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How to develop conversational ability? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| asad100101 Diglot Senior Member Pakistan languagel.blogspot.c Joined 6456 days ago 118 posts - 137 votes  Speaks: Hindi*, English | Message 17 of 28 24 March 2012 at 11:36am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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@Arek....well-detailed reply. I really appreciate your help.
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 songlines Pro Member Canada flickr.com/photos/cp Joined 5210 days ago 729 posts - 1056 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French Personal Language Map | Message 18 of 28 24 March 2012 at 4:08pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Napoleon, that's a creative strategy indeed. I've tried it a bit, and offer a word of advice to anyone attempting the same, especially with news broadcasts and speeches: Keep in mind you're simulating something conference interpreters do after intensive and specialized training. And even they typically interpret from their L2 to their L1. So scale down your expectations of yourself, and don't be discouraged if you find yourself scrambling for vocab, the thread of the sentence, etc. One early training exercise that I understand interpreters do is to listen to material in their native language, and repeat it, half a beat behind, in the same language (that is, not interpreting; just repeating). Assuming you're using an extensive piece (that is, something like a formal speech; not short snippets of "tourist" level dialogues), you'll find it surprisingly difficult. Even doing that is quite a skill - and trying it will give you some sense of how much trickier it will be to do so from your L1 to your L2. But it definitely does force you to "think on your feet"! Edited by songlines on 24 March 2012 at 4:10pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| songlines Pro Member Canada flickr.com/photos/cp Joined 5210 days ago 729 posts - 1056 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French Personal Language Map | Message 19 of 28 24 March 2012 at 4:17pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Asad, there's also a recent thread on "Self-teaching speaking ability". Please copy and paste the URL,
removing any spaces inserted by the forum software: http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?T ID=31325&PN=1&TPN=2#362486 There are quite a number of useful tips there. - And I'll be ordering the book that Splog recommends! 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| fiziwig Senior Member United States Joined 4866 days ago 297 posts - 618 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 20 of 28 24 March 2012 at 5:03pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
What works for me is to put the audio on my mp3 player and keep one finger on the pause button. I play a single sentence in English (my L1) then hit pause and repeat the sentence in Spanish (my TL). I can take as much time as I like because the audio is paused. I think it's more important to experience the success of getting it done than to feel constant frustration and failure from not being able to keep up. As time goes on you find you have to pause for shorter and shorter amounts of time. Another way might be to record pauses between each sentence in the mp3 track (using something like audacity), although I haven't tried that way. I suppose you could even record your own native language sentences to translate into your TL, and include the pauses as you record them. You do want to keep the pauses short so you have a limited time to get the sentence spoken, otherwise there's no challenge. It's about finding the balance between pushing yourself enough to make progress but not so hard as to cause nothing but frustration. 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Gallo1801 Diglot Senior Member Spain Joined 4903 days ago 164 posts - 248 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Arabic (Written), Croatian, German, French | Message 21 of 28 26 March 2012 at 12:03am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Submit yourself to the fire and just do it! You may not speak English, but you
know English after 9 long years of dealing with it. Meet with someone (there's got to be a great number of English speakers in Paki) or a group and commit to speaking English. Get a Skype partner and trade Urdu/English. Watch tv in English and listen for phrases, write them down, and then look up what they mean. If you don't know what it means "jump the gun" sounds very odd until you get the back story. I consider myself to be fluent in Spanish, and understand and can produce pretty much anything I want. I still have moments when I struggle, or lack a simple word. You find out ways to get around it. Get a tiny notebook to write words you don't know, and write them down as soon as you realize you dont know them. I do this and I put down both Spanish and English words, then look them up later. It really helps - I remember them quite well. For example, faucet I never could remember, and I could never remember what la fuga was, but now I know and won't forget that they are grifo and escape. It's oddly effective! I like it better than outright studying vocab lists, and it helps in conversation. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 22 of 28 26 March 2012 at 2:43am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Ultimately you can only do things by doing them - which means that you need to have conversations to learn to survive them. But selftalk is a fair preparation for it, and if you don't like doing it in public then silent thinking is also something that points in the right direction. However I know frem several concrete cases that it is possible to walk around thinking continuously in a language and when you then try so speak things fall apart. It is like a three-step process: accept being disturbed by the language (thinking), accept being disturbed by your own body (speaking) and finally learn to survive being disturbed by the presence of people .. and then you are ready for conversations. At least that's how I see the world.
Without too much order I would like to use a few concrete techniques. Napoleon suggested trying to translate news bulletins and debates from the news channels. He didn't specificy whether these broadcasts should be in the learner's native language, and actually I first remember using this technique from an evening in Barcelona where I was lying on a hotelbed listening to Spanish news while translating them into Catalan in my mind, It is important to remember that you don't do this to demonstrate that you can produce correct speech - you do it to learn to keep pace with a fast train thundering ahead with you running behind it, it is the extensive speech training par excellence. I actually doubt that I could do it even today if I had to speak aloud, but my thoughts are faster than my speech. Transferring this exercise to speech takes training. Another technique I have used is to 'double' all my conversations in a language in the local language - again without caring too much about correctness. I used first this technique during my second visit to Island. During the first one long ago I just 'read' a number of texts, or rather I guessed their meanings based on shared vocabulary and context. The second time around I had studied enough to have simple 'tourist' conversations - for instance I remember that I asked for an hour's use of a PC at the tourist information in Icelandic (which clearly surprised the lady in charge). But each time I had conversations in Danish or English I translated answers and questions into broken Icelandic, and it was surprisingly easy. Unfortunately I haven't spoken a word of Icelandic since then, so it would probably take me a couple of days do get back into the habit. There is a clear difference between being able to write in a language and speaking it in a fluent manner, and thinking silently is somewhere in the middle of these two.. Edited by Iversen on 27 March 2012 at 12:35pm 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| atama warui Triglot Senior Member Japan Joined 4702 days ago 594 posts - 985 votes Speaks: German*, English, Japanese | Message 23 of 28 26 March 2012 at 3:32am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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If you're still following this thread without having had a conversation in English, you've been wasting time.
Could have had 5 convos already, enabling you to break free from your mental block, artificially reinforced by discussing it here. 9 years! I chatted on Twitter and Facebook when I was done with Pimsleur, in really pathetic Japanese, using Rômaji, because I couldn't even read the Hiragana. I had not even 1 year of studies under my belt when I engaged in conversations on Skype. I was so hyper-nervous, I stumbled over simple words, blacked out when I tried to say things in sentences longer than 3 words. But I survived! And this was Japanese, a language totally alien. I've exposed myself in an embarrassing way, with lacking skills, to a world of people. Before everyone's eyes, I made a fool of myself. Guess what, I made a lot of friends that way. And even more than that, I met the woman I intend to be with until the end of my life. Do it already. Click the damn X on the upper right corner of your browser window! 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| asad100101 Diglot Senior Member Pakistan languagel.blogspot.c Joined 6456 days ago 118 posts - 137 votes Speaks: Hindi*, English | Message 24 of 28 27 March 2012 at 11:43am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Thanks a lot for all your useful comments and tips. They are really helpful. Also, taking a small action is key to success than taking a giant leap. I'll incorporate all of these positive steps one at a time and then wait and see what happens next.
I do talk in English with my 6 year old nephew( born and raised in Dallas) over skype but that 5-10 min convo happens once/twice per month depending on the mood swings of my nephew. He is pretty fluent. However, our conversations are always restricted to day to day stuff. But one thing I really like about talking with kids is, they speak slowly and clearly and not judgmental. If he does not understand a word or a sentence, he does not go like this " you speak like shit, I'm going to hang up." instead he speaks the sentence such as "what you are saying". etc 1 person has voted this message useful |
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