Today, I want to share with you my seven tips for speaking well in a foreign language. The background to this is my experience with Turkish. I'm going to Turkey with my wife in a couple of weeks.
Uh, I've been working quite hard at Turkish over the last five months. I talked to a tutor now four times a week. First little period, I didn't do that so much, but now I've stepped it up.
And I would like to speak better because I continue to stumble. I continue not to get the right grammatical form out. And I'm saying, how can I improve?
So I thought about this whole issue of how we learn languages and how everyone wants to speak better. And a lot of traditional instruction focuses on grammar. So what is the most important thing that in my view, we should be paying attention to if we want to speak better?
So. First of all, point number one, don't focus on pronunciation. I've always been far more impressed by people who use the words of the language well, but have a pronounced accent, compared to those people who may have less of an accent, but don't understand well, or don't express themselves well.
So as long as you can be understood, and as long as the other person is comfortable, comfortable, then your pronunciation is good enough. If you get sort of a expression from the person you're talking to that they don't understand you, then you got to try to improve your pronunciation. And I would focus on intonation in pronunciation.
If you're at LingQ, for example, you can listen to each sentence, hear it spoken, and then try to repeat that sentence with a focus on intonation. The actual letters, the guttural R in French, or the, uh, you know, vowel sounds in different languages, they will come along if you have good intonation. So don't put that much importance on pronunciation.
It's not the most important thing by any means. I've done business with people in English who have accents, but who express themselves well. The pronunciation is not the number one thing when it comes to speaking better.
Point number two, focus on words. You won't be surprised that I put words and vocabulary well ahead of grammar because the language consists of words. When we started LingQ, I said the most important thing, the most important measure of our capability in a language is the number of words we know.
Obviously different words have different forms and at LingQ we count them as separate words, but we have to get into words. We have to surround ourselves with words. We have to like words.
We have to see how words connect with each other. Uh, you know, there are components of words in different languages, which reappear in other words, which have the same components. We have to get into the mood, the feeling that we want to increase our familiarity with words.
That doesn't necessarily mean always remembering them. It means exposing ourselves to them. That's how AI works.
There's such a massive exposure to various corpuses of language that the artificial intelligence can predict what's going to happen. And that's the same thing with us. If we have had enough words, we are able to predict what's going to happen in the language.
And eventually that enables us to speak better. Tip number three, don't do things that are stressful and that increase your level of stress when using the language. In other words, don't spend too much time on conjugation tables, doing drills.
declension tables, trying to memorize rules of grammar, because these will fail you when you go to speak. These are stressful. These force you to start to think of the rule when you're trying to speak.
Well, actually, what has to happen is that you have had enough exposure to the language that not only are you predicting how the language is supposed to be, you're actually producing the language correctly. And if you have a lot of words, you're actually You can pull out of your bag a word that works in this situation and that'll keep the conversation going. So don't spend a lot of time creating stress for yourself by trying to remember the definition of when to use this tense versus that tense.
It is not going to help you to speak correctly. It's only going to increase your stress. Your stress level.
Tip number four. Think of grammar, not so much as a set of rules that determine how you are supposed to use the language or speak. Rather, grammar is a description of the usage patterns in the language.
So it's the usage patterns that determine what the grammar is. And that usage pattern evolves over time. That's why we have, you know, the Romance languages of today, which were once, uh, Latin or various dialects of Latin couple of thousand years ago.
And, uh, the way, for example, in French or in in Spanish, the future and the conditional is formed is based on a combination of a verb for, let's say, to love with a verb to have and combine together that eventually became the future or the conditional. You can Google this and see it for yourself. Things are constantly evolving.
Right now, for example, many people say, I would have went, which I can't stand hearing, but it's probably going to become standard usage. Very few people use the word whom in English. I hear people say, I am waiting on something to happen.
To me, waiting on means working in a restaurant. I'm waiting for is what I grew up with. The word wait either had the meaning of you're expecting something to happen or you're serving someone.
And waiting on was. But nowadays that's changed. So usage changes in every language, usage changes, and we want to get enough of the language in us that we get used to the usage pattern that is most relevant to us.
So if you are living in Quebec or if you're living in Paris, usage patterns that will be relevant and useful will be different in those two locations and similar examples in other languages. So. Getting used to the language, getting used to the usage patterns is probably, in the long run, going to be more effective than trying to remember rules of grammar.
Hint number five. Fortunately, the usage patterns in any language are limited. So, whereas the number of words you can use and learn is not quite limitless, but a vast number.
But the Usage patterns of the language, not only just grammar rules, you know, declensions and so forth, but even which words are used with which words, these patterns are not limitless. When I was learning Russian, I did a book called, uh, 52 Patterns in the Russian Language. 52, that's a limited number of patterns that you have to get used to.
If you can actually use these patterns in the language, you will cover most situations. And it's always, I find when I'm speaking in a foreign language, if I can trot out a pattern that I'm very comfortable using, that I know that works, that really helps me, and I can sort of direct my conversation. Around these patterns.
So the good thing about learning usage patterns is that there's a limited number of them. And it's easier to get used to these usage patterns by a lot of exposure and paying attention to them when you read them and hear them, rather than trying to remember rules and trying to apply rules while speaking. Now, number six, always circle back.
Don't think you're going to learn anything on the first pass. I have often said that I use the mini stories at LingQ to get started in a language. And I might spend three months on the mini stories before branching out into more interesting content, which I can import into LingQ.
However, I regularly go back to my mini stories. It's almost like going to the gym. Right now in Turkish, I go back to my mini stories.
Which I've listened to 30, 40 times over the course of, you know, a long period of time. I'm always amazed at the number of patterns that I suddenly noticed that I hadn't noticed before. Or words that I kind of half knew but didn't really focus in on.
If I go back to those many stories, if I go back to, uh, things that I've done before. Maybe even re reading an old grammar book. Because I do read grammar books occasionally.
to sort of remind me of certain things in the language, particularly once I have enough experience with the language that these grammar explanations start to make sense to me. So remember, you're going to have to circle back many, many times. And don't be afraid to circle back.
Don't feel as if you're wasting your time. If you circle back and so finally point number seven is we want to speak better. However, in order to speak better, we have to make mistakes.
There is no avoiding it. You have to speak a lot in order to speak well. And speaking a lot means that you cannot wait until you are perfect before you start speaking.
That means you're going to start speaking a lot with a lot. of mistakes. Learn to enjoy your mistakes.
Learn to recognize that it's plowing through this period where you seem to make the same mistakes over and over again. In talking to my Turkish tutors, I've always, you know, have trouble with the same Turkish verbs. The same structures give me trouble.
But I know from personal experience that eventually I'll get better. And the only way to get better is to continue speaking and continue learning. And that kind of brings to my summary, which is, in order to speak well, which is a subjective definition, you speak well enough that the other person is comfortable, you are comfortable, or maybe not totally comfortable, but you know you have communicated, that to me is well enough.
And if you continue doing that, you will eventually get better. But the key is, you have to stay with it. So therefore, you have to enjoy.
You have to enjoy what you're doing. You have to enjoy the way you speak the language, even with the mistakes that you make, don't let that frustrate you because ultimately those people who give up and who abandon never learn to speak well. Those people who continue making mistakes and slowly improve, they eventually achieve their language goals.
So I hope that was helpful. Seven tips, at least from my own experience, of how we can speak better in a language. Thanks for listening.
