Tips for fluent speaking without engaging with native speakers?

[rdearman]

I think you need to talk, simply because you need to make the "muscle memory" in your mouth and throat and tongue such that when you speak it all happens in the correct way. So in theory, you never need to engage with a native speaker., self-talk and shadowing should be sufficient.

However.... Is your pronunciation correct? Is your accent so thick a native can't actually understand anything you say? The only way to test this is to actually speak to a native. Someone willing to critic and criticize your language skills and give you pointers. I've met quite a few people who think that they are speaking perfect English, but I couldn't understand what they were saying because the accent was so thick I couldn't figure it out.

You mean Scots?

LOL. Only Glasgow. No, the people I was thinking about were Russian.

[Iversen]

(...) I couldn't understand what they were saying because the accent was so thick I couldn't figure it out.

You mean Scots?

This is not limited to Southern Brits lamenting about Northerly dialects or of Scots. I recently watched a French TV program where someone found it necessary to put subtitles on because a person spoke Québecquois, and in another program they put High German subtitles on because the language spoken was a mild version of Swiss German. And in Denmark jerks in Copenhagen have even put subtitles on nationwide TV when somebody spoke a Jutish patois.In none of these case did the speakers use the more extreme versions of their dialects, so the blame for being too lazy to even trying to understand their fellowmen (and -vomen) must lie squarely with the native speakers of the dominating language forms.

And if those native speakers can't even understand other native speakers with slightly different vernaculars then it is understandable that they also have problems understanding language learners. Luckily there are also people who actually do an effort to understand other human beings. And I mostly wait so long having conversations in my target languages that I rarely meet a totally blank face - and if it should happen I would not necessarily assume that it was my fault.

And of course there are language learners with such a lousy pronunciation that it is comprehensible that nobody can understand them. The blame goes both ways...

[leosmith]

it's possible to fluently speak in a foreign language by oneself by using techniques such as shadowing, self-talk (either aloud or inner coversations/thought process) and extensive reading and listening

I don't agree with this; it's much better to use real native speakers. Unfortunately, German language partners were hard to find for me, so I paid the very high prices tutors ask for on Italki. So I understand why you might want to try this and just wanted to mention that you can also use free AI voice to voice options for pretty realistic conversations. You can set up the ground rules for role playing ahead of time if you want to, and make it even more realistic.

[bombobuffoon]

For me the key to speaking in a language is thinking in it, starting out with short fragments with lots of holes and errors - and then you can weawe them together and weed out the most glaring errors before you engage in something as stressful as a conversation with a native speaker (or even worse: another mediocre learner). But at least for me the spoken language always comes AFTER I have learnt to write in it, and that comes AFTER I have learnt to read and (maybe) understand the spoken version of it.

As for errors: I'm not terribly afraid of fossilized errors. The best time to tidy up your language is when you already can use it.

How do you validate that you are writing understandable language?

[jimmy]

Some say it's impossible to attain this skill alone: one has to engage daily with speakers in a target language, preferably moving to the contry, where this language is spoken..

No. you do not have to do those things in my opinion. In fact, we have many options these days.
Also, nowadays, by AI developments, we may feel something sufficiently spicy too.
however, if you wonder my personal opinion, the things which you mentioned are not bad ideas if especially you have such options. Conversely, they are natural and effective. But I disagree to the idea stating that those things will be mandatory.

[bombobuffoon]

I'm finding it hard to agree with a view that one can 'speak fluently' without engaging with other speakers. It's possible to build up a decent battery of learned scripts, and 'islands' based upon predicting certain patterns (these also based upon general conversation etiquette). They will help a lot if you've drilled them so much that you can pick from them at will, but engaging in a conversation is at least 50% unpredictability.

I agree with Deinonysus's second paragraph above concerning the ability to understand others. This relieves a massive amount of the stress and difficulty. You no longer need to bother about struggling to interpret others, but upon your responses. Yet there are a couple of caveats: 1) that you need some practical in-the-field experience of being spoken to by someone expecting acknowledgement and/or a response. This is very, very different than unravelling speech not actually directed towards you, where the heat is off you, and is a psychological factor more than a linguistic one. 2) that, as rdearman said:

you need to make the "muscle memory" in your mouth and throat and tongue such that when you speak it all happens in the correct way.

However I don't believe self-talk and shadowing is at all sufficient for this. Speaking engagement also includes perceptible and sometimes imperceptible micro-correction as you go along, which it's hard to do when you're just speaking alone. I have no hard academic evidence for this, but I've slowly noticed myself (and others) making micro-corrections to pronunciation and things like tone and vocabulary choices based upon interactions. Effectively a form of copying, or shadowing if you like, much more tailored to practical use. I'm not against shadowing, though I would choose judiciously what to shadow. Shadowing long monologues and things that don't reflect conversation is a complete waste of time.

I have built up, and am building up more language islands. Yet I'm rather aware that in real life my experiences have been that even the most innocent of natives will drag me off script in about 2 sentences and send me down a deep dark hole where nobody can hear me scream.

Even ordering a coffee doesn't always go to plan.

I also have found theres an enormous difference between exchanging pleasantries and exchanging critical information. That is to say, the pleasant conversation can have many outcomes, but none of the outcomes really matter. I think language islands work well here. However the critical information exchange on the other hand often have only two outcomes (correct/incorrect information exchange).

I also have a theory, based off experience that real life experiences are required to tease out useful vocabulary. It just never ever appears otherwise, its only found in the wild. I don't think a language island can really prepare for this.

That ties in to what you say about monologues. I also have made that observation about monologues. If I do CI by working with monologues then its like being trapped in this monologue vocabulary bubble. Too much listening to podcasts. It may as well be a different language for all the good that serves when dealing with critical information type situations.

[alcarazesco]

Native speakers will always outperform you in the fluency department. But you can reach a very good level with some effort.

I recently travelled around the French-speaking parts of Switzerland and Belgium. My only knowledge of French is what I learned in school, grammar books, and French TV and radio, with little to no contact with natives beforehand. I didn’t rely on English once. I was able to go on guided tours, ask for directions, order meals, and engage in small-talk. I met friends of friends and we talked about football in French. It wasn’t perfect by any means, but I was still able to engage in an informed discussion with them. That’s good enough by my standards. In sum, you can go very far just by self-study. But at some point, you would need to move to that country (i.e. Germany) in order to reach a level close to what you would consider fluent. There’s just too much to learn, and TV and written materials, while informative, won’t prepare you for the daily exchanges you will have in German with German-speaking people.

So, short of moving to Germany/Switzerland/Austria, consume as much native media as you can!

Edit: as others suggested, it’s worth repeating some common phrases to yourself, out loud, to break your tongue. And imitate the natives’ accent to the best of your ability. Many words and phrases are just hard to pronounce with no practice in saying them.

[jeffers]

Native speakers will always outperform you in the fluency department.

I have heard this asserted before, but it is just not true. Not always. Not every native speaker is a highly fluent speaker, for a huge variety of reasons. Some might have a speech impediment, learning disability or injury which might make them poor at speaking. "Native speaker" would also include someone born into one language but who was educated in another language, or moved countries, and so is not particularly fluent in their native tongue. An extreme example of the latter is my mother, who spoke nothing but German until she went to school, but now her German is terrible. Technically, she's a native German speaker, but I can speak German more fluently than she. I know many people in a similar situation, whose fluency in their native tongue is poor because of shifting to another language. But even if you sweep away that subset of people, there are still many native speakers who just aren't very fluent.

[Le Baron]

An extreme example of the latter is my mother, who spoke nothing but German until she went to school, but now her German is terrible. Technically, she's a native German speaker, but I can speak German more fluently than she.

Does this mean you haven't updated the numbers in your bio, or is your mother's German now A0!

I know many people in a similar situation, whose fluency in their native tongue is poor because of shifting to another language.

While that's true I think the general idea of 'a native speaker' means someone for whom it is their first language and uses it wholly or primarily every day. There are other circumstances of course, since e.g. I am a native English speaker, but hardly use it for actual speaking daily and haven't for years. Maybe once every few weeks. However I reached adulthood using it every day to a high level. I've never met an English L2 speaker who can outperform me.

In general I would agree with the assertion, because even a native speaker considered to be at a 'lower level' has a facility with and 'feeling' for the language that an L2 speaker just doesn't have.

[iguanamon]

Along these lines, I just read an article in the NYT today about an American woman who grew up bilingual in English and French in the US, now living in France: Can You Lose Your Native Tongue?

After moving abroad, I found my English slowly eroding. It turns out our first languages aren’t as embedded as we think. ... in the past few decades, a new field of study called “language attrition” has emerged. It concerns not learning but forgetting: What causes language to be lost?