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How to develop conversational ability? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| napoleon Tetraglot Senior Member India Joined 5020 days ago 543 posts - 874 votes  Speaks: Bengali*, English, Hindi, Urdu Studies: French, Arabic (Written) | Message 9 of 28 23 March 2012 at 2:39pm | IP Logged | ||
IMHO speaking aloud should be a better choice. If you really want to challenge yourself try to translate the fast-paced news bulletins and the debates that are held on the news channels. Edited by napoleon on 23 March 2012 at 3:13pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| napoleon Tetraglot Senior Member India Joined 5020 days ago 543 posts - 874 votes Speaks: Bengali*, English, Hindi, Urdu Studies: French, Arabic (Written) | Message 10 of 28 23 March 2012 at 3:03pm | IP Logged | ||
If you are conscious about your accent, you might want to do some accent reduction courses. Cambridge University Press has published an excellent series called 'English Pronunciation in Use.' Frankly speaking, they are the only affordable books of their type available in the subcontinent. The series comprises of three books and their accompanying audio CDs. It focusses on British Received Pronunciation. You may also be interested in the 'English Pronunciation Dictionary' by Daniel Jones. It lists both the general-american and the british(rp) pronunciation in IPA(International Phonetic Alphabet) for each entry. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5770 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 11 of 28 23 March 2012 at 3:31pm | IP Logged | ||
And that's your solution. Create situations where you don't feel pressured. What helps me is talking to people who do not speak German (or English) because then their language is the only way we can communicate, and I forget about my inhibitions. I personally find it also easier to talk to children or the elderly: as long as I'm entertaining to them, I don't feel like I'm waisting their time like I do with working adults. Otherwise, make friends that speak your target language, and don't force yourself to speak it from the start. You'll be able to contribute to their conversations once you feel more at ease around them and get a general feeling for the pace and mood of their conversations. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6443 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 12 of 28 23 March 2012 at 3:39pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'd recommend Arekkusu's self-talk method: it is useful at your level. Try to express yourself spontaneously in English.
Your accent is unlikely to be an impediment, unless it's very strong. There are plenty of accent courses if you do want to use them, though. "Get rid of your accent" is another OK one for RP. RP tends to be clearly enunciated; other British accents don't. Similarly, you can find clearly-enunciated American speech if you want to. Going for whichever you want to - but American would probably be easier as you listen to it more. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5266 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 13 of 28 23 March 2012 at 4:09pm | IP Logged | ||
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I must differ in opinion in saying that I think, in order to improve your conversational ability, you need to place yourself under more pressure not less. You've been at this for several years now. Try to consciously put yourself in situations where you will be forced to speak- whether that be in person or on-line.
I know that you will feel more "comfortable" doing exercises, but doing more of the same expecting a different result is not going to help. If you really want to get better at conversation you need to force yourself outside your comfort zone soon and converse. You need to be uncomfortable first in order to get more comfortable later. It will be painful at first, but the more you do it the better you will get. It worked for me in Portuguese. I know that is not what you may want to hear, but I sincerely believe it will be what will help you to improve. Good luck. Edited by iguanamon on 23 March 2012 at 4:14pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| asad100101 Diglot Senior Member Pakistan languagel.blogspot.c Joined 6459 days ago 118 posts - 137 votes Speaks: Hindi*, English | Message 14 of 28 23 March 2012 at 4:12pm | IP Logged | ||
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@ Volte
I bought Anne Cook's Accent reduction book a couple of years ago because I was inclined towards American English. I still have it. I went through the excercises I do not know if it had helped me much. Self-study has a downside to it, I mean, you are not fully sure if you are doing the drills listed in the book to a T. I will give Arekkusu's self-talk method a read in a bit. Thanks for sharing the link. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6601 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 15 of 28 23 March 2012 at 4:44pm | IP Logged | ||
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If possible, speak English via skype! Might be easier to talk to non-natives first.
Though I didn't do that when I was in a similar situation with Finnish. I was fluent in writing but speaking was more difficult. I spoke to myself, did shadowing, posted a recording of my pronunciation here and in general asked people for feedback (it was positive so it gave me more confidence<3)... When travelling I used only Finnish, another confidence booster. Now it's actually my desirable situation in languages: in all but German and Polish I aim for written fluency first. Note that for me this means being able to write without consulting the grammar books. (dictionaries and google are fine) If you write better than you speak because you need time to make sure your grammar is correct, work on your grammar. For me, once I've reached this level, going for spoken fluency from there is quite easy. I'm not going to Italy or Portugal anytime soon so this can wait. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5385 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 16 of 28 23 March 2012 at 5:16pm | IP Logged | ||
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The first thing that strikes me is that you don’t seem to have a clear picture of what part of your production makes people ask you to repeat yourself and this is important. Let look at various scenarios.
If you severely lack fluency, then it’s possible that shadowing might help. I’m not a fan of shadowing as a learning technique, but it can be a valuable tool for a person who has never felt fluency or uttered anything seamlessly. By copying and learning by heart a few sentences, you can feel what fluency is like and build on that to improve further. You don’t have to do it a lot, just enough to get that feeling. Find something fun like a fast-paced song you enjoy and that was always a challenge, or a movie scene you like. Make sure you can say the sentences naturally and without hesitation from beginning to end. I also recommend you read English out loud from now on. If you stutter or hesitate mid-sentence, start over. It’ll make reading slower, but it’s a good habit that will help you build some automatic reflexes when stringing words and sounds together. My gut feeling is that, in the long run, this is a lot more efficient than any kind of shadowing, but you’ll have to make sure you look up the pronunciation of any word you aren’t sure about -- in contrast, shadowing gives you the right pronunciation, but it doesn't force you to make decisions when you produce language, and that process is very important. Don’t worry too much about mistakes – the goal for now is fluency, not perfection. If however you can sometimes make nice sentences and you feel the shadowing thing is useless, then self-talk is indeed a great idea. You are right though, unlike real live encounters, it’s stress-free, but you can work on improving in a stress-free environment before you tackle the real thing. Besides, if you do a good job of planning ahead your interactions, they won’t be so stressful anyway. Still, I get your point and I too like to push myself into stressful, do-or-die speaking opportunities… but frankly, if you craved that kind of thing, you’d have been doing lots of it for a long time already and you wouldn’t be writing to us, would you? If your problem is pronunciation per se, then it’s a more complicated problem to solve. You have likely created very strong habits over those 9 years and changing them will require a lot of hard work, but you can definitely work on being easier to understand. However, it’s important that you get a clear picture of what you need to work on, or you won’t be able to fix your issues. For that, I recommend a language partner or a tutor, a native speaker you can practice on and who will be able to tell you when you’re understood and when you aren’t. Speaking with a native speaker might also give you a bit of that stress edge you were looking for. Focus on oral production only with that person and find out what part of your current speech is hard to understand: is it the rhythm, the pronunciation of certain sounds, the intonation? Take precise notes, record your meetings and analyze where you were asked to repeat yourself. Pinpoint where the issues are. If money is a problem, at least try to meet someone occasionally and identify the issues! Lastly, if you don’t have a clear understanding of your own pronunciation in your native language, it might be a good idea to start paying attention to that. When you understand what you’re doing when making those sounds, you might also realize how the English sounds differ, making it easier for you control these differences. Edited by Arekkusu on 23 March 2012 at 5:18pm 10 persons have voted this message useful |
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