The Secret to Speaking Well

I love those, “Ah-ha!” moments when a picture that you have been trying to view through foggy lenses suddenly becomes crystal clear. As it concerns Japanese, I had one of those happy moments when I discovered the works of Stephen Krashen and that oh-so-simple yet oh-so –powerful phrase, “input before output”.

Another “Ah-ha!” instance came to me the other day when reading this article on speaking from Khatz. When you do start to speak, do it like a robot. Monotone, flat pitch and accent (as much as the language features and context allows it), and above all speak slowly. You may sound like Ben Stein but at least you will have a greater chance of (A) being understood by your partner, and (B) being understood by yourself. Let me speak to B in more detail.

Language is copying. You listen to native speakers and copy what they say, both in content and pronunciation. Pronunciation is a matter of correct movements of the mouth muscles, elevation of the tongue, etc. Repetition is the key to mastery. Practice the guitar enough and eventually you will make good music. Practice speaking Japanese enough and eventually you will be able to fool others on the phone into believing you’re a native speaker. The hang up, as it so often is with language acquisition, is the initial stages.

We all want to be adults, having adult conversations about adult topics at adult speeds. Why? We ourselves are adults and as such have adult expectations. This fact does not change when we star learning a new language, but in terms of our speaking capabilities we are not adults. We are still learning to crawl but our adult brain wants us to move into the fast lane before we are ready. The result is all of the following:

You quickly run into a wall

Your speech slurs or your stammer

You forget words and phrases you previously thought you had acquired

You use patterns that do not even exist in the language

Your speech fades out

Your confidence plummets

Worse still is that troubles such as these can befall us even if we understand the world around us with a high degree of coverage. In other words, “What gives?! I have done the right thing and focused my studies on input activities. I understand adult conversations but whenever I try to speak it always eventually degenerates to ‘Me going to the park is enjoyment.’”. So what is the solution?

Slow down.

You may know a lot, but you still need to do it a lot in order to become truly fluent. If you try to speak beyond your capabilities you are inevitably headed for trouble. Better to take things deliberately slow and give your brain more chances to naturally and smoothly cement things. This strategy has the additional benefit of providing more defense against the hardening of incorrect patterns (a notorious problem of those who speak too much too soon).

So, take things easy. Pronounce a word syllable-by-syllable if you need to. Speak with your simplistic, but correct, phrases even though you understand the big complex sentences that your partner just said. The more you do this, the quicker you will naturally progress to more complex speech at higher speeds.