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.