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How to deal with nerves when speaking? | ||
Tags: Loss of confidence | Speaking | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| chaotic_thought Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 3477 days ago 129 posts - 274 votes  Speaks: English*, German Studies: Dutch, French | Message 9 of 17 12 June 2015 at 2:32pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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I also like drilling as the weapon against this problem. When I am starting a language I need to have a very high "drilling ratio". For example, to feel comfortable talking for 5 minutes in a beginning language (lets suppose that 10-20 short conversations during the week adds up to about 5 minutes of actual language use), I feel I need about 10 hours of drilling during the previous week. As I grow more accustomed to the language, I may only need 5 hours during the week.
By "drilling" I mean precisely to sit in a room or take a walk and listen to an audio recording filled with comprehensible sentences in the language, and then repeating or shadowing them in a louder-than-normal speaking voice. The sentences that you repeat must be comprehensible to you without any aid (i.e. you are not allowed to use a translation during the drilling). Furthermore, you must be able to hear yourself speaking when you say the sentences. This means, for example, if you use earphones to listen to your practice material, you must keep one ear free so that you can monitor yourself via the echo of your voice. Finally, if you are using "listen and repeat"-style practice material, e.g. if the audio contains a "gap" where you are supposed to repeat after the speaker, then you must calculate your drilling time using a penalty factor. For example, if the audio recording lasts 30 minutes, and you perform this exercise twice daily, then you may be inclined to believe that you have drilled the language for 7 hours during the week, but in fact you have not. Because the audio recording has gaps, you have in fact only drilled for 3.5 hours. Therefore, to use such materials, you must perform such an exercise more often per day, or to switch to a non-gap type of material. For this reason I prefer the "shadowing" approach recommended by Professor Arguelles. Use material that has no gaps in the audio, or even better, edit the material so that it contains no gaps. Drill with your 30-minute recordings 2-3 times per day if you want to achieve 10 hours of drilling time per week. It's just like exercising your muscles, where you run for xx hours per week to burn fat, build muscles, lung capacity, etc. Edited by chaotic_thought on 12 June 2015 at 2:37pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| basica Senior Member Australia Joined 3471 days ago 157 posts - 269 votes Studies: Serbian | Message 10 of 17 14 June 2015 at 9:09am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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I think that everyone has offered good advice here. I will just say that what mostly got me over my fear of
speaking was when I first tried learning a language seriously, it was esperanto - a language which understandably has few native speakers thus pretty much everyone you speak with will be a learner like yourself and it the majority of cases they will be beginners too (one out of say every ten esperanto speakers I met were at a B1 or higher level). Knowing that we are all as terrible as each other made it easy to speak because there was very little fear of judgement which for me was more of a concern than perfectionism - you may have the opposite problem. Thus, I recommend if you are really worried about speaking to a native speaker - try to find other language learners to practice with. It will be a lot of fun and you're all in the same boat. Of course you don't want to do this as your only means of speaking practice, but it will be something that I think will help you start off with a lot less stress :) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4642 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 11 of 17 14 June 2015 at 9:46am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
My experience tells me that the previous advice is all good, but what helps is when you bite the bullet and do it and then find, five minutes in, that it isn't as bad as you thought it would be. Usually once you get into the flow, it isn't so bad. It's basically like swimming in cool water - it sucks when you jump in, but once you're in the water it isn't so bad. And even the most advanced of us make mistakes! The other day I confused the word μακρύς with μεγάλος (I actually meant to say ψηλός but I had forgotten that word, so I tried to circumlocute with the first one). But έιμαι μακρύς means your organ is very large! I was trying to say "tall", for those of you who don't speak Greek (the Chinese are very short and I'm 1m 95 (~6'5") so this is a relevant term for me to know because it's literally the first thing people notice). OOOOOOOOOOOOPS. I laughed it off, but I certainly will never make that mistake in Greek again! Edited by tarvos on 14 June 2015 at 9:49am 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5701 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 12 of 17 15 June 2015 at 2:48am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
That's what I was talking about in my third strategy. Your body simply can't keep up being nervous all the time so sooner or later you'll calm down - it's faster when you were simply a bit nervous and once you get going all the things you've practiced fall into place; it takes quite a bit longer when you're suffering from anxiety and/or actually struggle with the skill. As I suffer from anxiety it will take longer than five minutes and outside factors (like the other person also being nervous and showing it, or being overly critical) can make it last longer even. But that doesn't really matter, what does matter is that eventually the nervousness will subside, and if I repeat the interaction within the next couple of days I may still be a bit nervous but it won't last as long. For reference, on good days it subsides in less than 20 minutes after which I do experience what you described. On bad days it may last an hour or more which leads to being exhausted and making more careless, basic mistakes than usually. I expect the OP to be somewhere between the two of us. But if I manage to do these things, she'll surely manage too. :) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Rem Groupie United Kingdom Joined 3692 days ago 66 posts - 96 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Mandarin, Czech, French | Message 13 of 17 15 June 2015 at 8:55pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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Thanks again everyone for all the responses. I tried not to make this post too long
but there is a lot of good information and advice from everyone here, so a bit of length was unavoidable I think.
This is one of the things that I worry about. I know that mistakes are inevitable (and a necessary evil if I want to improve) but at the same time I don’t want to accidentally say something wrong and end up offending someone unintentionally. The rational side of me knows that most people would probably be understanding about it and I’m just over thinking things I’m sure, but I can’t help it.
This is pretty much what I’ve decided to do. I don’t like making phone calls anyway, so just having Skype lessons is already out of my comfort zone...add in a foreign language that I barely know on top of that and it seems like a recipe for disaster. Fortunately I’ve found a tutor who is willing to talk for part of the lesson in English. Knowing that English is an option seems to be helping me at least a little. I’m still nervous but I am at least speaking during the lessons. Hopefully, as my language skills improve, I’ll start feeling more comfortable and I’ll be able to transition to speaking more of my target language during lessons.
This isn’t something that I have much chance to do right now. I can’t afford to travel and I have no practical use for the languages that I’m learning. I only really get a chance to speak in the (relatively safe) environment of my Uni classes, and with it being summer I don’t even have those classes to focus me (which is part of the reason that I decided to try italki again). I do have the opportunity to study abroad later on in my course so maybe that will help, but it’s quite a way off and I’d like to at least start to tackle this before then so that I can make the most of my time when I’m there.
I’ve never really tried shadowing. Maybe I should? I tend to focus on the pronunciation of individual words/phrases as opposed to whole sentences which, now that I think about it, is good for improving sounds but probably isn’t helping with the overall fluency of my speech.
Unfortunately I know very few people outside of my course (and this forum obviously) who are learning the same languages as me and, as it’s summer and there are no classes, they’ve gone home. This leaves me with the option of language exchanges, which I don’t feel ready for yet. I’d rather stick to tutors as at least I can tell myself that I’m paying them to put up with me. ;)
This is what I’m hoping for. I’ve tried italki lessons in the past...had one then stopped...had one then stopped...ect. so I know already that the real challenge for me is going to be to keep going. So far this time I’ve managed to make it through a couple of italki lessons and, although it’s still an effort for me to press ‘answer’ when the call comes in and I have to force myself to speak during the lesson, I am doing it and making it though the entire hour. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Rem Groupie United Kingdom Joined 3692 days ago 66 posts - 96 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Mandarin, Czech, French | Message 14 of 17 15 June 2015 at 9:03pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
You’re right that I probably fall somewhere in the middle here. I think my problem is a mixture of perfectionism (wanting to get everything right even when I know it’s just not possible to do so) and anxiety. Right now I definitely need more than 5 minutes to get comfortable in a conversation, and sometimes it feels exhausting forcing myself to keep going, but I can at least see myself improving to a point where I could be more comfortable in the future. So I guess the main thing that I should take away from all of this is that my confidence does seem to be improving and I am getting better at speaking (even if sometimes it doesn’t feel that way). I’ve decided that one thing I’m going to start doing after every lesson is to write down three things that I think went well. Maybe this will help me to see more of the good points of my lessons, instead of focusing on the negatives all the time. 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5171 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 15 of 17 15 June 2015 at 10:05pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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One thing nobody seems to have mentioned is punishment! If you have a tutor who is willing to speak with you for 1 hour in your target language with zero English, pay them in advance for those lessons, and if you don't show up, they get to keep the money for that hour. And don't just pay them for one lesson pay them for a LOT of lessons! Same reasoning as a gym membership, they are going to take the money so you might as well go. If the tutor is charging you £20 per hour, then give them £200 and tell them if you don't show up for the 1 hour lesson, they keep the money.
This is known as loss aversion. In economics and decision theory, loss aversion refers to people's tendency to strongly prefer avoiding losses to acquiring gains. Some studies suggest losses are twice as powerful, psychologically, as gains. So while you might not be motivated to gain an hour of language practice, you'd be highly motivated to avoid the loss of £20 and not get anything in exchange. If the carrot doesn't work, maybe the whip will. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| basica Senior Member Australia Joined 3471 days ago 157 posts - 269 votes Studies: Serbian | Message 16 of 17 16 June 2015 at 12:37am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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As someone who also has anxiety issues, I strongly recommend having some sort of action
plan set up just in case it's more of an anxiety issue for you than anything else. Anxiety is sorta insidious in that way because it masks the true problem very well. By an action plan I mean something along the lines of what others have said, organizing to have regular meet ups and setting it up in a way that you'd hate to cancel more than you'd hate to put up with going. In any case, best of luck! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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