How ‘Talking to Yourself’ Can Boost Your Ability to Speak a Language

Hello, everyone and welcome back to this page! After 6 weeks of studying abroad in France and being a French teacher at a language immersion camp, I have finally started to settle down and to take time for myself before studying abroad again. For this week’s post, I wanted to focus on a skill that I have developed and strengthened over the years: talking to myself in my target languages. I know what you are probably thinking: “Why would I ever do that? Wouldn’t I sound weird and be made fun of?”. Those questions are very natural to have, but I hope to convince you to at least give it a try before the end of the year.

Since the video below could not have summarized what you should do after talking to yourself any better, I will list all of the points that the he made and will add a few of my own remarks to them.

1.  As you could have already guessed, once you have decided that you will talk to yourself in one of your target languages, one of the best ways to see your progress over the years is to record yourself when speaking. With all of the technology that we have nowadays, there are many ways to do so. The two easiest ways are by either grabbing a voice recorder, or your phone. If for some reason neither of these objects are at your disposal, you can do it the old-fashioned way by simply talking to yourself without a device that tracks your progress.

2. Speak for 5 minutes in the foreign language without stopping. Choose a different topic every time: As intimidating as this next step may sound, it is very important to hold yourself accountable for the progress, or lack thereof that you make when learning other languages. Therefore, setting yourself a goal of a short 5 minutes should be feasible for most language learners. Keep in mind that if you are an absolute beginner of a language, or if you have not had the chance to brush up on one of your languages for a while, this goal may not be as realistic for you. If that is the case, do not fret, lower your expectations at first, and set timely goals to eventually reach a 5-minute conversation with yourself.

Aside from choosing for how long you will talk to yourself, you should also change the topic every time in order to put yourself on the spot. Say that you are currently on a clothing unit in your textbook, then you should focus your conversation on clothing items and what you would like to buy next. On the other hand, if you are preparing for a business trip to China, then you should focus on proper formal greetings and how to ask polite questions to your colleagues. I personally like switching them up, as I find it more interactive and fun. I like being challenged and find that when I change the topic, I tend to make faster progress in the long run.

3. Listen to recordings of yourself and make notes: Once the 5 or so minutes have finished up, make sure to listen to your recordings. It will seem a bit unnatural and strange at first, but try to resist the temptation of deleting them instead of listening to the mistakes that you made and on which you could improve. Below are some questions that the video suggests that you should ask yourself when taking notes of what you said:

a.     What sounds are you not pronouncing well ? : For example, if you are learning Russian, you may have a hard time pronouncing guttural sounds, making it a priority of sounds that you should regularly practice. In Spanish, you may have to practice how to roll your r’s over and over again until it starts feeling more natural.

b.    What problems with tenses do you have? For example, if you are learning any of the Romance languages (Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, etc) the conditional, or the pluperfect may trip you up. Instead of giving up and telling yourself that you will never master all of these tenses, you can listen to your recordings and see which tenses do not come to you as easily as the others. You can then take an entire study day to review them until you feel like you have a better grasp on them. Remember that consistency is key.

c.     What words did you not know? Look them up. : For me personally, I have a hard time remembering long words that have few vowel sounds in both German and Russian, so I tend to focus on those words more-so than shorter words. After listening to myself talk for a few minutes, I take the time to write down any words that I did not know in those languages, look them up in a dictionary, and write them down in a notebook, so that I can easily refer back them to them later on.

d.    What mistakes did you hear? Note them down. : This question is a bit broader than the others, but is just as important. The mistakes that you can hear can be anything from mispronouncing a word to saying the wrong gender of a common word, such as “the book”. Instead of assuming that you what you said was correct, it is best to look up those words and to hear them being pronounced on online dictionaries, or on other websites.

e.  Find a friend/a teacher/a native speaker to listen for you. : Finally, once you have followed all of these simple steps, if you have someone at your disposal in real life, or virtually, you can ask him/her to listen to your recording and to give you feedback. This step is optional and is not always necessary, but if you are learning a language that is completely unrelated to your native language, or if you are not still not comfortable speaking your language (usually until you are an intermediate-learner), this can be helpful. Once you have listened to yourself several times, make sure to jot down any words or phrases about which you are unsure and then verify them with someone else. If you are confused about something, it is best to fix your mistakes sooner rather than later, as it is much more difficult to train your brain to say something the right way after having done it incorrectly for a long time. I hope that these tips help you out and that you consider trying this out for yourself. 

   

Until next time, happy language learning! Feel free to also comment on this post any post ideas that you would like me to write next.

How to Improve Your Accent in a Language

If someone were to ask me what I thought were one of the most important elements that demonstrated a level of mastery in another language, I would say that accurate and authentic pronunciation were key to becoming fluent. Even though I am nowhere near perfect, as no one is, I have always had an ear for having what many would say is a “good”, or a “native-sounding” pronunciation. I have already been mistaken for a native French speaker and have been told that my German accent is good by students who have already studied abroad in Germany and by other native German speakers. This ability, just like anything else, did not just happen overnight. I can still clearly remember stumbling across words that were unfamiliar and trying to force myself to produce German sounds by being my American-self and by trying to transfer that over to a language whose pronunciation was nothing like that of English.

This is where I went wrong. I truly believe that anyone, including immigrant parents, adults, and teenagers who have never been exposed to a language other than their native languages can eventually sound like a native speaker in a foreign language. My hope for this post is not to try to denounce accents, or to say that you must sound a hundred percent authentic, but I do hope that you can gain some words of wisdom from someone who has had years of experience trying to find the best methods to completely get rid of, or to improve on your accent.

My first tip is to try to speak as early as you can. Even if you only know a few basic phrases, or have an elementary-level vocabulary, there are no real excuses to not start using your language as frequently as possible. I would recommend talking to yourself, finding language partners online, talking to your friends, your classmates, or your family-members, and to get as much exposure to authentic listening material as you can find. If you have been keeping up with my blog posts, you will know how strong of a proponent I am of YouTube. It is just like Google, in the sense that there are hundreds of thousands of videos dedicated to learning another language, or, what I almost solely do, listen to YouTubers who are from a country of your target language. (Feel free to read my post “How to Improve Speaking a Language” and “Listen to YouTubers in Your Target Language” if you want to know how to improve on those skills).

I also recommend reading passages out loud as many times as you feel necessary on a regular basis, so that you get used to making new sounds with your throat, with your mouth, and with your tongue. Remember that you should not try to make sounds using the same parts of your mouth as you would with your target language. Instead, you have to slowly train yourself to start using different parts of your mouth in order to make them without even thinking about it. The more practice that you get, the less you will have to have stop and think about where your tongue should be placed in order to make a particular sound. In other words, the more audio, reading, and speaking exposure that you get, the more likely it will be that you will start to familiarize yourself with how words should be pronounced.

Lastly, it is very important to ask advanced language learners, especially native speakers, if you can have conversational practice with them. If you do so, you can ask them to correct your pronunciation, or words that you are not saying correctly. You should not be corrected after every mistake, especially if you are a beginner, or feel that you need a lot of speaking practice in order to become proficient; however, you should take any criticism to heart and work on your weak spots. If, for example, you had trouble pronouncing words with accents, you could practice saying those words out loud based on what you thought were their correct pronunciation. After a lot of repetition, the extra exposure will help make you confident when speaking without worrying about sounding “very (too) American”, or “not very good.”

I hope that you found this post helpful. I figured that I would give you tips about how to start taking your language skills to the next level, as I feel that perfecting my pronunciation has helped me gain more confidence and become closer to reaching fluency in several languages.