Speaking a Foreign Language: 50 Tips from 50 Years

Welcome to The Five Week Linguist Show. If you want to learn a language or you teach a language, you’ve come to the right place. Join Janina each week for tips, resources and advice for making engaging language learning happen anytime, anywhere.

So this week on The Five Week Linguist Show, we’re going to continue 50 things I’ve learned about languages in my nearly 50 years. I want to talk about vocabulary this week. So the first thing that I wanted to talk about is sort of breaking down that path to fluency, right? Learning vocabulary and how that relates to becoming fluent. So obviously when you start a language, you don’t know anything, right? You start learning words and phrases and then the things that you say start looking more like phrases that you’re kind of putting together, perhaps choppily, that start looking a little bit more like sentences, maybe choppy sentences.

Then you can start saying some sentences and then those sentences start looking more like paragraphs, right? Sort of two or three sentences at a time. Those paragraphs become stronger and more accurate with the vocabulary that you’ve learned. And then those paragraphs become connected where you can speak for a long time at once. Then those paragraphs, those connected paragraphs become extended and accurate, really detailed up into levels that you may not even have achieved in your native language. We’re talking college professor who knows a great deal about a topic and can speak very accurately and for extended periods of time about something. Right?

So all of that was the path to fluency, and in fact, I’ll leave that in the show notes. So how do you achieve that? You did this when you were in school, through your family, right? You started with nothing. As a baby you made sounds, you understood things and then you started on this path to fluency where the things you say when you were a kindergartner and look much different than the things you say when you were finishing high school or a teenager. So the takeaways for this, for learning languages that can really help you take control of this because you weren’t in charge of that, your journey on that path necessarily, but if you want to learn another language or you’re teaching another language, certainly you have a lot of control over what that path looks like.

So we learn vocabulary, realistically we acquire vocabulary. If you want to focus and really learn to get communicating, whether you have a situation that allows you to do that naturally or not is to learn vocabulary in chunks. When I say chunks, I’m talking about meaningful chunks. So don’t just learn separate words, maybe all the words for fruit. You’re going to want to learn how to be able to do things. I always like to start with travel because it naturally offers language in chunks. Meaning think about talking to someone at the airport, for example. “I’d like a …” “I need …” Those are chunks, right? Those are meaningful groups of words and phrases that are going to get you communicating. I always recommend people to start with phrasebooks because they naturally serve that. The whole point is just to be able to survive with language. I’ve created a whole bunch of phrasebooks with audio that I share for travel and beginners and I’ve shared the audio on iTunes, just like I’m sharing this here.

Plenty of comments have been left about it. It’s not really a proper podcast, even though I’ve got a feed there and it’s not meant to be. Those are meant to be bite-sized files that you hear in meaningful chunks and you can arrange them any way you want.