How Do You Become Good at Speaking in a New Language?

Hi, Steve Kaufman here. Today I'm going to answer the question. How do you become good at speaking in a language? What's the secret? And I'm going to share with you the secrets about getting started speaking in a language and how you continue to get better and better at speaking in a language. Remember if you enjoy these videos, please subscribe.

And by all means, join me at LingQ, which is where I learn languages. Now, you have all heard me talk about input. I stress input. I say you have to get the language in you. You have to acquire words. You have to let your brain get used to the language. And that's how, that's where I spend most of my time, but I do want to speak.

We all want to speak. That's the goal for most of us of learning a language. We want to communicate with people, to connect with people. We want to express ourselves in the new language. So how do we do it? And people have asked me sort of specifically to go through sort of step-by-step because I know that many of us, and myself included, after an extended period of input, of listening and reading and acquiring words and seeing my comprehension, you know, improve and I understand more and more stuff. And then, you know, I schedule a session with a tutor and of course I'm concerned like, how am I going to be able to retrieve these words? You know? Oh, by the way, I'm wearing my t-shirt from Machu Pichu.

And it relates a little bit to my story and I'll get to that. At any rate, you know what happens when we start speaking? How do we get started? And that's what I want to kind of cover in this video, sort of getting started, speaking in a language and then doing all the things you need to do so that you can continue to get better and better, even as you continue all of your input activities, even as you continue to acquire words and phrases and, and, and, um, get your brain used to the new language.

So you all know that I spent most of my time on LingQ. On LingQ of course we have all of our input activities. We also have tutors. We don't have as many tutors as italki, but we do have some, and the advantage at LingQ is that the tutor's report is incorporated into LingQ. So I have a record, all of, of, all of my conversations with my tutors now in Persian.

I'll give you an example. So Persian and Arabic, both very difficult because the writing system is so difficult. So what I did in order to break down that first barrier, in other words, I have never said anything in Persian or Arabic. How do I get started? How do I get words out? Now, there are people who say that you can talk to yourself and you can say phrases to yourself.

But I've never found that I'm able to do that for very long. I might try it, but I won't spend a lot of time doing it. It's just something that I have never been able to do. People who can do it, good for them. It's a way for them to prime the pump, to get started. What I found and what I recommend, what I found very useful was in languages like Persian and Arabic, especially, but probably in all languages,

I get a tutor, whether on LingQ or italki, and I say, I want to read and what I, and I, I want to then talk about what I have read and what I use as the sort of material that's going to prime the pump and get me going is the mini stories, because the mini stories have so much repetition built into each story.

And I end up listening to each one of them, 10, 20, 30 times, not necessarily at one sitting, but over the course of a couple of months. I will have lesson two, lesson one, two, three, four, five, back to lesson one. And so I'm familiar with what's there and in each mini story, there are questions, but the questions are structured in such a way that you are given the answer.

In other words, a statement, you are asked the question about that statement and then you're given the answer. So you don't even have to provide the answer. It's just more exposure. But now with my tutor, I am asked those questions and I have to produce the answer, but I am producing an answer that I already know, that I have listened to many, many times.

So, the big thing about speaking is to reduce stress. In fact, if there's one key it's to reduce stress. Stephen Krashen says that we learn languages when there is meaningful communication in a low stress or unstressful environment or situation. So anything you can do to reduce stress is going to help you.

So, first of all, if you have a tutor, you're with someone who is paid to speak to you, so that's less stressful than hoping that some random person you meet is going to want to humor you in your, in the language you're learning. So that reduces stress. Even amongst the tutors, some are more sympathetic than others.

Some make a face if you say something wrong or show impatience, you don't want those tutors. You want the tutor that's very encouraging, doesn't correct you all the time, uh, and keeps the conversation going. But also by sort of having a pseudo conversation where I'm asked questions that I have heard before and where I have in fact read the story with the tutor and maybe even read some of the questions,

and then I'm asked the question, I have the answer. I'm not asked to remember something about the story. I'm just asked to say something that I've heard before and. You know, it's very familiar to me. I'm likely to succeed. Whenever you're given something to do where you're likely to succeed, that's good.

The brain likes it, likes success. Doesn't like failure. So I find that beginning to speak in the language, uh, reading and then discussing, using the questions that are in the many stories is extremely helpful. And so I would recommend that as a sort of step number one, where you, you got to break the ice, you've got to go from all of your listening and reading to, to a situation where you're starting to speak.

And what I found in both Arabic and Persian was that I would do that for three or four or five, six lessons. And then I was tired of doing that. Now I wanted to, even within the 60 minutes, I might do that for the first 20 minutes. And then I would start to wander off into something else, perhaps using the vocabulary that I had learned.

So it's, I'm sliding into sort of a broader range of, you know, exchange with my tutor all in a low stress environment. So that's extremely important. The next thing is obviously, when you start to speak, part of the stress comes from your inability to say what you want to say. Part of it comes from not understanding what the other person is saying, because you're not good enough in the language to have a really good, free-flowing conversation.

Bit of advice. Don't worry about what you can't say. Don't worry about what you don't understand. And there is a bit of a tendency for people to wonder about what people are saying. Like I, often people ask me, well, have you ever been in an elevator with Asian people and have they said stuff about you? Never. People don't talk about you, but it's when you don't understand you conjure up these ideas that people are talking about your, what are they saying?

And, and I've often as I'm progressing in a language when I was learning Portuguese I'm with these Brazilians and they're all talking a mile a minute and I feel I should be able to understand, but I don't understand because my brain is not yet used to it. And you have to remember that with enough exposure, you will get better.

And so every time you're in a situation where you don't understand, or you can't say what you want to say, that's fine. It's part... you're on your way. That's part of the process, uh, of, of getting to know, you know, acquiring a language. And when I was in Machu Pichu, I was with these other people. And our guide was speaking to me in different languages and they were a little bit annoyed that the guide wasn't speaking in English, they were annoyed that they couldn't understand what he was saying.

Don't worry about what you can't understand. That's very important. So begin with a mini stories, reading, answering questions, where you have the answers, where you've actually heard the answers many, many times then gradually move to subjects which are of greater interest to you. But I would recommend staying with people who are paid to be sympathetic to you, like a tutor or a teacher of some kind.

Uh, if you, like I mentioned, when I was learning Japanese, I had a very patient assistant, um, Mr. Nick Yazaki, who was very long-winded and spoke very, you know, humored me and stuff. If you have people like that, fine, but don't put yourself in stressful situations. Then just keep on speaking. Keep on, uh, finding there again, find a tutor who's good at keeping you going, who can ask you questions about things that you're interested in, where you're going to succeed, who doesn't insist on, you know, like I've had tutors that they just, they want to talk about food. I don't know the words for food in let's say Persian. I want to talk about history, which is of interest to me, but my tutor, she didn't want to talk about history.

So get tutors that are sympathetic, that don't express annoyance when you make mistakes and who are good at keeping the conversation going around things that you are interested in and where you can express yourself. Then of course, when I get my conversation report at LingQ, I study it, I listen to it many times, and I remember the things that I had trouble saying.

And if I look at a number of these conversation or parts and listened to them, I realize that I made the same mistakes week after week after week. It doesn't matter. You have to have confidence that you are gradually going to improve. So the answer, how do you get started speaking and continue to improve?

Reduce the stress, reduce the stress. Start with something like the mini stories where you're basically reproducing things that you have heard many, many times. And from there gradually wander into a greater range of subjects, subjects that are of interest to you, with someone who is sympathetic to you and, you know, gradually your ability to speak will improve.

And in the end, as I've said, many times, even though I stress input, to speak well, you have to speak a lot so that, uh, I find that I'm speaking with a tutor once or twice a week, you know, at the early stages, maybe three months after I started into the language. But eventually if I want to do well in the language, I may eventually have to go to the country, but I also ramp up, you know, my, my sessions with my tutor, maybe four or five times a week.

So there you have it, my take on how to get proficient at speaking, which is something we all want to do. And how do we do it in a way that minimizes stress. And I'll leave you with a couple of videos that might be relevant to you on the subject. Okay, then bye for now.