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Conversational fluency in two weeks? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| James29 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5380 days ago 1265 posts - 2113 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 9 of 22 17 July 2012 at 2:24am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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You have a pretty good base in the language based on what you have already done so I would not try to "learn" anymore before your trip. Rather, do something to get comfortable. I used to always "freeze" whenever it came to actually using the language.
I suggest you go to sharedtalk.com and go to the text or voice chat section. As a native English speaker you will almost immediately find someone to speak with. Then just talk in Spanish with the person (and, of course, English too). That should get you more comfortable using the language. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5537 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 10 of 22 17 July 2012 at 2:59am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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You might be interested in this book, if you can find it soon enough:
How to Improve Your Foreign Language Immediately This was written by Boris Shekhtman, who used to give crash courses at FSI on how to get the most out of limited language skills, with a focus on polite chit-chat. A rough outline of his major ideas: 1) Write and memorize "islands" of text that cover your most important conversation topics: You, your family, your profession, or whatever. The idea is that you should be able to rattle these off without too much thought, and follow them up with, "And what about you / what do you think?" 2) Practice changing the subject gracefully. If you're lost, learn how to get back to an island. 3) Use filler phrases to stall for time. ("That's a very good question. Let me think.") 4) In a more serious conversation, where you have to communicate an idea, speak using very simple vocabulary and grammar. It's a thin book, but it's well worth $15. It's not going to teach you anything new, or actually activate your conversation skills, but it will help you use what you have effectively. 9 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| liddytime Pentaglot Senior Member United States mainlymagyar.wordpre Joined 6234 days ago 693 posts - 1328 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Galician Studies: Hungarian, Vietnamese, Modern Hebrew, Norwegian, Persian, Arabic (Written) | Message 11 of 22 17 July 2012 at 4:06am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Holy heaters! You are learning Spanish, not Sami!
You live in the US - I have to believe that there are plenty of Spanish speakers in your town. You need to get out of your comfort zone and speak with "real, live, people" if you have any hope to have a reasonable command of spoken Spanish. Network with as many people as you can and explain your situation. I'm sure plenty of people will be able to help you find Spanish speakers to speak with. I have never been happy with my "Skype" conversations. They just seem too artificial to me. Perhaps I am old school but, I prefer speaking face to face with real people. You have plenty of didactic material under your belt. You should be able to do just fine with that. If people are speaking too fast- kindly ask them to slow down because you are just learning. If you can't find a word - paraphrase the best that you can. This usually works. Spanish is great because you can often "cognate" your way to comprehension. I have no idea what the word for "computer plug" is is Spanish, but I'll bet that if I said "plug de la computadora" (with gesturing) I could manage to get my point across. Try not to let yourself speak English these 2 weeks. When you think of something in your head - try to think of how you would say it in Spanish. Make these 2 weeks your own Spanish immersion - Spanish TV - Telenovelas use google translate to translate web pages into Spanish. Everything Spanish! You will do fine. Relax and speak Spanish. You'll make a ton of mistakes...but that's OK too. Have a sense of humor about it and nobody will mind, Really! 10 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5212 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 12 of 22 17 July 2012 at 11:01am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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I agree with everyone else - practice conversing as much as you can to "activate" your
knowledge, and yes, it'll be difficult and frustrating at first. However, finding opportunities to practise is often much easier said than done as language exchange partners are often extremely unreliable and so you'd probably be lucky to arrange even one or two meetings in two weeks, so paying a tutor in real life or over Skype might be a more realistic option given your time-frame. On the other hand, from what I've seen it's far easier to find practice opportunities for Spanish than any other language, so you might have some luck. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| nj24 Diglot Groupie United States Joined 4668 days ago 56 posts - 106 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Italian, French | Message 13 of 22 17 July 2012 at 11:28pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Thank you all for your suggestions and ideas! They have all been very helpful and encouraging.
In reply to @nuriayasmin70,
I have practiced using both usted and tu. The people I would be talking to in Spanish at the seminar would be college students around my own age so I believe I would address them with tu? I have always understood that you address someone with tu that you would be on a first name basis with (unless they were much older than you or in a position of authority, like a professor). Please let me know if this is incorrect. In reply to @Kyle_Corrie,
I definitely agree that I should not limit myself to what others say is possible. I was just hoping that people might have some tactics for jumpstarting one's foreign language speaking skills (and a lot of you had some fantastic suggestions, so thanks!). And if everyone had told me no, I would definitely not have quit Spanish. But I probably wouldn't have changed the way I was learning Spanish. In reply to @Serpent,
Thanks! This is a great idea. I've started reading several economics blogs from Latin American countries, but I will see if I can find podcasts too. In reply to @prz_,
Thanks for the link. I'll take a look at it. In reply to @iguanamon,
Thanks for the welcome, @iguanamon! The link to Nualengua is very helpful. I will definitely try out the free lesson. And I absolutely agree with you that if one wants to speak, he or she needs to do just that. I have to admit that speaking wasn't necessarily my top priority when I started learning Spanish. Though when I first started out, I did have a friend that I would chat with now and then in Spanish. But even that was mostly through text and not me speaking out loud. I feel like I needed to build my confidence in the language first. Now I feel a bit more confident with my knowledge of the language and feel ready to start speaking. I'm hoping that because I am so anxious to talk fairly well over the next two weeks, I will have the motivation to just start speaking and not worry about making mistakes or not saying everything perfectly. In reply to @James29,
Thank you for the website recommendation. I will look into sharedtalk. Yes, I am definitely not going to try to cram any more grammar rules into my head. But I do think I will continue with the FSI lessons since I think the sentence variation drills are really helpful for speaking and will give me sentence patterns that I can use in conversation. I am going to try to focus solely on speaking and listening to native material in the next two weeks. In reply to @emk,
This book is seriously fantastic. Thank you so much for the recommendation. I did a quick google search online and was able to find a pdf copy. I love the tactic of writing and memorizing islands of text. I feel like I do the same thing in English. Not necessarily memorizing text (of course), but I'll usually think of different topics to talk about if I'm going to telephone someone, etc. I can see how this would be incredibly useful in Spanish and really boost my confidence. I like his recommendation of different topics for islands, and I can see how I can add to that with my own islands (one for how I became interested in economics, etc.) I just have to think about what topics might come up in conversation. Of course, I can't think of everything, but his suggestions for leading back to your island in a conversation or using filler sentences are really very helpful. I'm planning to type up several "islands" and memorize them, but I'd like to make sure my grammar is correct. I recently found Lang-8. Has anyone used this before and is the feedback good? In reply to @Liddytime,
I feel the exact same way. I would feel much more comfortable talking to someone (preferably someone I already knew well) in person. I'm going to try to get some speaking in over the internet, but I know there are Spanish speakers at my church and I *am* going to talk with them in Spanish this Sunday and see if I can put some of the techniques that @emk mentioned into practice.
Thanks! This is so encouraging. I like the idea of creating a pseudo-immersion environment and have already done that with a lot of websites. I've been using Facebook in Spanish since I started learning Spanish last summer, but I'm going to be even more serious about this with other websites that I visit. I hadn't thought of translating pages into Spanish with google translate. I will do that too. In reply to @garyb,
Thanks for the advice! I am going to try to find a tutor and see how that turns out. Sorry this post ended up so long. But thanks again everyone for taking the time to reply! I really appreciate it and am glad I got up enough courage to post on the forum. I am really amazed by how helpful everyone is in their replies. Thanks again. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| liddytime Pentaglot Senior Member United States mainlymagyar.wordpre Joined 6234 days ago 693 posts - 1328 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Galician Studies: Hungarian, Vietnamese, Modern Hebrew, Norwegian, Persian, Arabic (Written) | Message 14 of 22 18 July 2012 at 5:24am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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nj24: you are on the right track. You'll do fine. Re-post after the trip and let us know how it all went!
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| Sandman Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5413 days ago 168 posts - 389 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Japanese | Message 15 of 22 18 July 2012 at 10:34am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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The methods above sound very good. Something else to consider doing (if you are really "cramming" for these 2 weeks) is to list out the various things you might find yourself needing to talk about and spend a half hour each day with straight speaking about them to yourself (you might not have time to find decent speaking partners, and chances are they'll want you to listen to their English just as much ... you should still try to do it but it's something to keep in mind). Each day you should get much better than the previous day, and it somewhat alleviates the need for "memorizing" things as you'll quickly realize which phrases are your fallback phrases and which of those words/grammar structures you thought you knew but it turns out you really don't. When practicing for job interviews and the like I've found pure memorizing to be a bit inferior to just practicing what you want to talk about on the fly over and over again. Each time ends up being a little different, but you'll fall into usual patterns and are less likely to get rattled if you happen to forget a specific word or phrase you were supposed to have had memorized (as well as sounding FAR less rehearsed ... my gf is Japanese and insisted on memorizing every single things she was going to say when she was doing job interviews and when we practiced it sounded like she was trying to read out of a phone book rather than speaking naturally). If you are going to memorize specific things keep them pretty short. Having a block of text you HOPE you have memorized can be added stress in itself.
I also hope your listening skills are pretty well polished, as if you can't understand what's being said it makes conversing almost impossible. Listening takes a long time though and it might not be something you could very effectively "cram" for in 2 weeks. You should look up some of the more event specific vocabulary you expect to encounter though and try to incorporate it a bit into your speaking activities, to get used to it, if nothing else, Edited by Sandman on 18 July 2012 at 10:49am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5537 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 16 of 22 18 July 2012 at 1:01pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
This is a good point. I often rehearse a conversation or a piece of writing over and over in my head, and sometimes—if it's difficult—write 100 to 200 words on lang-8 discussing the subject. This typically gives me huge boost in discussing that subject in the future. I do have "islands" that I repeat with minor variations, but I built them organically over many conversations in French. But I had the luxury of a couple months. Overall, I agree—if obsessively thinking about a subject works well enough, then there's no need for rote memorization. But when I'm stuck, I really do fall back fixed phrases and stall for time. So memorize or rehearse with variations—whichever gives you the most confidence with only two weeks of practice.
Lang-8 can provide you with really awesome corrections, but it's largely a matter of who your friends are. You make friends by correcting other people's diaries carefully, and explaining things like "This is grammatical, but it sounds kind of odd," which is a thousand times more helpful than just some red marks. And you want friends who are natural born-editors and a little addicted to lang-8. Until you find the right friends, you'll get some drive-by corrections, which can be hit or miss. Don't worry about getting your "islands" 100% perfect. They should be the best you can do, and show off your strong points. And getting them corrected on lang-8 is a good idea. But your goal isn't 100% correct, perfectly-native Spanish—if you somehow pull that off, you're going to get a very fast and idiomatic response with brutal levels of phonetic reduction. You can be solidly conversational just a bit above B1, but only if the natives speak to you the way they speak to a native 4-year-old. So a few mistakes or odd phrasings are perfectly OK, and will help most people adjust to your actual skill level. Edited by emk on 18 July 2012 at 1:03pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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