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Best "course" to get started talking | ||
Tags: Speaking | Language Program | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4563 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes  Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 1 of 17 12 September 2012 at 5:32pm | IP Logged | ||
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Some people can study a language for years, and even learn how to read it well, without
learning to speak very well. For a learner like this, leaving out options like "move to the country" or "get a girlfriend/boyfriend/spouse who speaks the language", what is the best way to break into speaking? Courses such as Michel Thomas and Pimsleur (or Synergy or LSLC for Spanish) have been described as "quick ways to get started speaking." Would these, or other courses you know of, be to help "passive skill intermediate/active skill beginner" learner break into intermediate speech. steve 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6395 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 2 of 17 12 September 2012 at 6:47pm | IP Logged | ||
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Well, I don't travel as much as most Europeans do so I'm satisfied with listening, reading and writing till I get an opportunity to go to the country of that language. ie I don't mind learning the passive skills first, you assimilate a lot as you go. My preferred techniques for going from passive to active are shadowing and cloze deletion (though not the MASSIVE kind of it).
Are you basically asking for advice? Is it your situation with Spanish? It depends on what sort of problems you have. A key factor is your level of listening. Regardless of what you do for speaking, work on getting your listening on par with your reading if it's not there yet. There's a recent thread here. (the book the OP mentioned sounds good btw) How is your grammar? MT is known to be good for it. Pimsleur would be boring for you at your level. Bear in mind that MT teaches very little vocabulary. You may also want to spend some time doing grammar exercises. You may want to avoid translation exercises, though, as you need to think in Spanish, not translate your thoughts from English! If this is a problem, try self-talk or just practice thinking (e.g. while walking or during your commute, just describe what you see). You may also want to practice writing and aim to formulate your thoughts in Spanish and possibly post your writing on http://lang-8.com/ . Another default rec is to check out the book "how to improve your foreign language immediately" by Shekhtman. Also, you're in the US! Go ahead and practice! Do you have any Spanish-speaking friends? If not, find some, preferably via social networking rather than language exchange. Search the way a native speaker would - look for people with similar interests, join facebook groups etc. Use Skype and/or arrange to meet offline. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6707 days ago 4250 posts - 5710 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 3 of 17 12 September 2012 at 7:35pm | IP Logged | ||
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Yeah, both MT and Pimsleur will probably be boring if you already know a fair share of the language. Still, I('m not surprised to) see reviews from people who after so-and-so many years of study still couldn't speak the language and found MT/Pimsleur/whatever to be a real eye-opener.
Provided that you want active skills, any course that motivates you to think in the language (and actually use it) is better than none. But there are of course material that gives you more bang for the buck. And remember that nobody is stopping you from opening your mouth today. :) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5060 days ago 2237 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 4 of 17 12 September 2012 at 9:09pm | IP Logged | ||
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Steve, it's possible a course could help you. I agree with the other posters that with your level of Spanish, I think you probably wouldn't get much out of Pimsleur. Have you considered a private tutor? As opposed to a language exchange- which can be hit or miss, you'd be getting someone who is a trained instructor and will know how to help you speak. Given your level of Spanish it shouldn't take much to get your speaking up to par.
I used a private tutor for Portuguese along with conversation exchanges and my private tutor made a huge difference. For Spanish tutors, look into PLQEorg Non-profit Spanish Language School where the instructors are Guatemalan and charge about $10/hour via skype. There's Nulengua Online Spanish Tutor as well, also located in Guatemala. I know that suggesting people spend money in these difficult economic times isn't something a lot of folks can do right now. I think this could help you if you find the right tutor (first session is free). In any case, good luck! Edited by iguanamon on 12 September 2012 at 9:10pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4563 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 5 of 17 12 September 2012 at 9:17pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm probably an A2 or something speaking, and I had horrible day yesterday. I couldn't
think of the word, "llegar", got tangled in my circumlocution to try to get around it, and had my interlocutor give up and switch to English. That's no big deal, but when I tried to talk in Spanish again, I couldn't get *anything* out of my mouth. I was very annoyed with myself! I'm really, really tired of waiting for more speaking skills to "emerge" out of my steadily increasing passive skills from Assimil. steve 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6395 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 6 of 17 12 September 2012 at 9:43pm | IP Logged | ||
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Oh, you're doing Assimil? Have you even started the active wave yet?
In my experience, if you do enough listening, speaking skills WILL emerge :) I was surprised myself when I got some unexpected opportunities to speak Spanish and Italian and did just fine :-) Whereas when I was learning Finnish, I did mostly reading so I could write pretty fluently but dealing with the normal touristy situations was a challenge. Shadowing came to rescue! I also needed to improve my listening so I listened to the entire Da Vinci Code audiobook while reading the paper book, and it helped greatly. Now that I think of it, this might have helped my speaking more than i thought it did. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4563 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 7 of 17 12 September 2012 at 10:41pm | IP Logged | ||
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Sadly enough, I'm at passive 96 and active 47, and I'm still stumbling around. Shadowing
made me talk faster, and really helped my listening comprehension, but I still lack confidence and automaticity when speaking. Maybe I just have to remember that FSI says it takes 700 hours or so at minimum to reach B1 or B2 in an "easy", and I'm still at only 300 hours or so of beating my head against Assimil. In a couple of weeks I have to figure out what to do after Assimil, and I'm just not sure... I have a few audiobooks, and I would really enjoy heading off into native materials, but d**n it, I need to learn to talk better steve 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 4928 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 8 of 17 12 September 2012 at 10:59pm | IP Logged | ||
Hopefully you won't let a bad day or two dissuade you from further practice. Have you considered trying something like busuu.com or livemocha.com? In addition to the lessons, they both have chat and live video/audio features. If you're feeling like you're grasping too much for words, start with text chat. It's still real time, but you have a bit more time to formulate your responses. And I'm willing to bet it'll give you a bit of a confidence boost, too. R. == 1 person has voted this message useful |
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