Your mood is vital!
When you begin to speak your new language, how you feel is more important than what you know.
If you know a few words, and you deliver them in a relaxed, enjoyable manner, you have already succeeded.
This series of posts will show you how to turn your practice conversations into powerful stepping stones toward fluency.
The key moods to maintain are competence, comfort and joy.
I will help you develop these in a variety of ways.
Section 1
Preparation: pronunciation
The first aspect of this process is developing decent pronunciation. You need to feel comfortable about the words you are saying. You need to feel competent about how you are saying them. This means you can read your new language and pronounce the great majority of words comfortably.
You don’t need to be perfect. You need to know what you are doing and feel reasonably comfortable about it.
Practicing pronunciation in short frequent sessions (2-3 minutes at a time) is the best way to improve. Repeat what you hear as best as you can (movie, podcast, etc.) and read out loud (anything you fancy). These are two proactive ways of developing good pronunciation. I have written several other posts about pronunciation. They will help you learn how to sound good in more detail.
Part 2
Preparation: organization
When you begin speaking, you want to feel that you are doing so competently. The best way to do this is to organize yourself.
Be specific. Be humble. Evaluate, don’t judge.
- Be specific. Decide what you specifically want to communicate. No one can “speak Spanish” or “speak German”. But you can learn to order a meal in German or introduce yourself in French.
- Pick out the 10 or 15 topics which are most useful to you. Study how to present them, write them out; practice delivering them. When these become easy, expand them or create new ones. They are specific to you and your communication needs. What are the things you feel comfortable about discussing in your own language?
- Decide to use a major point of grammar. Study it or review it. Make sure you are competent in using it. For example, study how to use the past or the future in your new language; then practice making many talks using it.
- Being humble means that you only take on what you can handle reasonably well. It also means you accept you will occasionally make mistakes and get stumped.
- Mistakes in language learning are indicators of what you want to learn next.
- Evaluate. Don’t judge. This is key. Look at your performance objectively. Do the best you can; perhaps record yourself. Then decide on the best way to improve your performance next time. “What was missing?” “What improvement will help you the most?”
Preparing yourself ahead of time will ensure that you have a good experience when you practice speaking. (I have written several posts about how to do this better specifically.)
We have covered the two important ways to prepare yourself for speaking practice. In the next post we will talk about what you actually do when you enter the practice stage and begin to speak.