Should We Speak Before We're Ready?

Should we speak in a language before we're ready?

That's the subject today.

It comes up all the time.

People are afraid; they're intimidated.

They know that they speak with mistakes or with a poor accent, so they don't speak.

"I would like to buy a hamburger.

I would like to buy a hamburger.

And of course you know that I'm very much into input.

I believe that you can continue to build yourself up, get used to the

language, develop comprehension skills, acquire a passive vocabulary.

All of this is making you better prepared for speaking.

But there comes a point when you have accumulated a lot of words and you've

done a lot of listening, and at some point you have to jump in and get wet.

And this was very much my situation with Polish.

Eight years ago I did three months of Polish, and then I didn't do anything.

And two months prior to going to Poland, I spent a lot of time

listening to and reading polish.

Probably my comprehension ability—and certainly my vocabulary—in Polish grew.

I learned more new words during this two-month period than I have

forgotten over the past eight years. But probably my speaking ability

was better eight years ago.

Why?

Because I spoke more eight years ago.

I had I don't know how many online sessions during a three-month period

with my Polish tutor. And typically in languages where the alphabet is the Latin

alphabet, or it's a familiar alphabet, after a month or so, six weeks, with

the [LingQ] Mini Stories, I feel I'm ready to start to struggle in the language.

And if I speak two, three times a week, you know, the more you speak,

the better you get. As I always say, "To speak well, you have to speak a lot."

So if you look back at my video that I did eight years ago, I don't speak so bad.

I don't speak well, but relative to the amount of time I

put in, it wasn't all that bad.

This time traveling with my wife in Poland, I had the odd semi-

conversation with a taxi driver or flight attendants on the

airplane on LOT [Polish Airlines] coming over.

Not very successful.

And then all of a sudden I was put in a situation where I was gonna

have an interview in Polish, and I'm going to show you this video.

At the end of this video.

You can see me speaking in Polish.

And you can also follow a link to Easy Polish where the whole

interview was put up.

And you will see.

Comments from people that are mostly somewhat critical of my

polish, saying that it's kind of a mixture of Polish, Czech, Ukrainian,

and Russian. Which is true.

People saying that "Steve doesn't speak any languages.

He's always all over the internet pretending to be a polyglot."

A variety of negative comments.

Others are encouraging, but the point is, I knew going in that I was not

going to speak very well in Polish. However, tt was still, from my

perspective, a very positive experience.

I actually communicated! I mean, if you follow the video, it's a bit

painful. I throw in some English and various other Slavic languages.

I do my best, but we are communicating! The person interviewing me

understands what I'm saying.

I understand what she's saying most of the time.

So there is communication.

If I were to do that, say night after night in Poland,

Or frequently, or three times a week online.

My speaking ability would improve a lot because I have this background

of passive vocabulary. But the fact that I'm gonna make mistakes, the fact

that I'm somewhat, yeah, I would say intimidated by the prospect of being

interviewed in Polish when I know I'm not gonna do well, didn't prevent me

from doing it, and I'm glad I did it.

So the initial question is, "Should we speak before we're ready?"

Well, the answer is "You're never ready!"

We are never as good in the language as we would like to be if

the objective is to perform well.

But if the objective is to communicate, like if I'm in a situation,

it's going to be in Polish.

We have to communicate. I communicate. I grab whatever I have, whatever I can

remember of Polish, whatever comes to my mind that's in a Slavic language.

I throw in the odd English word and we communicate. And what I hear from her is

pure, relevant, high-resonance content. So that it's a very good experience.

So, I'll leave you the video.

You can have a look yourselves and you can send all the critical comments you

want, but I don't mind because even if I spend another six months working on my

Polish, improving my Polish, it'll still not be as good as I would like it to be.

I think in language learning we're never quite as good as we would like to be.

And yet we still have to go there and use the language.

So my answer is, you know, should we speak before we're ready?

Yes.

Because we're never really ready.

But we should nevertheless, you know, try to prepare as much as we can,

focusing on our input activities.

So there you have it.

Speak when you feel like it.

Bye for now.