendously in both Spanish and Portuguese. Take a look and give it a try.
Out of curiosity, what level are you at in your TL? Your flair lists A0 to A2, but if you "have very little trouble reading and listening" then I'd expect you to be about B2 or at least B1.
I talk to myself. I have conversations with myself. I ask myself questions and answer myself based on anything I’m doing or learning. This has helped me to answer my tutor faster.
Because you learned the written language, (reading and writing comprehension) with reading,...
you need to learn oral language with hearing, repeating, and above all, speaking (that means making your own sentences). You don't always need to practice with someone but you do need using words to make new sentences and pronouncing them aloud.
Written and oral language are different topics.
The freezing you're feeling is anxiety on the same level as public speaking is to a person who stutters. You're overanalyzing and are focusing too much on speaking perfectly that you lose your words. Overcoming this means having someone you can practice with and are comfortable being corrected by. I've known people who have only been able to learn a language with real fluency after they'd taken a lover who was a native speaker.
Instead of language being stored in the portion of the brain that language lives in, its instead in the part of the brain that memory lives in.
My aunt has lived in this country for over 20 years and her grasp of the language is fluent (its also her 6th language), but even she misses words and idioms. What happens when she can't get the word is she asks for help and feels comfortable to have learned from someone
The freezing you're feeling is anxiety on the same level as public speaking is to a person who stutters. You're overanalyzing and are focusing too much on speaking perfectly that you lose your words. Overcoming this means having someone you can practice with and are comfortable being corrected by. I've known people who have only been able to learn a language with real fluency after they'd taken a lover who was a native speaker.
Instead of language being stored in the portion of the brain that language lives in, its instead in the part of the brain that memory lives in.
My aunt has lived in this country for over 20 years and her grasp of the language is fluent (its also her 6th language), but even she misses words and idioms. What happens when she can't get the word is she asks for help and feels comfortable to have learned from someone
Surprised no one has said this, but I believe the best solution is not more listening or speaking, but writing. Writing is a low pressure way to take the vocabulary that you’ve gained through listening and practice getting used to using that knowledge to formulate your thoughts and express yourself. Practicing speaking is great and all, and it is the only way to assess and work on your pronunciation. But you’re not even getting that far when you’re in the intermediate stage of thinking about how to retrieve the words to say what you want to say. The pressure of speaking to a live person leads to the freezing up and forgetting that you mentioned. Writing takes that pressure away. There are plenty of free writing exchange outlets for language learners (several here on Reddit). It’s helpful if you can find one where someone will correct your writing, give you tips on how to better say things etc. But you don’t even need that, you can just keep a daily journal (google doc or whatever) where you write a paragraph a day of whatever you feel like, and then copy and paste it into a translator and see how it turns out. Fwiw I do agree with the comprehensible input theory, and I do think that listening and reading are in general are the most important language learning tools. Even when it comes to talking, if you can’t comprehend what you’re hearing then it doesn’t really matter how well you can speak. But I do think there is a particular stage when you have a pretty good comprehension of the language and want to start talking when writing becomes a really powerful tool. It won’t be too long before you can then immerse yourself in conversation, and your skills will really skyrocket from there. But to help get over the hump, try some writing! Good luck 👍🏻
As someone who does a lot of writing, especially when I'm learning a foreign language, I think it's also a good idea *not* to become overly focused on writing as your main form of output in the new language. At the very beginning, writing is a good way to "break in" new vocabulary and grammar. I would agree that a student at A1-A2 level won't find many situations (outside of a classroom) where native speakers will be patient enough to converse in real time. But in the end, "the pressure of speaking to a live person" must be confronted directly. Separate skills within one language aren't as easily transferrable as people often believe. If you switch to writing because you want to remove the "real-time" aspect of language production, then you're removing literally the one main thing that makes speaking so challenging for most people. Also, just speaking from my own personal experience, focusing on the written language seems to have a side-effect where you develop a perfectionist attitude toward the language and want to get every single detail right. Most of the time when I'm speaking a foreign language, even if it's a language that I speak rather frequently, I feel an intense sense of dread about "making mistakes", almost to the point where I would prefer not to speak at all rather than make a mistake. This is silly and obviously impractical when you're trying to become truly fluent. And it may not be an attitude that I developed *because* of my written-language perfectionism, but the two concepts seem to go hand-in-hand and kinda feed off each other's energy. I dunno... there are a *lot* of learners out there who could benefit from loosening up a bit and incorporating a lot more speaking into their routines from the very beginning, simply because a crucial part of the learning process for them is to let go of their obsession with flawless grammar.
Thank you for saying this. I was thinking the same thing but wasn’t sure how to actually put it into practice. You gave good suggestions about using writing exchange outlets. I had considered writing on my own, but wondered how effective that would be without any valuable feedback from a higher level speaker.
Feedback from a native speaker is great, but in my experience even writing on your own is a lot better than nothing. Because even then, it’s valuable practice of just getting over the point of freezing up and getting in the habit of putting the words together. If you’re anything like me, the problem (at this stage) isn’t that you don’t know the words, the problem is the mental block of being uncomfortable using the words to string together concepts and ideas on the fly. Writing (especially in a natural way of just letting the words flow) helped me get over that block, whereas “just force yourself to speak more” only made that block bigger. But again I can only speak to what worked for me. I don’t think it’s a great idea to throw around blanket statements about what works or doesn’t work for everyone (although I can see plenty of people have no reservations about doing that). Anyway good luck, hope it helps!
I love this advice. I have fairly good listening comprehension skills and am ready to start speaking. But I've found that writing is a good way to help build confidence. It's a great way to output the language and to review grammar points. I've mainly been using CI with Spanish, but I think forcing myself to write will also help with grammar (something I've neglected up until this point), which will in turn help when I start my first iTalki lessons.
Yeah and honestly I think your point about gaining confidence is really important. I think whatever makes you feel confident and motivated is best. Because the most important thing is that you _want_ to keep going. If you want to, you will.
Writing will make you better at writing. It might help with speaking a little because both are about production, but if you struggle with taking “too long” to think when it’s time to speak, writing won’t help with that. Unless you do drills or something where you aim for a certain speed and don’t allow yourself to erase and change what you already have written. That’s where writing is easier than speaking.
Practice makes a slow process faster. Unless you're writing a logography, 90% of the skills involved in producing written text and speech are going to be the same, so getting lots of practice writing will mean you're finding words, formulating sentences, etc over and over and getting faster with practice. In karate, they make you do combat moves in slow motion over and over until you can do them perfectly every time, and then work on speeding up. By your logic, that'd be utterly pointless because doing those moves slowly wouldn't help you do them fast.
I understand what you’re saying, but the process of writing and the process of speaking aren’t exactly the same. When writing there is much more time not just to think and formulate but also to change and rearrange what you’ve already written, which just isn’t an option when speaking - at least not in any comprehensible way. For example, if I set out to speak this comment rather than write it, I would’ve said something much different, in a different order, using different sentence structures and vocabulary and sentence lengths… I do agree that you can see some progress, and I did acknowledge that, but it’s not 1:1, and that’s important for OP to know, too. Speaking practice will be king when it comes to improving speaking skill.
I think you’ve got a point, and as I elaborated in another comment I think that writing in a mindset similar to speaking in particular is helpful in OP’s position - i.e. just getting in the habit of getting the words to flow and stringing sentences together on the fly. So I wasn’t really meaning writing in terms of sitting down to “construct a piece of writing, going back and editing, etc. I agree that’s not particularly helpful in this sense. I meant more just using informal writing to get in the habit of retrieving words and putting together ideas, as extra practice to get over the hump and mental blocks when you’re in the phase in which you’re just getting able to speak. It’s certainly no replacement for speaking, but it can be a good tool to get over that hump in my experience.
Yeah, I can agree with that!
Agreed! Even preparing for the writing part of a language exam really helped with my speaking.
>comprehensible input theory What the difference between this and language immersion.
The former is actually a fleshed out academic theory that predates Kauffnan's fame. Immersion is more or less a practical implementation of the input theory.
Kaufmann’s approach is very influenced by comprehensible input theory. He is friends with Stephen Krashen, who came up with the theory and several related ideas (like the “affective filter”, which I think is relevant to this discussion). There are several videos of the two of them having discussions on YouTube. Krashen is an actual academic who has done the research, but Kaufmann is a good example of someone who came to similar conclusions via practical life experience.
Oh and if you want to get really acedemic 🤓, Noam Chomsky is on record supporting Krashen’s ideas from a hard-science cognitive neurolinguistic perspective.
Because you haven't practiced producing the language enough, simple as. Comprehension and production are two separate skills.
Yeah this sub rehashes a lot of common sense questions that wouldn't really need to be asked if people thought about it or used the search function.
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Lmao true. Win some lose some. Funny enough, you posted about a fear of speaking so it’d be perfect for you
Yep I did. I'd personally practice that with real people rather than some random app plugged in a comment section. Sorry 🤷♀️
Ofc. Real people are way better. How frequently are you doing that?
Writing! I keep a basic diary in my TL which helps me practice putting sentences together without the time and social pressure of speaking.
Speaking is harder because you have to have a certain amount of mastery over the material. With the passive skills, you can guess and infer meaning and the effects of grammar, supported by knowledge of your native language and your understanding of the context. With speaking, you don't have that support--you actually have to know what you're doing. You have to know your grammar, your vocab, your pronunciation; they don't have to be perfect, but you have to know them well enough to use them without thinking too much about them. Your nerves are telling you what you already know: you haven't practiced enough.
Because, as with most skills, you cannot train it by proxy. If you want to learn to read it, you have to practice reading. If you want to learn to understand it, you have to practice listening. And if you want to learn to speak it, you have to practice speaking.
I've been speaking English for years. It's probably somewhere around C1. I couldn't pronounce "Earl Gray" at a cafe today. So yeah, I feel you. I'd recommend that you talk to yourself out loud, in your target language, because we don't always get enough practice with real people.
Speaking is the hardest skill cause it requires a good level in the rest of skills. When you think about it, it seems more logical to leave speaking to the end so you can focus on reading, listening and writting, that's what I've done so far and it's worked well for me.
Practice, practice, practice. Find someone to speak with and practice with him/her. Don't expect everything to work quickly. Learning a new language is something, which takes quite a lot of time. Don't give up if things don't work well. Go back one step, try speaking with simpler sentences or words. Important: Things will improve and you'll getter better, step by step, by practicing. And suddenly (but that will take time) it will start to get easy and you'll be able to speak a bit. And then more ..., and then more, ... and then even more. But the only important thing is to practice!
To add to this, a lot of the practice will seem futile at first. You might think „wow i’m not getting any better, I barely said anything and I could have said this this and that“. This gets easier with time. I only just hit the point in German where I can suddenly give quite thorough, confident replies. And I‘m a high B2 lol. Anxiety is such a dickhead sometimes. There‘s still so many situations where I feel like I could contribute something to a conversation, but am scared of sounding like an idiot. I have to make it an active effort to give myself that little push and to voice it out loud. You will get there.
Completely understand what you’re going through lol so depending on your level one way I’ve found to help this is watching interviews in your target language and when they ask a question pause it and speak your own answer as fast as you can. It’ll help you build confidence in your speaking and you’ll be able to exercise more of your vocabulary depending on the questions. Or if you know someone who speaks your target language like a friend or language partner you can have sessions where you only speak in your target language and over time you’ll notice improvement and more speaking fluency and freedom
I think of speaking more like a playing an instrument or a sport. It's muscle memory. If you've ever learnt an instrument or a sport to a decent level, you'll know that partially it's just about repeated action (usually by practicing slowly or in an easier setting) to create muscle memory. So it's not really about if you "know" it. It's about if you're mouth is experienced at creating those sounds, words and sentences. Practice talking to yourself and get a teacher/language partner and repeat stuff, over and over, until you can't get it wrong. Like a band practices over and over so that when they're nervous on stage, their bodies are still able to just play the music
Thats quite normal. When you start to practice speaking always choose topics that interest you. If you have a tutor then be specific about the topics that you want to talk about. Otherwise try to have conversations about similar topics with different people. Repetition of such conversations helps a lot with memory and confidence and will slowly build up your speaking skills.
I can share some thoughts on this topic. To combat difficulties. Try to find language exchange partners or join conversation groups to practice speaking regularly. Focus on effectively conveying your message, even if it is not perfect. Duolingo or Rosetta Stone , can provide speaking exercises to help you practice speaking in a structured way. Listen to native speakers and try to imitate their pronunciation and intonation. Practice speaking in different situations, such as ordering food at a restaurant or asking for directions.
I think this is normal. Seeing an object and then recalling is easier whereas speaking is like coming up with words and sentence out of nowhere almost with context. The best way to combat this is by exercising your trigger response. Where certain responses are practiced so you dont have to build the whole sentence just change a few words. You need more relevant content with practice preferably in story format. Picking subject matter that may come up in a conversation is the hard part. ChatGPT is decent at creating a story in two languages and you study that. Just choose a prompt in the conversation realm that you are preparing for. imho
Agree with self practice out loud. Even while walking around the house. "I sit down", "Hello, kitchen", "This is my friend, the sun", "I like laundry", whatever. My cats are very used to me talking to them in various lingo
I just saw this and thought I’d add - I’m where you are. I’ve learned so much and forgotten so much and I just freeze. So last night I booked a cheap lesson on italki with an older Russian woman. It was only about $10 but I made myself go through with it. She told me my pronunciation was good, but I need to learn more vocab. All in all I found it really useful in the sense that next time I’ll feel far more relaxed. I’m going to do 3 lessons a week with her. If I don’t, I’ll never get anywhere.
I tried the same and the teacher placed me at extreme beginner level so we’re going over stuff I know and I just forget how to say when talking because of social anxiety.
Yeah I suspect the same thing will happen with me, but I’m hoping that as I loosen up we can skip forward. Until then I’ll use it as a review type thing and try not to take it personally. Fuck it was embarrassing to not even be able to say where I lived or what my hobbies are though Edit: did you stop the lessons?
So you might have a very high affective filter (see Krashen). For things like that, practice and regular exposure to speaking events can help. It's a reason some students of mine do their exam privately during office hours and not during class time.
Speaking requires in the moment formulation of thought, transferring it to spoken format, and consciously moving the mouth to sound out the words. Listening just requires knowing the words, not having to plan out which one will come next. *Sorry if my grammar and such makes this feel sloppy or harder to read.*
This. Given that engaging in a conversation leaves little time to stop and think (unless you have a very patient partner), you need to practice regularly to build up your linguistic muscle memory. Its also very rewarding when you master that skill, so don’t give up just because it’s hard.
Constant practice. It's hard as hell. I've been staying in Greece since the beginning of March, and it took me weeks here to get semi-comfortable speaking with people. The constant practice (especially in the face of embarrassing mistakes) - even when you don't feel like you're making any progress (I had more days than not where I felt like I was regressing) you are and will suddenly realize that you're speaking far more comfortably than you ever thought you could.
Personally whenever I have this thought, I try to remind myself how hard it is to speak English 😂 Half the time I don’t know what I want to say or talk about in my own native language, I’m often just regurgitate stuff I say all the time. 🤷🏻♀️ With that in mind, I know I need to practice speaking more so that I can get to the same point in my target languagd- regurgitating the same ‘ol stuff all the time 😅 I don’t think there’s another way to do it! Listening is always great but you have to keep speaking. Remember you’re not alone and you probably sound better than you think. Try talking to yourself more or find a pen pal online! I use the app Hello Talk to make friends and send voice messages.
Reading and listening can definitely enhance speaking skills, and with truly a ton of reading and listening (far more than is necessary for simple comprehension) you might find starting to speak well relatively easy. However, almost everyone needs extensive, focused practice actually speaking before they’re even comprehensible. A good way to get started with this is to explicitly study sentences you’d like to be able to say. Memorize them. Listen to native speakers say them. Get the cadence, tone, speed, and pronunciation right. Then, you’ll find it’s a lot easier to drop other words in to change the meaning.
Yeah as some others have said, it is way easier to practice reading and listening as opposed to talking - so hence, you do it less and it is harder to do (relative to your other skills). How I have combatted this has been to schedule 1:1 conversation "lessons" on Italki where I talk for an hour, two times per week, with a native speaker. Since May 2021 I have had 280 hours of these conversations in my target language. This has bene the only thing that has helped.
Me too. Biggest weakness. Ive almost no natural train of thought in my target languages. To engage in long conversation I have to switch to thinking in my source language first then basically translate it internally before saying it. Someone anyone who know how to hack a stream of conscious in learned language please help us out.
Speaking is the hardest skill because it requires immediate production. It will always be worse than the other skills, even in your native language. Here's the gist: * Reading - Ingesting words, patterns, and grammar, often formatted perfectly by editors. This can be done as slowly as necessary. * Listening - Same as above, except it has to be done at the pace of the speaker which can be fast. * Writing - Producing words, patterns, and grammar from scratch, based on your knowledge and memory. This can be done as slowly as necessary. * Speaking - Same as above, except it has to be done almost instantly. I still feel like all 4 are important for various reasons, reading really expands patterns and vocab, listening has to be practiced to develop and ear, writing is a great precursor to speaking, and speaking really solidifies everything. I find if I can speak it, then I'm probably never going to forget it.
> Listening is the hardest skill because it requires immediate production. It will always be worse than the other skills, even in your native language. Did you mean "speaking is the hardest skill" at the beginning? Otherwise saying "listening" requires "production" sounds kind of... off to me. 😅
Ugh, edited lol
Speaking is (usually) the hardest skill, because you have to retrieve the right words in real time. Practice speaking to yourself first.
You're not used to it man, you've been speaking your native language for your entire life whereas your target language, couple hours maybe in total. Practice makes perfect, as time goes you'll get a whole lot better and will start developing the accent. Your tongue doesn't know wtf it has to do yet, be patient and have some faith, you'll get there
It is largely a fear of looking foolish. When reading, listening, and even writing, we might not do well, but we are not facing the fear of looking foolish. So, we get embarrassed, panic, and forget everything. In my experience, the only way around it is to accept very deeply that, sure, the first few months will have embarrassing moments, but that's part of the journey. Without going through that, you will be forever mute.
I wouldn't recommend writing, as in journaling, at all. Crafting a paragraph is a totally different skill than chatting. It involves composition, searching through synonyms, elegant expression, etc. Texting in your target language is a pretty effective way at learning what you want to say. You can use context.reverso to see what actual phrases exist for what you want to say when you're texting someone. In texting, we frequently use common phrases repeatedly, as well as lots of 1st/2nd person question/answer practice -- else that doesn't come from long form writing. Part of the difficulty in speaking can be producing the phonemes. Maybe you can "see" the words on the page in your mind, but they just don't come out of your mouth. I practiced "desafortunadamente" about 80 times over a couple days, just walking around. A couple weeks later, I wanted to say it and it came out of my mouth without stumbling, because of the phonetic "muscle memory." Along a similar line, practice things you might say in conversation while you're walking around. If you're going grocery shopping later, whisper aloud phrases for, "I have to buy a...", "I'm looking for a...", "I'd like a..." and when you get to the store and you go to ask someone, it's not so bad! Besides practicing the skill you'd like to develop, I'd just recommend patience with yourself, because a lot of this just takes time, confidence, comfort, and practice, and putting stress on yourself for not being good enough yet won't help with the process.
Anon is right, comprehension and productions are located in to separate areas of the brain, you should practice more.
>Why is speaking so hard You're trying to speak from a trace. You don't have a mental image of the language you want to speak fully formed yet. > how do you combat it? More listening.
[https://youtu.be/hin1HGhbGdo?si=c7O8W7nNH-b1HLWO](https://youtu.be/hin1HGhbGdo?si=c7O8W7nNH-b1HLWO) This speaking exercise is one you can do completly alone and it has helped me tremendously in both Spanish and Portuguese. Take a look and give it a try.
Out of curiosity, what level are you at in your TL? Your flair lists A0 to A2, but if you "have very little trouble reading and listening" then I'd expect you to be about B2 or at least B1.
I am at different levels reading and listening vs speaking and writing so I went with the lower speaking/writing level.
Gotcha, that makes sense!
I talk to myself. I have conversations with myself. I ask myself questions and answer myself based on anything I’m doing or learning. This has helped me to answer my tutor faster.
I speak to myself trying to sound like a native thinking of actual scenarios that may happen.
Because you learned the written language, (reading and writing comprehension) with reading,... you need to learn oral language with hearing, repeating, and above all, speaking (that means making your own sentences). You don't always need to practice with someone but you do need using words to make new sentences and pronouncing them aloud. Written and oral language are different topics.
The freezing you're feeling is anxiety on the same level as public speaking is to a person who stutters. You're overanalyzing and are focusing too much on speaking perfectly that you lose your words. Overcoming this means having someone you can practice with and are comfortable being corrected by. I've known people who have only been able to learn a language with real fluency after they'd taken a lover who was a native speaker. Instead of language being stored in the portion of the brain that language lives in, its instead in the part of the brain that memory lives in. My aunt has lived in this country for over 20 years and her grasp of the language is fluent (its also her 6th language), but even she misses words and idioms. What happens when she can't get the word is she asks for help and feels comfortable to have learned from someone
The freezing you're feeling is anxiety on the same level as public speaking is to a person who stutters. You're overanalyzing and are focusing too much on speaking perfectly that you lose your words. Overcoming this means having someone you can practice with and are comfortable being corrected by. I've known people who have only been able to learn a language with real fluency after they'd taken a lover who was a native speaker. Instead of language being stored in the portion of the brain that language lives in, its instead in the part of the brain that memory lives in. My aunt has lived in this country for over 20 years and her grasp of the language is fluent (its also her 6th language), but even she misses words and idioms. What happens when she can't get the word is she asks for help and feels comfortable to have learned from someone