How to learn to speak a different language
If you want to learn how to speak a different language, you need active language learning strategies. Let’s talk about what that even means, what strategies you should be looking for, and resource recommendations to help you get those language strategies.
First of all, let’s define some terms so that we’re all on the same page. With active language learning strategies, you are intentionally focused on learning the language and building your language skills as opposed to passive strategies where you may be more focused on something else.
You may be more focused on watching a movie or listening to a song, or even cleaning your kitchen and you’re only kind of like half paying attention. There’s nothing wrong with that. But it’s not an active strategy.
Don’t overthink this. The basic idea is to make sure that you are practicing the language in the way that you want to eventually use it. My best example of this is unless you specifically want to translate vocabulary words and you want to become a translator, you don’t have to worry about translating between your target language and your native language. That’s not an effective use of your time.
In this video, we are focused on building your speaking skills.
Learn to speak a different language by shadowing
So let’s talk about different strategies that you can use to build up your ability to speak the language. One mistake that so many language learners make is that they throw themselves into conversations and then they get overwhelmed and they shut down and then they can’t do anything because their expectations are way too high compared to their ability and their confidence level.
Fortunately, we live in a day and age where you don’t just have to throw yourself into a conversation. There are baby steps that you can take to build up your skills and your confidence to have that eventual conversation.
So the first active language learning strategy at the very, very bottom, step one, is talking to yourself. When you talk to yourself, you don’t have to worry about other people understanding you or the pressures of a conversation. You can focus on creating the sounds, creating the words, piecing together the words to create simple sentences, taking as long as you want, and experimenting as long as you want in as many different ways as you want.
When you’re learning how to speak a new language, half of the problem is getting the words from your brain out of your mouth. You know this If you’ve tried to speak your target language and nothing comes out, you have to take so much time piecing together the words, getting them out of your mouth, and then trying to move your mouth and make the right sounds. And it’s a mess. So if you’re struggling, just start talking to yourself.
And if you need a little bit more engagement and more prompts, as it were, to give you inspiration and motivation to find something to say, there are a couple of resources that I would recommend for that.
The specific strategy that I would recommend is called shadowing. Shadowing is just a fancy term to describe when you are listening to an audio recording of like a word or a sentence, you repeat the word or the sentence, and then you can compare your spoken language and the native speaker or the native audio. This can be a helpful way to work on your pronunciation because you’re focused specifically on matching up the way that you’re speaking to the audio.
Three language learning resources come to mind that will be helpful for shadowing, and that’s Speechling, uTalk, or Yask.
But uTalk is strict shadowing, which means there is just an audio recording and you try and mimic the audio recording. Speechling and Yask do have connections to people. So Speechling is when you are connected with a language coach that listens to your audio recording and lets you know if there’s any room for opportunity, or if you’re doing really well, and then Yask gives you a prompt and you respond to the prompt or you say the sentence and then the Yask community can help you by correcting you or telling you that you did great.
Using chatbots to speak a different language
Now if that’s not engaging enough for you and you want the next step to conversations, the next active language learning strategy that I would recommend is chatbots. This just means speaking to a robot speaking to somebody, but it’s not a sentient being so you don’t have to worry about being judged or criticized or, you know, any funny looks or anything like that.
With chatbots, you get a conversation with the computer, with that app, with the robot, whatever it is, and you get to participate in a conversation in a much safer and accessible way. The amount of flexibility in the chatbot depends on the language learning resource.
You have the most conservative, for example, Mondly offers completely pre-determined conversations where you are told what to say and how to say it, and you say it and you are participating in this conversation. There is not going to be any flexibility as to what you’re saying. You are told exactly what to say and there you don’t have to think about it.
Now, if you do want to have a conversation, but you want a little bit more flexibility, Lingodeer also has an awesome chat bot that is fun to use. And fortunately for us, as time goes on, these chatbots, and this tech is getting more and more advanced, and now you can use something like Trancy to have a full-blown conversation with a chatbot in your target language where you can decide where the conversation goes, how it’s going, what you’re going to say, how you’re going to reply.
And you can do it from the safety of being alone in your room, talking to a robot that cannot judge you, criticize you, or say anything. Now there are a ton, a ton, a ton of options like these for practicing your conversational skills, practicing your active language skills without the stress of a human being, and all of the stress and anxiety that can come from that, which I get 1,000%. If that’s where you’re at right now, I would recommend the resources that I mentioned when it comes to shadowing or chatbots.
Having your first foreign language conversations with a tutor
But eventually, if you want to be conversational in the language, you do have to expand to actual human beings. The next active language learning strategy that I would consider to be on the path from absolutely zero to having full-fledged conversations is working with a language tutor.
I would recommend this because while you are talking to a person, you are talking to a person whose literal job is to allow you to struggle in a safe space, to have a conversation, and to struggle to understand what they’re saying. Honestly, it feels so much better to struggle in front of somebody that you’re paying to watch you struggle and mess up words and all that stuff.
There’s less of an obligation of guilt on my part when I can think to myself, I feel really bad that this is such an uncomfortable and boring conversation for my teacher. But at the same time, I don’t feel that bad because I am paying them for this discomfort. It can help to put up a barrier between like, “Wow, I feel guilty that I’m taking up this person’s time” when you’re not because you’re paying for their time.
So what are the options for language teachers? There are quite a few, actually, and these can be split up into two categories. The first category is just one-on-one lessons. It’s just you and your teacher and you are building a relationship and they are teaching you how to speak the language. I would consider this the next step because it’s still a pretty comfortable conservative approach to speaking the language. After all, you still don’t have the pressure of performing for anybody. You have somebody who has a literal job of letting people struggle and not pronounce correctly.
This can look like a lot of things. This can just be somebody that you’re working with and you’re practicing conversation. This could be somebody who is helping you with grammar. This can be somebody who is giving you some direction as to what to learn. For if you want to learn by talking about articles or if you want them to give you some prompts for speaking or if you don’t know at all.
Now, when you start working directly with people like this, I would recommend you have an idea of what you want because any teacher that you work with will have their own strategy, their approach to learning the language, which is excellent, but it may not be the most compatible with your needs.
So if you aren’t able to communicate with your teacher, if they are going in a direction that you don’t like and you aren’t satisfied with and they aren’t willing to change it, it can lead you to hit a wall because you’re not enjoying the process anymore and you may not be able to articulate what exactly you’re struggling with and what exactly you don’t like. So clarity on your intentions, your goals, and your strategies and how exactly you want to accomplish your goals is vital if you want to make sure that you are intentionally building your skills the way that you want to.
And the next little sidestep on that journey is group lessons. You can find group lessons where it’s you and two or three other people who are working with a teacher and it’s doing the same thing as a one-on-one, except it’s with other people. And so you have to share your time with other people.
There are pros and cons to this. Of course, the major con is that you have to share your time with all the other students. But the major pro is that the other students also have perspectives and make mistakes that you can learn from.
For one-on-one lessons for any language. I would recommend trying something like italki or Verbling and if you happen to be learning Spanish, I would suggest Baselang. But group lessons can be a lot of fun just because you can make connections with other language learners as with learning languages, having different perspectives and having different people attempt different things is always more beneficial for your language learning.
The two recommendations for group lessons that come to mind are Lingoda and Babbel Live. Both Babbel and Lingoda are pretty limited in their languages. But if you use my language app search link below in the description to search for your target language specifically, if Lingoda and Babbel don’t support it, then you might find some other options there.
How to use language exchanges to speak a new language
Finally, the last step of the journey of building your conversational skills and your speaking skills using active language learning strategies is conversations with friends with peers in language exchanges. If you’re not familiar, a language exchange is a conversation you have with somebody who speaks your target language and is learning your native language and you exchange the languages.
In these scenarios, hopefully, you find a language exchange partner who is sympathetic, patient, and supportive of the mistakes that you make. And if they’re not, you can always find another partner, honestly. But outside of full-fledged conversations with anybody that you want to talk to, language exchanges are the final step.
These are a lot more flexible because you show up to whatever hangout, you get coffee, you get lunch, whatever it is, and you spend maybe 30 minutes on each language or you switch between them continuously. It depends on the approach that you and your partner agree upon. And resources for finding language exchanges like this are honestly a dime a dozen.
The most popular ones are Tandem and HelloTalk. They’re very very similar. Both are free language apps. They can help you find language exchange partners that you connect with and that you can rely on and meet up with, you know, once a week, twice a week, whatever works for you.
How to choose a language learning strategy
But as you can see, you don’t have to throw yourself into a conversation to build your speaking skills. There are several steps back that you can take to build your confidence before putting yourself in a situation where you feel vulnerable.
So if you’re interested in any of these active language learning strategies, but are looking for different resource recommendations to fulfill them, I would recommend starting with my language app search. You can plug in your language, plug in speaking, you can even plug in the level you’re at and find different resources that can support those strategies.
Now that you know exactly what you’re looking for, it’s going to be much easier to find a resource that will truly benefit you and won’t waste your time.
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