speaking a new language better
I went out to the local Mandarin Meetup tonight, which happens twice per month. Lately i’ve been a bit worried about my ability to speak, but i think this is more of a symptom of my perfectionism. I want to be fluent already, dammit! Anyway, in the past few times i’ve gone to mandarin meetup, i’ve tried to avoid worrying about speaking, and just enjoy the event. I’ve met new people, tried to teach the newbies a bit, and tried to learn some new words from the native speakers.
Tonight i actually felt more comfortable with speaking, however. I can’t purely mark this up to being less worried about it. In the past few weeks i’ve tried to refocus my listening efforts and also practice some speaking on my own. I haven’t actually spoken in conversation with anyone in a long time, except for brief moments at chinese meetup, but i really think my speaking has improved. Really, speaking in conversation isn’t necessarily that great…a lot of times, you just hear a lot of confusing words and struggle to get your intended meaning out. You end up saying a bunch of incorrect things too. Better to just concentrate purely on correct speech, on your own.
Firstly, you need a strong grasp of pronunciation. Lots of listening, and in the early stages you need someone to correct you. Later on, you may have the ability to critique your own pronunciation even if you can’t always say it 100% perfect in practice. This is fine, because it means you can practice on your own. What i’ve been doing is reading out the phrases from my flashcards. When a phrase comes up, i read it, understand it, and carefully turn it over in my head. Then i try to slowly say it completely correctly. Even for me, with months spent in china and in classes, it can be challenging to say a new phrase perfectly the first time. I listen carefully to what i said, and try to figure out the problems. Then i repeat it. Right now, with a phrase that may have some new words in it, it takes me between 3 and 6 repetitions until i’m happy with my production of it.
After purely focusing on pronunciation and getting it right, i then move on to making up a scenario in my head. I try to imagine a conversation in which i might use that particular phrase. I try to imagine myself making a response to someone using the phrase, and then i try to very minorly modify the phrase to convince myself that i’m using it authentically. I don’t want to change it too much, because i don’t want to be practicing an incorrect sentence. Just minor modifications to make the mental scenario seem more real.
I usually notice immediately that these imagined scenarios really help me convey the sentence fluently. My delivery of the phrase goes from “slow, but correct” up to “smooth and effortless”. This is the only way i can hope to verbalize these sentences at the speed of a newscaster. The phrase and all of its parts have to be part of my thoughts, they have to be what i want to say rather than just a mechanical motion of mouth and tongue. Imagining the scenario and imagining my mental state in such a situation, and then coming out with this perfect response…it’s all a sort of act that i put on, but it works. The phrase eventually comes out smoothly at a high speed, just like the newscasters i listen to all the time. This can be really fun when it’s a complicated phrase about the increase in share prices and the effects of oil prices on consumer spending, or whatever phrase i happen to be practicing.
I’m curious to see what further effects this sort of practice will have, since i’ve only been doing it quite recently. I’m sure that after doing this sort of mental acting for several months, my speaking will even more drastically improve. It just feels so good, and has such immediate results when i’m practicing, and now after speaking much more smoothly at the meetup tonight i feel that it has some medium-term effects too.
All of this has to be combined with listening, though. Background listening where i just have chinese news playing all the time, and also intensive listening where i try very hard to hear every single word that the newscasters say, and determine if each word is a word that i know. Words that i don’t know must be heard precisely and written down, and later looked up in the dictionary. Then, after looking up that round of unknown words, i listen to the whole newscast again. When listening intensely the 2nd or 3rd time, those words i looked up really stand out. All of this listening is accustoming me to how people speak at a fast pace. I know what chinese sounds like at a realistic pace, rather than the kid’s chinese that they spoke in all the listening exercises at school. I have to have this real sort of chinese stuck in my head if i’m going to be able to successfully imitate it when i play my little acting game on my own.
The great part about all this is that i just need some real recordings of real speech. I don’t use any “easy” stuff, because it isn’t real. I don’t need a “language exchange” partner that encourages me to speak before i’m ready, and i don’t have anyone around to make me feel embarrassed about having to repeat a phrase over and over again to get it right and let it sink into my head. Nothing holds me back, mentally or socially. I just get in some pure practice time without any performance anxiety. I think this is very important in any practice that you do. At this stage, speaking with real people is just a test of where my skills are at, and i don’t have to depend on such conversations as a learning mechanism. On my own, i can intensely fill my head with correct input, and then later it just comes out automatically in my speech.
Ride hard, ride free