If you’ve ever think, “I’ve been learning this language for X years, but I still can’t speak the language,” you’re probably using the wrong approach.
Some language gurus will advise people in your situation to just speak as much as possible (no matter how poorly!) if you want to learn how to speak your target language. This is bad advice.
To be great at speaking your target language, you have to think like a musician.
Conversations are like concerts
Learning to speak with ease is like learning to play an instrument. Musicians need time to practice a piece on their own before the it’s concert-ready.
Telling people that they only need to speak more (without prioritizing substantial study time) is like expecting a musician to be concert-ready without ever picking up their instrument.
The concert isn’t practice time; rather, it’s the fruit of hundreds—or rather, thousands—of hours of practice time.
The same goes for speaking: Conversations in your target language are the performance of the skills you’ve practiced on your own. They are the fruit of many hours of study time.
Practice your target language like a musician
If being at ease when speaking your target language is the result of study time, what should studying your target language actually look like?
To answer this question, let’s take a look at how musicians practice.
When musicians practice, they rarely run through the entire piece all at once. Instead, they pick very short sections that they want to work on (that usually last few seconds), and isolate specific skills that they want to perfect.
First they might focus on getting all the notes correct. Then they might focus on the articulation (the different ways of producing the sound), and then the dynamics (how loud or soft the music is).
Just as musicans isolate certain elements when they practice, you need to do the same when you study your target language.
Practice doesn’t make perfect. Practice makes permanent.
Just speaking more isn’t the answer because when you speak, you’re combining a number of skills that need to be learned and practiced separately, such as:
- Pronouncing words correctly
- Mastering the language’s cadence, intonation, and musicality at the sentence level
- Knowing when to use the correct verb tense
- Using the correct verb conjugation
- Actively recalling vocabulary
- Making decisions about register (formality) and tone
- Structuring sentences correctly
- Applying other rules for grammar
When you have a conversation, you’re trying to apply all of these skills at the same time.
And if you haven’t practiced each of these skills one at a time in isolation, then you’re just trying to patch up a million holes in your speaking ability without ever having built a proper foundation.
Musicians know this very well. That’s why they isolate each skill they want to perfect and they pay close attention to avoid making mistakes as much as possible when they practice. They know that they will perform in the concert hall like however they’ve practiced at home.
Similarly, if you don’t isolate and master each skill that goes into speaking, or if conversations with native speakers are the first time that you’re practicing these skills, then you’re inevitably practicing errors.
That’s why speaking as much as possible no matter how poorly is a bad idea. In fact, it’s probably the worst possible advice to give to people who struggle with speaking.
The more you make mistakes when you speak, the more you ingrain those mistakes into your brain. It takes far more repetitions to unlearn a mistake than to learn something correctly in the first place.
Confidence comes from competence
Some language gurus will tell you that if you stuggle to speak your target language, your problem is that you lack social confidence and that you just need to put yourself out there and get used to making mistakes in front of other people.
But confidence doesn’t come from making so many mistakes in front of other people that you become numb to your errors; rather, it comes from actually knowing what you’re doing.
When people say things like “I’ve been learning the language for X years, but I just can’t speak it,” the core problem is that they have not trained their active recall, specifically active recall out loud.
The core problem—for most people—is NOT a lack of social confidence or willingness to make mistakes in front of others.
Ultimately, most people struggle to speak their target language because they haven’t put enough time into becoming good at training their active recall out loud.
Most people usually study just until they get something right. But what creates long-term knowledge is practicing until you can’t get it wrong—something that musicians know very well.
How to be excellent at speaking your target language
So, what does does it actually look like to isolate specific skills when you study your target language?
Ultimately, if you want to start actually speaking your target language, the most important thing is to do a variety of exercises that do two things:
- train your active recall of vocabulary and grammar and your ability to build sentences, and
- get you comfortable with orally producing the language
With that said, here are the techniques that I’ve used and recommend if you want to actually start speaking your target language well:
- drill vocabulary (both written and out loud)
- do exercises for verb conjugation and grammar (both written and out loud)
- do shadowing
- listen and repeat after
- do spaced-repetition audio programs
- read out loud
- talk to yourself in your target language
- do sentence-building exercises and read them out loud
- translate sentences out loud
- journal or do writing prompts in your target language
If you go into conversations knowing that you’ve extensively trained your active recall out loud, and you’ve worked on internalizing the musicality and rhythm of the language, then you’re on your way to speaking your target language with ease.