When we met up, my acquaintance mentioned that her granddaughter knew some Russian, which we were speaking, and English. She asked the girl to say something in Russian, but the girl shyly refused. Then Grandma asked for a few words in English, the young lady refused again.

Later that evening, when the little girl looked tired, I asked her in Russian if she was sleepy, even making that international hands-as-pillow gesture. I was expecting a silent nod, but she answered without hesitation, in English, that she was because this was her first time staying up so late. Like a lot of us, she clammed up when asked to “perform,” but had no trouble when the conversation happened naturally.

Take the Pressure Off

There’s nothing wrong with having performance-based goals like “order a meal in French at Chez Martin,” but when you set those goals too high and demand success of yourself, it’s easy to get so intimidated you end up not talking at all. If you’re having trouble working up the courage to go out and “force yourself” to speak, stop expecting yourself to perform.

It’s a lot less painful to slowly get used to speaking your target language in an environment where speaking that language is natural and expected. Instead of trying to accomplish something (like getting a meal without making the waiter laugh) or pass for a native, which carries risk of “failure,” you can just be there and allow yourself to be draw into conversations.

When your target language is the default or at least almost universally spoken among the people around you, you’ll probably find people assume you know the language and naturally speak to you in it–even if just to ask you where the restroom is or what time it is. All you have to do is answer. If you manage a few sentences, but then the conversation gets too difficult for you, just explain that you only know a little of the language.

Of course, there’s no reason you can’t strike up conversations of your own and even if you’re ostensibly there to do something else (watch a film, look at paintings, etc.), you do have to be ready to speak and not look like you’re afraid to interact with people. That’s still easier than demanding some performance from yourself.

Where to Find “Ambient Opportunity”

To get you started, I’ve collected a few ideas for places to go to surround yourself with speaking opportunities without being under pressure to speak. Many of these are the same types of places you’d go for any type of speaking practice (in fact, I think I have a similar list somewhere on this blog).

The difference is primarily in your goals–going to watch a film at the Institut Francais, attend a concert at the Goethe Center, visit the nearest Russian Orthodox Church, or eat a meal at a restaurant with a primarily Korean clientele–all of which put you in contact with the language without pressuring you to accomplish a specific goal.

Now, I admit these opportunities are a lot easier to find in larger, more culturally diverse cities, but at the end I’ve included an alternative method you can use even if you have no local native speakers.

Cultural Centers
These include places of worship, theaters, libraries, college heritage clubs, and heritage events with a connection to the nationality that speaks your target language. If you’re not comfortable just showing up, go and ask if they have a monthly program of meetings and events, so you can choose something specific to go to ahead of time.

Expat/Diaspora Hangouts
These are often restaurants, night clubs, and even hotel lobbies, but they really could be anywhere and may not always be the obvious spots. If you have a native speaking friend, they may be able to point you toward some good places. Another way to find these locations, along with culture centers, is through publications targeted for that population that speaks your target language. Look for guides designed to help new arrivals find shops and service providers where their language is spoken.

Volunteer
Check out local volunteer opportunities that might put you in contact with speakers of your target language. And just because an organization doesn’t advertise for volunteers that doesn’t mean they would refuse free help. It never hurts to ask.

Conversation Practice Groups
While you’re unlikely to find native speakers at a conversation practice group for learners of that language, you’ll at least be in an environment where the language is spoken. And you may luck out from time to time and run into a native speaker who was invited by a regular participant in the group.

Take a Tour
This one’s only good once or twice, but it’s something to do for fun. If you live in a city with a fair amount of tour agencies, go on a guided tour for speakers of your target language. If the tour leader thinks you’re a little odd, just explain you’re learning that language. They won’t care as long as you pay.

Fake it
If you live out in the middle of nowhere and can’t access any of the above opportunites, you may have to get creative with what you do have. The internet is an invaluable tool for this. Play internet talk radio while you make dinner or clean up the living room. Watch movies online or look for online for shops that sell DVD movies in your target language. First of all these things will give you exposure to dialogues, which can help you learn useful phrases.

Secondly, nothing’s stopping you from talking back to the radio and TV–announce your opinion on that outrageous news item, make a peanut-gallery crack at something, or warn the lady in the horror movie not to go upstairs–you know, the usual. Keep in mind, though, that you don’t have to understand much to benefit from this. Just as you may not understand the conversation around you in a restaurant or theater, you’re still getting exposure to the sound of the language and probably at least a little vocabulary review.

Have any other good ideas for places to go for speaking opportunities? I’d love to hear about them in the comments below.

Related posts:

1. Fear of Speaking a Foreign Language? Consider This When You Travel
2. Foreign Language Learning for Introverts: Speaking Practice Tips for Immersion Situations
3. How to Overcome Fear of Speaking a Foreign Language

One of the best ways to improve facility with a language is to learn whole phrases from native speakers, whether from speech or writing. Phrases give you words in context, which is critical because a dictionary translation rarely shows you how native speakers really use the word. Complete phrases also allow you to communicate a whole idea eloquently rather than spitting out nouns á la Tarzan while pointing and playing charades. (Don’t worry, we’ve all been there.)

But a problem comes up when you’re studying a less common language. You may not be able to find textbooks filled with good example phrases or easily access native speakers or material (books, radio, movies) locally. Maybe all you have is a basic phrasebook and a list of some newspapers online, or even less.

For some languages, Google Translate and Google search (or any other machine translator and search engine) can help you get around this. Like most machine translators, Google Translate is often wildly–and entertainingly–inaccurate, but still useful.

This “Phrase Search” method is most useful when you need to get to conversational fast and don’t have time to passively collect whatever phrases you happen to come across whenever come across them. The method has its flaws, it’s not meant to be “organic,” it won’t work with all languages, and it’s not enough to learn a whole language with, but it’s something I’ve been playing around with and having good luck with. Just a little something to add to add to your learning toolbox.

Here’s how it works:

For Beginners: Reinforcing Your Foundation

(Photo: Fountain in the park near Tbilisi’s Freedom Square) When you’re just starting out and only know a few words, you can enter a basic noun, like house or chair, into Google search and see what get. The goal at this stage is more to see the word in context than to grab “useful phrases.” Searching for phrases is a way to explore the language and practice your basic vocabulary, rather than memorize phrases.

For example, I typed the German “wand” (wall) into google.de and got the sentence, “Gestalten sie Ihre Wand mit Farben, Tapeten, Wandfliesen…” (Design your wall with paint, wallpaper, wall tiles…) Not the most useful sentence, but it does show you the word “wall” in context with some related words.

When you’re ready for something more challenging, you can move beyond simply exploring words in context and use this method to check your ability to form grammatically correct sentences. Go through some words (nouns, verbs, adjectives or anything else will do) you know and think of common ways you might use them, like “She went into the house.” or “He’s sitting in the chair.” If you don’t know enough of the language to compose your own sentences, but you’re trying to learn, put your chosen sentence in your own language into Google Translate and copy the resulting translation.

Then put the translation in your target language into Google search and see what you get. You may see that exact same sentence in several search results, in which case you’ll know it’s probably grammatically correct. Often, though, you’ll get sentences that are similar to, but not the same as yours. Those are still good examples.

I put in “We painted the wall” and got “Wir malten die Wand” in German from Google Translate. I put that into Google search and got, among other phrases, “In ersten drei Stunden malten wir ein ganze Wand fast fertig.” If I didn’t understant that, I could put it back into Google Translate and get “In the first three hours, we painted a whole wall almost finished,” which is clear enough. What you get from Google translate doesn’t have to be correct because what the search results give you, provided you take results from reliable websites like newspapers, probably will be.

That “probably” part is one of the flaws in this method. You’ll almost certainly need to go through several example phrases before you get example phrases that are really clear and helpful. When you’re not sure, cross reference what you get with your dictionary and, ideally, have a native speaker check your examples to make sure they’re correct.

For More Advanced Learners: Building Up

(Photo: Tree of lights made from the statue of St. George slaying the dragon in Freedom Square) As you gain more skill with your target language, Google becomes particularly handy for learning about prepositions, adjectives, adverbs of time, conjugated verbs, idioms (sometimes) and collocations, in addition to common phrases. Say you know the infinitive form “to tell,” but you don’t know how to use it in a sentence like, “He already told me about it.”

Using the above method of traslating and plugging the result into Google, you might get a phrase like, “He told her about the problem…,” but at least you now have the past tense of “to tell” and an example for “to tell someone about something.” With some knowledge of the language, you can work out the rest.

If you come across an idiomatic phrase while reading or listening, look it up in Google search to see more examples of how it’s used. If you hear a phrase you suspect is a collocation (words that typically go together, like “heavy rain” instead of “strong rain”), check with Google.

Then practice, practice, practice by using these example sentences and phrases as a basis for creating your own. From “He told us about…” you might make “I told him yesterday,” changing the verb conjugation (”He told” to “I told”) and the person in the accusative case (”us” to “him”). Plug your sentence or phrase into Google to see if you get any matches. If you don’t get much, provided the language isn’t extemely rare online, you’re grammar’s probably wrong. In that case, you’ll need to tweak the sentence until you get a match. Google sometimes “corrects” for grammar, but just as often gets it wrong, so I wouldnt trust it too far. From here, you can keep practising making up your own sentences and checking to see if native speakers have written it the same way.

A Few Tips

(Photo: Tbilisi’s City Hall) Avoid trying to memorize every example you find or collecting so many examples you’ll never have time to review them. The goal here is get a little more exposure to the language rather than do grammar drills. This method may not always provide you with prefectly grammatical examples or phrases you can use everyday. You’ll probably get some things wrong, but if you have little opportunity to experience the language, it can help.

Also, you can choose the phrases you might need in daily conversation instead of those typically odd textbook examples like “Please bring the cow to milk.” For common phrases the Phrasebook Starter that comes with Faster Foreign Language Learning is a good place to start, if I do say so myself. I collected these after during settling-in periods in four different countries so it’s a real-life-based selection of the phrases you’ll probably need if you’ll be living in the country and spending a lot of time with locals.

This post is not quite as concise as I’d like it to be, but I’m not sure more tinkering with it would have helped, so…there you have it.

Related posts:

1. How to Learn Foreign Language Vocabulary When You Have No Time to Study
2. Learning a Foreign Language: Tips for Learning Grammar
3. Foreign Language Vocabulary Learning: A More Efficient Way to Use Vocabulary Lists

I’ve just come back to my “home base” after about two and a half years away and I was surprised at how hard it was to get back into the flow of the language. While away, I listened to the radio and wrote emails in the language, but except for the odd phone call, I hardly ever spoke.

I’m used to being able to express whatever I need to in this language without thinking much (which has its own hazards!), so it was a shock to find myself unable to say the simplest things sometimes. I could communicate fine, but not fluently. Most of it was that “tip of the tongue” feeling, but some was also strange grammatical errors that felt like somebody else talking. Meanwhile, I could understand with no trouble at all. Very frustrating.

It’s taken me almost two weeks to really get back up to speed again. Below, I’ve listed a few things that have helped me. If you have any suggestions for anyone trying wake up their hibernating language skills, please leave a comment, because I’d love to hear about them.

Here are a few tips I can pass on for reviving speaking skills…

Listen a Lot

Load up on auditory input. By “load up,” I mean get as much as possible and preferably all in your target language. You’re not trying to learn anything new, just bring up things that are already firmly planted in your memory. Reading helps, too, but listening lets you review more words faster. Chatty friends come in handy here. Ideally, talk with people who know you understand and used to speak better, so they aren’t tempted to slow down or simplify too much.

Adjust Your Thinking

Until you get your language skills back to where they were, try to think only in the language you’re re-activating. It’s probably impossible to do 100 percent of the time, but aim for as much as possible. This helps re-set your “first reaction” language so you’re ready to answer in the local language when someone speaks to you. I’d spent several months speaking a lot of Russian and based on the grammatical errors I was making in Hungarian, I realized I was trying to make Hungarian fit Russian grammar. That situation quickly improved once I stopped thinking in Russian so much.

Talk Anyway

If you mispronounce things and stumble over grammar, it’s only natural that multilingual people are going offer another language to try to help you (or themselves) out. I got this a couple times in the last few weeks and my tactic was to completely ignore the fact that they switched languages and continue in the local language. I wouldn’t try it with airport security, but talking to a cashier or taxi driver, you’re probably fine.

Of course, this works best when you’re fairly sure all you need is a few seconds to remember a word or arrange a sentence and then you can continue. If you’re having trouble saying anything at all, you might want to accept the offer of an easier language and save your practice for friends. It depends on your tolerance for trying other people’s patience.

If you feel uncomfortable because of your tongue-tied-ness and don’t have another language to use, try mentioning that you used to speak better, but haven’t had a chance to use the language in X-amount of time. It seems to reassure people that you can understand them and will manage to get your thoughts out if they give you a second.

Lean on Another Language

When you’re trying to learn a language, giving yourself time to remember a word or construct grammically correct sentences is good practice. Taking time to work things out for yourself helps you build mental connections so you’re more likely to remember the next time. When you already know, though, just asking will save you from a lot of frustration. If you’re talking to a friend you have another language in common with and you can’t remember a word or can’t remember how to phrase something, asking them to translate will get you back up to speed faster.

Ever been in this situation yourself? If so, what helped you recover your language skills?

Related posts:

1. Fear of Speaking a Foreign Language? Consider This When You Travel
2. The Communicative Approach is Bad?
3. Learning a Language in a Bilingual Culture: Getting the Locals to Talk with You

Don’t Let Yourself Get Stuck

Sometimes letting yourself get too comfortable in that silent period only makes it harder to get out. First of all, you slowly discover that it’s possible to get around without using the local language. You get so used to figuring out ways to manage without it that you forget how much harder it is to live that way than it is when you can talk to everyone everywhere. Needless to say, that alone can lower your motivation.

Another problem is that the people you interact with regularly get used to talking with you in a certain language. Switching languages seems unnecessary, and therefore socially awkward. How to you ask them to switch? What if they refuse because it’s too much trouble? What if they forget and switch back? Oh, the wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth! Better just stick with the language we’ve been speaking, eh?

Getting used to an intermediary language puts a psychological barrier between you and the local language that can be very hard to overcome, especially if you’re the type who doesn’t like to rock the boat. If you just go for it right when you arrive, sure it will be awkward sometimes, but you’ll never have to worry about working up the nerve to make a sudden switch.

Instead, you move forward a little at a time. Your first venture into the language doesn’t have to be much. It can be just asking for a kilo of apples from a fruit stand or exchanging a greeting with your neighbor. Grab any opportunity you can to jump in and then move on to more complex tasks as you progress.

Take Advantage of Your Second Childhood

Learning a language is one of the few times you get to be a kid again. Sure, no one’s going to clap and coo when you first utter “Mama,” but you might be surprised how genuinely delighted people will be to see you progressing “just like a little kid.”

It’s fun to watch someone accomplish something challenging like learning a whole new language and people want to contribute to that accomplishment. So they’ll feed you new words and “test” you with mini-conversations to give you a chance to impress them.

When you first move to a country, it’s understandable you won’t know the language. People who know you just got off the boat will cut you some slack as long as you’re putting in some real effort and making progress. So take advantage of that first three or even six months to learn voraciously. [Try this plan for getting conversant in a foreign language in eight weeks at Hubpages.] The praise and encouragement you get for “knowing so much already” will lower your affective filter (nervousness level, that is) more than a few awkward moments will raise it.

Once you’ve been in the country for a year or two, though, the fact that you’ve learned a little of the language is no longer impressive. If by that time you can hold a simple conversation, instead of “Wow, you’re learning fast!” you’re more likely to hear, “You mean, you’ve been here that long and that’s all you know?” Speaking less fluently than you feel you should becomes embarrassing, so you’re less likely to seek out opportunities to practice.

If you’re struggling to find ways to speak the local language where everyone seems to speak your language, check out these tips for talking with the locals in a bilingual culture.

Related posts:

1. How to Overcome Fear of Speaking a Foreign Language
2. Improve Your Speaking Skills by Surrounding Yourself with Opportunity
3. Learning a Language in a Bilingual Culture: Getting the Locals to Talk with You