Speaking after B2, not in country (Advice Center) Language Learning Forum

Speaking after B2, not in country
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culebrilla
Senior Member
United States
Joined 4002 days ago
246 posts - 436 votes

Speaks: Spanish

Message 25 of 40

21 December 2013 at 6:57pm | IP Logged

I never said that it was the only thing to do, but you really have to consume a lot of native media to reach C1, C2, or C2+, near-native levels.

It was only one of many things to do to improve his French. Also, it gives you cultural context and understanding. It's kind of weird if you don't even know the biggest singers in a language when you are talking with native speakers.

Edit: Plus, I don't know a lot of good foreign language English speakers that don't listen to a lot of music in English. I would argue that it's a lot more than 1% of the solution, as you say. As you listen to songs it is very similar to just listening to a podcast in the language. Right now I'm thinking of some lyrics in my head and a lot of words are internalized. And they are "high-yield" words.

Edited by culebrilla on 21 December 2013 at 7:02pm
1 person has voted this message useful

emk
Diglot
Moderator
United States
Joined 5537 days ago
2615 posts - 8806 votes

Speaks: English*, French^B2
Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian
Personal Language Map

Message 26 of 40

22 December 2013 at 3:30pm | IP Logged

Wow, thank you to everyone for all your great advice!

sctroyenne wrote:

If you watch with your wife, it may give you something else to talk
about. Documentaries will probably help as well - though pretty easy to understand, it
will give you topics of conversation and locutions that you would need as a more
advanced speaker.

This is the one absolutely unfair advantage I have being married to a native speaker—we can both crash on the couch after a long day and watch French TV series socially. And nobody complains that I'm stealing the TV. :-)

sctroyenne wrote:

To mix things up with your wife or other regular speaking partners, you can try
conversational board games in French (or in English but just adapted to French), such
as Taboo, 20 Questions, Cards Against Humanity (translated into French on their
website), etc.

This is a totally brilliant idea!

culebrilla wrote:

Do you THINK in French?

Yes, though not all the time. After 6 months of interior French monologue, I missed my English-language brain. :-)

I do all the obvious stuff: French music, about 2.5 million words of reading (both formal and informal), plenty of TV. And if I do this intensely enough, my spoken French absolutely does get better for a while. My French vocab is quite decent, too, thanks to the Super Challenge.

The problem is that if I ever try to do anything else with my life, I lapse back to my pretty adequate level—I can say anything I want, but I have to stop and think where the words used to be automatic.

I strongly suspect that if I could "turn the dial to 11" for, say, 6 months, I'd be able to lock in my best level.

beano wrote:

How good is your wife's English? Is she French or French-Canadian? If it's the former, then ask her how she
learned and try some of her strategies.

My wife's strategy was to move to the US and speak English all day long, both at work and at home, for 10 years. I'm quite certain that, given a similar opportunity, I could get pretty darn good at French. :-)

Similarly, after 18 months of studying Japanese, Khatzumoto was able to successfully pull off a job interview. But he was nervous about his language ability going in, he did several warmup interviews before the critical interview, and he had mapped out a whole interview strategy using one the company's products as a prop.

None of this is meant to knock his Japanese skills, which were obviously amazing for 18 months of study. But it shows he couldn't effortlessly take his speaking for granted in complex situations, either.

Even once he arrived in Japan, his Japanese was still fragile for a while:

Quote:

Example: back in late 2007, I spent an entire week here in Japan (Thanksgiving Break, essentially) hanging out only with Americans. We ate, walked, talked and slept together the whole time. No, not in that way.

…

So Thanksgiving Break ends and I get back to my Japanese life. At the train station on the platform, I call my friend Emstar, who happens to be Japanese and monolingual. He says: “dude…you sound weird”. And I know I do. A week of galavanting about with the American crew was enough to harm my Japanese severely. It didn’t matter that we were in Japan. It didn’t matter how much — what quantity of — Japanese I had been exposed to before. The frequency had gone down to 0. And that was enough to cause damage.

Now, my spoken French still isn't as good as Khatzumoto's Japanese was back in 2007. But I'm not impossibly far below that level, either—if a French software company needed a programmer really badly, and I was performing near my personal best in French, I might survive a job interview.

iguanamon wrote:

English is ubiquitous on the web, software, games. It would be a challenge to avoid the language.

Yes, English is a bit special this way. As an English-speaking programmer who's learning French, I can create an immersion bubble in my off hours—if I invest enough money and time. But if I were a French-speaking programmer, I would have spent over 3 hours per day reading English for the last 19 years, because much necessary documentation never gets translated.

mst wrote:

To be honest with you, I've got an A in the Cambridge C2 exam and still struggle with some things you mentioned. Still, according to my Cambridge report the only part of the exam in which I didn't excel was writing. I tell you this only to make you aware that the goals you have are very ambitious.

Thank you for all your excellent advice! And yes, I am aware that my long-term goals are pretty ambitious. :-) After almost two years of speaking French when it matters, I'd really like to have a bit less variability in my French.

culebrilla wrote:

Do you listen to all your music in French?Steve Kaufman wrote once that he doesn't find songs "efficient" or "useful" or something, but I'm a big proponent of them.

I've had surprisingly good luck with music. For example, singing along the MC Solaar's Un coup d'œil dans le métro in the car was one of the things that finally fixed my French R. There are some lovely, sustained Rs in the refrain!

Some of the things I've learned from all your excellent advice

- Being able to speak my L2 nearly as well as my L1 is a very ambitious long-term goal. Of course I knew this already, but it's nice to have some confirmation. :-)
- Writing actually helps quite a bit with speaking at the advanced levels.
- Lots of people love media immersion (which I already do).
- Lots of people who speak really well needed extended immersion, but not everybody.

This has all been exceptionally helpful.

Another insight that really interests me was just published on Khatzumoto's site:

Khatzumoto wrote:

How To Compete Against Yourself: Don’t Do Your Best, Do Better Than Your Personal Average

…Nevertheless, no one has the energy to do their best every day. That’s why it’s your best. It’s a superlative performance. If it weren’t your best, we wouldn’t call it your best, we’d call it your average.

Aha.

And that there is the key. If you want to raise your average (and who doesn’t), which is the “true” baseline measure of your skill, the performance level you can (statistically speaking) consistently put out, then all you want to do, all you need to do, is focus on meeting and beating your average. This is wonderful for at least five reasons:

- It’s “realistic” enough to not be a mental burden. By definition, your average is well within what you can do. It’s what you do do, typically at least. In that sense, there’s no sense that you’re attempting the impossible; what you’re attempting is, in fact, extremely possible. That fact alone bypasses any fear response.

This gets right to heart of my frustration:

1. My personal best was probably receiving medical care in a bilingual emergency room. Some people would walk into the room and speak to me in English; I'd respond in English. Other people would walk in and speak to me in French; I'd respond in French. It was all pretty easy and natural on my part. One completely bilingual doctor kept the conversation in French for a good 5 or 10 minutes before she finally switched to English. (This was a perfectly natural outcome, since her English was as good as mine, and I don't insist on speaking French when English is obviously the polite or sensible choice.) I've had other days like this, and I absolutely adore them.

2. My personal worsts are those days when everything falls apart, when I have to hunt for words I should know, when I need to actually conjugate verbs deliberately, and so on. These days are frustrating.

My problem is that I would love more days like (1), and I could certainly make use of those speech skills at home, but I can't produce days like (1) on demand. Well, OK, like Khatzumoto back in 2007, if I stay in my French bubble 24x7, my French gets better. But I can't devote that much time to French day-in and day-out, so I can't permanently live near the level of my personal best short of moving to a French-speaking country and getting a French-speaking job.

But instead of reaching for my top performance, and feeling frustrated when I fall well below it, I could focus more on beating my average performance. And I could even sacrifice a little bit of correctness for more fluency, especially on those days when my French is obviously broken.

Anyway, I plan to keep working away at this, and I'll let everybody know what happens!
2 persons have voted this message useful

montmorency
Diglot
Senior Member
United Kingdom
Joined 4833 days ago
2371 posts - 3676 votes

Speaks: English*, German
Studies: Danish, Welsh

Message 27 of 40

22 December 2013 at 7:11pm | IP Logged

beano wrote:

It didn't take me long to realise that the Irish people on the course who had been
exposed to the language in
the education system (it's compulsory for all pupils, right the way through) were way
more advanced than me,
even though they said they hated Irish lessons at school and never really learned how
to speak.

Also, in Ireland, bilingual signage and Irish terms are everywhere in society. Okay,
it's not as ubiquitous as
English pop music but the influence is always in the background.

Another subtle advantage that they would have had would be with the accent, intonation,
stress, etc (and the same is true of Welsh learners in Wales). The accent of those
people when speaking English must surely owe almost everything to the languages which
were once widely spoken in those countries, and pronunciation-wise, it's a much smaller
step to the target language, than for someone with a completely different background.
3 persons have voted this message useful

Avid Learner
Diglot
Senior Member
Canada
Joined 4667 days ago
100 posts - 156 votes

Speaks: French*, English
Studies: German

Message 28 of 40

23 December 2013 at 2:49am | IP Logged

emk, from my own personal experience, mst gave you the best suggestion I can think of: writing. I would encourage you to join forums with challenging and interesting discussions.

I basically never spoke English, ever - only in the past two or three years did I start speaking on the Internet, and that was for about 4 hours a year. But somehow, when I tried, I managed to speak pretty much the same way I write. Sure, I have an accent and I was really nervous at first, but I found myself to be much better than I expected to be. The words and the grammar came to mind just as easily as they did in writing.

I would think that writing might be less efficient than speaking, but considerering it's usually a lot easier to find a forum to discuss than a partner, it might just compensate. In any case, I am fully convinced that you will see tangible results in your speech in time.
3 persons have voted this message useful

jhaberstro
Senior Member
United States
Joined 4398 days ago
112 posts - 154 votes

Speaks: English*
Studies: French, Portuguese

Message 29 of 40

23 December 2013 at 3:50am | IP Logged

Avid Learner wrote:

emk, from my own personal experience, mst gave you the best suggestion I can think of:
writing. I would encourage you to join forums with challenging and interesting discussions.

I basically never spoke English, ever - only in the past two or three years did I start speaking on the Internet, and
that was for about 4 hours a year. But somehow, when I tried, I managed to speak pretty much the same way I
write. Sure, I have an accent and I was really nervous at first, but I found myself to be much better than I expected
to be. The words and the grammar came to mind just as easily as they did in writing.

I would think that writing might be less efficient than speaking, but considerering it's usually a lot easier to find a
forum to discuss than a partner, it might just compensate. In any case, I am fully convinced that you will see
tangible results in your speech in time.

Were you writing or typing? I've read that writing and typing affects different regions of the brain, so (although I'm
doubtful) it could be important to clarify.
1 person has voted this message useful

Serpent
Octoglot
Senior Member
Russian Federation
serpent-849.livejour
Joined 6602 days ago
9753 posts - 15779 votes

4 sounds
Speaks: Russian*, English, Finnish^C1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese
Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish

Message 30 of 40

23 December 2013 at 4:39am | IP Logged

emk wrote:

1. My personal best was probably receiving medical care in a bilingual emergency room. Some people would walk into the room and speak to me in English; I'd respond in English. Other people would walk in and speak to me in French; I'd respond in French. It was all pretty easy and natural on my part. One completely bilingual doctor kept the conversation in French for a good 5 or 10 minutes before she finally switched to English. (This was a perfectly natural outcome, since her English was as good as mine, and I don't insist on speaking French when English is obviously the polite or sensible choice.) I've had other days like this, and I absolutely adore them.

2. My personal worsts are those days when everything falls apart, when I have to hunt for words I should know, when I need to actually conjugate verbs deliberately, and so on. These days are frustrating.

My problem is that I would love more days like (1), and I could certainly make use of those speech skills at home, but I can't produce days like (1) on demand.

You know you're a language nerd when... :D
5 persons have voted this message useful

1e4e6
Octoglot
Senior Member
United Kingdom
Joined 4295 days ago
1013 posts - 1588 votes

Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish, Italian
Studies: German, Danish, Russian, Catalan

Message 31 of 40

23 December 2013 at 5:04am | IP Logged

I remember this year when I had to go with my parents to the hospital in Schiphol
Airport, and I helped to practise my Dutch by helping to have the sign-in sheet filled
in. But I was not brave enough to practise extensive speaking, because "blood pressure",
"electrocardiogram", "basal blood sugar level" were terms that I did not know. It did not
help that I had one of "those" weeks, i.e. not sleeping consecutively for two days.

Edited by 1e4e6 on 23 December 2013 at 5:05am
1 person has voted this message useful

maydayayday
Pentaglot
Senior Member
United Kingdom
Joined 5224 days ago
564 posts - 839 votes

Speaks: English*, German, Italian, Spanish^B2, French^B2
Studies: Arabic (Egyptian), Russian, Swedish, Turkish, Polish, Persian, Vietnamese
Studies: Urdu

Message 32 of 40

23 December 2013 at 8:47am | IP Logged

emk wrote:

I'm stuck....

What I want:

- Fast, fluid speech, even when discussing complicated topics. My immediate goal isn't to sound like a native, but I'd love to be able to participate in (say) a late night, dorm-room "bull session" with native speakers and to be able to hold the floor when it's my turn to espouse some harebrained theory about life.

I'm at roughly the same level in Spanish - I found that if I am back in the UK for any length of time and then return to Spain it takes about four days to get back to all Spanish all the time. Following your current practice you'll get there eventually.

What I'm doing to accelerate it is forever challenging myself: originally when I gave a presentation I would fully write out the words and just read the script after practicing over and over again.

I gradually took away the supports so that I began to do what I do in English - add in side remarks and additional comments making the presentation off the cuff. The question and answer sessions at the end will always be a challenge as there is no way to predict what they will ask. Occasionally there will be a term used that is unfamiliar to me but that happens in English too. The bad news is we are now doing a lot more work with Arab investors so I don't even get as much time in Spain as I used to.

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