Your plan of attack - Speaking

[garyb]

The foreign language I speak best is Italian; I'd estimate around C1 after just over five years of part-time study. My method for that, after learning the basics, was mainly just lots of interaction with native speakers and lots of input, focusing on modern TV, films, and books with a lot of everyday language.

It's easy to forget that conversing with native speakers is not only speaking practice but also an ideal source of input, since what you hear is personal and completely adapted to the situation. This interaction has been absolutely key to me learning how to use language in social contexts; I might well have figured all that out from just TV and films, but it would have taken much longer.

There are a few things that I strongly believe would have made the process quicker and less painful:

- Waiting a bit longer before starting to converse regularly. I don't think early speaking did any harm, and whether to speak early is a question of preference and need rather than one of the best way to learn, but conversing when you only know the basics simply isn't very fun or productive beyond the initial novelty. Study and input are more effective and enjoyable uses of time at this stage.

- Using tutors for speaking practice at first rather than trying to find opportunities socially and through language exchanges or meetups. Socialising with natives is awesome like I said, but better left for when your speaking is already decent. In general, the less painful it is to speak with you the easier it is to find willing people, and exchanges and meetups are so hit-or-miss that they can become very discouraging if they're your only practice opportunity. Although finding a decent tutor can also be tough, as attested to in this thread.

- More time spent on internalising the grammar, particularly the verb conjugations, as a beginner and intermediate. I mostly did it the hard way, just through input and conversation, which took years and I still make some mistakes. Weak knowledge of the verbs can be a big barrier to speaking fluency. Specific exercises like what FSI does for Spanish would have helped a ton.

- To state the obvious, more time in the country would have speeded things up a lot. Keeping in mind of course that immersion is a complement and not a substitute for other study.

I'm now trying to apply these lessons to Spanish...

[smallwhite]

Any more analyses and plans of attack for more distant languages?

[smallwhite]

I've learned to speak my languages mostly through input (mainly listening). 700-1000 hours seems to be enough, at least for Czech, Russian, German and French as learned by a native speaker of Polish who graduated in Classics (the knowledge of Latin and Greek facilitates the process of vocabulary acquisition ).

How well do you speak after the 700-1000 hours of input?

I am all ears

How much input have you had and how well do you speak now?

*I had (another) break-through half a year after the exchange most likely due to something a (native) friend told me. But that is really difficult to redo and it would not have worked without gaining some kind of fluency first.

What did you mean by break-through? I once felt a breakthrough in my Spanish speaking, when I transitioned all of a sudden from "carefully forming sentences" to "knowing and speaking Spanish". I was just doing my usual speaking practice, and suddenly things felt different in my head. Is that what you meant as well?

[tiia]

*I had (another) break-through half a year after the exchange most likely due to something a (native) friend told me. But that is really difficult to redo and it would not have worked without gaining some kind of fluency first.

What did you mean by break-through? I once felt a breakthrough in my Spanish speaking, when I transitioned all of a sudden from "carefully forming sentences" to "knowing and speaking Spanish". I was just doing my usual speaking practice, and suddenly things felt different in my head. Is that what you meant as well?

After the exchange I had once met this friend, who told me something that made clear that I already had the skills I needed, but the only thing that stood in my way was my own perfectionism. She did a really good job by telling me this the way she did.

During those 2-3 weeks I was again in Finland the amount of English was reduced to an absolute minimum, meaning that it was mostly due to another person, who didn't speak Finnish. Otherwise there was usually no need for me to speak English.
Finally I started reading books and Finnish became more and more the default language when thinking. I felt like I was making progress everyday. Speaking was a lot more fluent compared to the moment I had left the country half a year earlier, although I had not spoken that much Finnish in between. More difficult topics were still slow, because of missing vocabulary, but at least possible to talk about.
With one guy I even switched to Finnish from English, because it felt easier that way due to some background noise. (Note, that we had normally been speaking English before.) That's something I usually don't feel, even now.

I guess there was suddenly coming to life what my brain had silently been processing the months before.

[Theodisce]

I've learned to speak my languages mostly through input (mainly listening). 700-1000 hours seems to be enough, at least for Czech, Russian, German and French as learned by a native speaker of Polish who graduated in Classics (the knowledge of Latin and Greek facilitates the process of vocabulary acquisition ).

How well do you speak after the 700-1000 hours of input?

B1-B2, I would say. To get to strong B2/C1 one would need to double the initial number of hours (about 1400 for Czech and 2000 for German given my linguistic background. A native speaker of Russian with teaching experience and background in linguistics evaluated my 1000 hours strong spoken Russian as B2 though) and have more speaking opportunities. Two real life examples: 700 hours of Czech input enabled me to have meaningful long conversations and to participate in the university life. 1400 hours of German input plus 10 hours of tutored Skype conversations was enough for me to pass a job interview at a German university. 700 hours of French proved to be enough to hold several 1 hour long conversations without me struggling all the time (but I would have been lost, had I been forced to speak about vegetables or furniture. My Polish vocabulary related to those subjects is not particularly developed either ).

[reineke]

En avant! Direction, le trou du cul de mon cheval, chargez! Something like that.

[kujichagulia]

I'm not by any means fluent in Japanese yet, but people here in Japan tell me that my pronunciation is really good for my level. They could just be flattering me, but assuming what they're saying is true, I'll talk about what worked for me.

When I was learning the basics, I used a textbook with audio and dialogues. I'd listen to the dialogues, try to repeat the lines, then I'd memorize and act out the dialogues on my own, so I worked with them a lot. I tried to imitate the pronunciation and intonation the best I could. Later on, when I was working through an intermediate textbook, I would take the audio and put them on a playlist on my audio player, then shuffle it and listen to it when I had a chance. If I am able to, I try to repeat the tricky parts.

Now that I'm not using a textbook anymore for Japanese, I'm trying to do more listening: TV, radio, whatever. It's easy for me, though, being in Japan; I can just turn on the TV every morning and get a blast of Japanese. It takes more effort with Portuguese; I have to make time to listen to Portuguese radio or find streaming TV or videos on the Internet and watch them. Usually when I hear something interesting, I'll repeat it to myself, or to my rabbit. (Pets are really useful language-learning tools!)

I use Anki a lot, and sometimes I forget this, but I try to slow down when doing reviews and read the sentence aloud a few times. The other day, there was a particularly tricky Japanese sentence that came up, and I was having trouble reading it aloud, so I made it into a little rap. I went around singing my little rap while doing a stupid dance. Luckily my wife wasn't at home at the time; she would have thought I'd gone crazy! But it helped me improve my pronunciation.

I also read aloud anything I'm reading. If I'm reading a Japanese news article and nobody is around, I'll read it out loud, like I'm a newscaster or something.

Now, all of this helps me to say the words well. But of course, speaking is more than just that. If your vocabulary is inadequate, like mine, you need to get in a lot of input (listening and reading). I don't really have to tell you that you have to know what to say, and also what the other person is saying, in order to have a good conversation.

[ddich]

I don't speak many languages, but with English I did a lot of input by watching TV and also learned grammar at school. My grades were good, but honestly I haven't got a clue how much I actually learned there.

I then moved to the UK for a year as a teenager, and as I remember it, the only real problem with understanding was all the different accents. I remember some local girl asking me outside my future College "where do I enroll" and I had to say "sorry?" like 3 times. Might have been 4 or 5 because I remember her losing all hope of ever getting an answer. I wasn't great at speaking to begin with, but it didn't take long for that to not be a problem, and most of my friends there thought I was an American.

I then moved back to the UK after over a decade, and talking was horrible mumbling again. But now, most people wonder which English speaking country am I from...except if I'm nervous..then I sound like Mika Häkkinen. And sometimes apparently I'm nervous when I don't even realize it. Funniest incident was when some older lady didn't believe that I was Finnish (or not English), and to prove it she told me to speak Finnish. It just made me wonder how was she going to approve of my Finnish.

Now with Italian, my first plan of attack was to speak a lot of Italian when we went to Venice a few months ago. It didn't really work all that well, because as soon as everybody saw a pale white guy they started speaking English to me. But the worst I did was called some really good red wine "beautiful" so I think I did quite well. Made the waitress laugh too.

Will have to see what happens now, but honestly I'm happy with how things are. Or perhaps I'm trusting how things went with English a bit too much. We'll see. I think I'd be more bothered if I had problems with understanding instead of speaking.

[JaraM]

That's a great suggest, but I can't agree with this: "More time spent on internalising the grammar, particularly the verb conjugations, as a beginner and intermediate." Personally I don't use in speaking a lot of tenses or different verbs. I need only present, past, "I'm going to do" and the simple verbs.

[reineke]

- More time spent on internalising the grammar, particularly the verb conjugations, as a beginner and intermediate. I mostly did it the hard way, just through input and conversation, which took years and I still make some mistakes. Weak knowledge of the verbs can be a big barrier to speaking fluency. Specific exercises like what FSI does for Spanish would have helped a ton.

I'm now trying to apply these lessons to Spanish...

That's a great suggest, but I can't agree with this: "More time spent on internalising the grammar, particularly the verb conjugations, as a beginner and intermediate." Personally I don't use in speaking a lot of tenses or different verbs. I need only present, past, "I'm going to do" and the simple verbs.

Internalisation is the process of learning something so that it can be used as the basis for production. Once language is internalised, it can then be retained and retrieved when needed for communication.

British Council

"Explicit knowledge is conscious knowledge of grammar rules learned through formal classroom instruction."

"In contrast, implicit knowledge is unconscious, internalized knowledge of a language that is available for spontaneous speech."

The question is can explicit grammar knowledge become implicit knowledge?

http://iteslj.org/Techniques/Noonan-Noticing.html