How I Learn To Speak Foreign Languages Without Talking To People | Polyglot Language Learning Tips

[Music] hey everybody happy wednesday good news i have got just the most splendid cup of coffee today i pulled the perfect shot so well balanced have i ever told you how much i love coffee ah so over the years and especially over the last few months so many people have noticed and pointed out in the comments how when i learn languages i actually don't do a lot of speaking to native speakers i don't go out there and aggressively you know create opportunities to speak i don't usually use online tutors or you know fine language exchange partners it's just not something i do a lot of right and so many of you have rightly pointed this out and asked so how do you develop these speaking skills in different languages if you're not practicing talking to people on a regular basis and so i thought this would be a really cool video to talk about you know why i typically don't do that a lot until later on and of course more importantly talk about how how i still develop pretty strong speaking skills mostly by myself so that later on when the opportunities come organically i'm ready and i can really engage in some fantastic conversations with native speakers and just other people who speak the language that's all coming up of course if you enjoy this video please do give it a like and consider subscribing and i also have a patreon page where i'm posting a lot of exclusive content so if you're into that check it out link in the description [Music] okay so first of all i want to really quickly explain that you know speaking to native speakers or other people who speak the language it's not something that i avoid right so i don't actively or deliberately avoid speaking to people it's just that i don't you know create those opportunities myself i don't book online tutors i don't use apps that can help me find exchange partners and the primary reason for this is honestly that i've always just found that i can be really independent when it comes to developing that kind of really basic level of fluency i always talk about how for me fluency is a really wide spectrum and there are many many levels of fluency so when i say that like really basic level i'm talking about getting to the point where you can freely express yourself right there'll be mistakes you're going to get stuck sometimes but you can express your ideas you can talk to people and if you get stuck you can typically find a way to still express your idea one way or another and so yeah when i was learning japanese there was an interesting situation where i was a student at university i was learning japanese and we had like five exchange students from japan and what happened back then is that like every person it seemed in the whole japanese department was like i would say aggressively trying to like find these five japanese exchange students all the time and like trying to practice japanese with them and i always felt weird about that because in my opinion you know these people came here to learn english they're here to practice english it's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity they're students here for a whole year it's really special and so if i meet one of these people organically i'm more inclined to try to help them with their english or just talk to them as a normal person in english right i'm not gonna try to force them to speak japanese with me and the funny thing is that most people in the japanese department at my university basically nobody could even converse in japanese and so on one hand it's like you're aggressively trying to find these five people who can speak japanese but then you're not even able to have a proper conversation with them anyway and so i just made a decision at the time that i i would just try to develop those skills by myself and i i knew that once my japanese became pretty good and i was conversational i knew that those opportunities would come and when they did i'd be ready i'd be able to actually engage and that actually did happen later on in my university years i kind of ended up being the guy that you know exchange students would come to when they needed help and when they were just exhausted of speaking english and they wanted someone that could speak japanese with them and who they could express themselves naturally with and we had some wonderful conversations and we really bonded over you know discussing the struggles of living abroad things like that so that's when it all started and the same thing happened in french italian basically every language i've learned i've always just developed my speaking skills pretty independently and because again the thing that i really look forward to when it comes to speaking to other people in a foreign language i look forward to those really genuine authentic moments of again like discussion and like bonding over sharing experiences and you know all these things that really happen later on right they really happen once you at least have the ability to engage and converse with somebody and so yeah i that's what i look forward to and i just have a lot of patience for that happening and prior to that i'm pretty content talking to myself practicing on my own and building up those skills and it's kind of a thing that like i said i look forward to it because i know the i'm gonna be ready one day when i get the chance but again if i get opportunities that organically just pop up i'm more than happy to speak with people it's just not something that i aggressively go after so let's talk a little bit about how i personally do this right how do i go about developing speaking skills without actually talking to a person well the first thing is and this is going to seem kind of obvious but i am constantly constantly repeating things out loud from basically day one so if i'm doing an app if i'm doing a textbook that's got like audio whatever it is if there's an example sentence or a dialogue anything i am just constantly repeating the language and really trying my best to focus on you know pronunciation rhythm intonation even things like tonality even things like emotion right like is someone angry in the dialogue are they upset are they happy i want to really try to mimic all these things but the next thing i do and this is where it starts to become very powerful for developing speaking skills is that very early i start to manipulate those example sentences and so if the sentence is you know i would like to have lunch then i'll do my best to first of all repeat that sentence but then to change it right so i would like to eat dinner or i don't want to eat dinner because i already ate right like anything i can do right to me it's an opportunity to just practice whatever i have and it can be just changing the verb tense it could be using the passive voice if i know how to do that i'm just constantly repeating and manipulating sentences as much as i can very early on and so even that starts to give me this comfort in producing my own sentences now of course then we start to get into dialogues right so maybe there are dialogues in a textbook or an app and stuff same thing i'll try to go through the dialogue but then maybe i'll try to do it a second time but i'll try to change one of the characters lines right i'll try to just substitute myself in and do things like that right see if i can completely change the story so that's a very basic thing that i do early on but i do think it's very powerful and that starts me on this journey of becoming an independent conversationalist in a language about speaking to people now the next thing i do is i do actually engage in sort of drills right for substitution exercises right so i will always try to become very comfortable saying a lot of things with a little bit of language right so in the beginning i'm not trying to learn a thousand verbs a thousand nouns or ten thousand this or whatever honestly it's amazing how much you can say we have a pretty small list of nouns verbs adjectives conjunctions whatever like it's kind of incredible because if you learn how to say i want to eat and then if you learn to say i want to go and if you learn a few words like restaurant but afterwards already like it's a pretty small selection of words all of a sudden you can say well i want to go and eat at the restaurant but i already ate a couple of hours ago so i'll eat later like there's not a lot of complexity there and i find that what takes a long time for many people is people get very good at saying very very short sentences very very short phrases because typically that's what you're seeing in these apps and these textbooks and these courses very often people struggle with saying longer more complex sentences but again very often the individual pieces of those sentences are quite simplistic but you just need a good amount of these sort of connector words or conjunctions or different things like this and i find that a lot of it it's just simply practice but i find that the best way to do that for me is first of all to be outputting these things and to kind of drill them right and so i'll say i'll just try to see how many different ways can i manipulate a single sentence how many words can i substitute in so i do a lot of that but to be honest all this is really just in preparation for what really starts to get interesting which is when i do begin speaking to myself now the first thing i want to do here is i would like to reframe this many people are uncomfortable with the idea of talking to themselves but if you think about it it's not that different than when you think to yourself right when you're thinking to yourself it's very similar to talking to yourself it's just your inside voice so what i like to think of it as is thinking out loud right that's all it is i'm gonna start thinking out loud in the language i'm learning and i find that this framing is a lot more comfortable for people because we think to ourselves every single day all the time right and so it's a much more familiar idea so one thing you can do if this is still a bit uncomfortable is try it in your native language so you could start by just thinking out loud in english for example if you're an english speaker like me and then try to do the same thing in french or japanese whatever language you're learning it's a good exercise to just get comfortable with the idea of thinking out loud in a new language but there's a lot more to it than this so the first level for me is pretty basic stuff it's describing my surroundings how did my day go things like this but i want to focus more on what's after that because many people that tell you to talk to yourself that's where they stop right but there's a secret key in my opinion or there are two keys one is emotion and one is opinion and they of course these two things are deeply intertwined what i like to do is i'll take anything that i have an emotional attachment to in terms of content right so this could be a tv show that's in english it doesn't have to be in a foreign language it could be a book it could be a video game anything it could be a current event happening in your country's you know political system whatever it is but i find that stories are best because they tend to have this rich context built up around them so what i like to do is i'll take my favorite book my favorite movie my favorite tv show and i'll watch either a whole episode or just even a piece of an episode and i'll start to think about okay what's my opinion how do i feel what do i think is the point of this episode because most tv shows most movies most books they have a message right they're trying to tell you something so what is that and i find that this is an incredibly powerful way to start actually getting speaking practice with myself as i start to think about okay so how would i tell this episode how would i tell this story from the perspective of a different character you know how would i get inside the head of you know this other person and what would their perspective be and so you know many things start with i think that you know and you start just basically expressing your opinion on things that have happened and you use this idea of manipulation right and so you manipulate the story you change the perspective you you know honestly it's quite remarkable how deeply you can get into a discussion with yourself when you start not just making it very boring like well my day was good i went to school i ate lunch no as soon as you can i would move on from that and i would start engaging with genuine thoughtful discussion about what do you think what do you feel right or again how did that person feel how would she have felt if the story were told from her perspective it's kind of incredible and you'll find that this very closely mimics those types of conversations that you would like to have with a person one day because a lot of what we do is we tell stories we express our opinions we connect with people on an emotional level we maybe someone tells us a story and then we say we tell a story from our own lives that is similar right you can get a lot of that practice and it's great because you can do so by engaging with content you love like i said it could be tv show movie drama in your native language or in a language you're learning it doesn't matter um and yeah i just find this to be really really powerful and like i said this helps me to become a very independent speaker and so what happens is inevitably i come across words i don't know how to say i come across expressions or things that i'm not sure how to express and so i write those things down and i make it my mission to find out how can i say those in a natural way and then i come back the next time more prepared and i really like this because it's a completely safe space i'm not scared of making mistakes because it's just me no one else is around right i can even record myself and then listen back to it i always hear a lot of my own mistakes and it's really powerful for helping not make the same mistake again there's just so much you can do here there's so much you can do and it's quite enjoyable and i don't know i just find that this has been so powerful and effective for me and so yeah i can usually always develop a decent enough speaking level so that when i do encounter people in real life and i start to get all these opportunities i'm ready and then that's when my speaking skills really start to grow okay everybody i hope that was helpful it's kind of a strange topic i don't know i feel like people don't talk about it very much and i feel like people are often hesitant to engage in this but to me it's so liberating to know that i can get a tutor right i can go and find an exchange partner i don't necessarily need to and i can develop some really really powerful speaking skills by myself so that one day when i decide it's time i can go out and find all kinds of opportunities to speak and actually have really genuine authentic interactions hope you have a wonderful wednesday and i'll see you back here on [Music] friday [Music] you

Channel: Robin MacPherson

Views: 342,879

Rating: 4.9265819 out of 5

Keywords: language learning, how long should you study, languages, polyglot, polyglots, language tips, how to learn a language, foreign languages, learn english, learn french, learn spanish, learn japanese, learn german, building habits, language study tips, learn korean, learn russian, robin macpherson, learn chinese, learn mandarin, mandarin chinese, babbel, lindie botes, steve kaufmann, luca lampariello, ikenna, matt vs japan, xiaomanyc, richard simcott, speak fluently, fluency

Id: QxHKkfbcRKQ

Length: 17min 25sec (1045 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 30 2020