Daily Dose of English 141
Starting to Speak
Daily Dose of English 141
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every single day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about starting to speak. Starting to speak. Interesting topic title, right? I'll explain, obviously, I don't know. I always feel weird starting these episodes, you know? Because I make them, I plan them, I listen to myself say them, but like, I don't know, it feels like I'm, I don't know, it's weird. Hopefully you don't mind. But anyways, what do I mean by starting to speak? So, in the way that I learn languages, in the way that I recommend that pretty much everybody learn languages, is that you start with understanding first. Understanding the language is the core thing that is gonna drive you forward. Why? There's a couple reasons why, but I think the best way to explain it is to talk about a conversation. Right? That is sort of the main thing of language in a lot of ways, right? Having a conversation between two people talking about something that they want to communicate with each other. They want to share ideas between themselves. That requires two things for each person. So you're one of the people, let's say, and so you need two different skills. You need to be able to understand them, and you need to be able to express your ideas. Those are the two things that you need to do. So you can think of that as input and output ability. Input would be listening and understanding, and then output would be speaking and saying your ideas. And so there's two things that you need to be a fluent user of a language, basically. There's a lot more going on, this is a simplification, but it is very obvious from millions of people's experiences, years of language study, research, and development, and all these things, that you can't learn to speak and create your thoughts into clear sentences unless you can already understand. So there is a prerequisite is a good word. A prerequisite is something that's required to do something else. And so for example, a prerequisite, it's often used in school. So a prerequisite to taking calculus is that you can do geometry. Geometry, there's a prerequisite to being able to do algebra. I think, yeah, I think that's the order. And so those are things that are required to know or to be able to do before you can learn something else or do something else. And so to be able to speak well, you have to be able to understand well, that is a prerequisite, but it's not the other way around. You don't need to learn to understand somebody or you can learn to understand somebody even if you don't speak that language, right? And that's the core idea behind learning to understand first. So when I'm recording this episode, which is actually about a month before you're going to hear it, I have been studying Czech for about 1,000 and a couple hours, right? 1,005 hours, let's say. 1003 of those hours have been spent on just understanding the language. I haven't tried to produce ideas. I haven't tried to improve my thoughts in check or anything like that. I've worked a little bit on pronunciation and sound perception, but that's primarily a listening activity, actually, which I can talk about in another episode, I think. So 99.9% of my time so far has been spent on understanding the language. And yesterday is when I began to speak, I started to speak the language aloud. And my very first conversation was in Czech and we understood each other. I was very awkward, I was slow, I forgot tons of words, I spoke a lot of Spanish for some reason, like Spanish words just kept coming to my mind. but I had a conversation in Czech with a Czech person. She did speak English as well, so we could have talked in English, but theoretically, I could have had a conversation with somebody who doesn't speak any other language but Czech. And so that is the huge difference. I already understand so much that I can have a conversation. It's stumbling, it's slow, it's awkward, which I'll talk about in a second, but I had a conversation. And today, one day later, it was already way easier. I had a conversation with another Czech person and it went way smoother. We talked about a lot more things. I expressed my ideas and thoughts and opinions about things without ever having tried to speak about them before. And that is because I focused on my understanding first. I'm going to make a video about this on the Refold channel, which is what I make like just language learning videos for because I think it's a really good example of the difference between trying to start with speaking where you're basically trying to recreate sentences that you've looked up or planned ahead of time versus being able to actually interact. Because the really cool thing about starting to speak at this point is that I understood everything that my teacher said. Maybe a couple words here and there, like I did learn some new words, but everything else was easy. Like it was, I don't really know how to explain it except for it was easy. I was able to have that side of the conversation. So going back to the idea of the core of language is like communication between two people and like everything else comes from there. That side of understanding, I've got down more or less. I still have a lot to learn, I still have a lot of words to learn, plenty of things still, but I've got those skills as a base already. I've passed my geometry and algebra classes and now I'm able to go into the other classes or to go to speaking to actually try to learn how to produce those ideas and improve my accuracy in all these different things. And that's the idea of waiting to speak is the main thing. So if somebody asks you why you're not speaking English, even though you're learning it, you can tell them that basically. Or when you are starting to speak English, you'll realize that you're able to actually express things, even though you're not perfect, because you can understand so well. So now I wanna get into that a little bit. So starting to speak, what was it like? So the first day was honestly really hard. I felt like I was going really slow. I forgot so many words and Spanish kept coming out. So I speak Spanish as well. And for some reason, I could easily turn off English. Ignoring English was pretty easy, but Spanish words just keep coming up to the front of my mind, which is really weird to me. But today, it was already way better. I didn't have as many Spanish words. I still did, especially some phrases would come up, but I felt a lot more fluid and I could actually say the things that I wanted a little bit more fluidly. And I already know that I fixed some mistakes. So for example, yesterday I said basically on the future instead of in the future. And today that wasn't hard. I just started saying in the future because I know it's in the future that it's supposed to be in not on the future. And so I'm able to fix that mistake without it really being pointed out. I knew it was wrong, she said it correctly, and I go, oh yeah, duh, and now I'm able just to do that. I didn't need actually to get my error corrected or pointed out or for her to tell me why. I just was like, oh yeah, I'm doing it wrong, I can do it correctly now. My goal isn't even to fix errors. My goal right now is to be more comfortable, which is what I think is going quite well after just two days. And so that's something that I'm really happy about, is that I feel like I'm making progress in two days, which I think is really cool. I'm excited to speak every day for another week and two weeks and see where I get. After 50 hours, I'm pretty sure that I'll be able to express myself fairly well, which I'm really, really excited about. So we'll see. I'll probably do another episode like this pretty soon. But yeah, if you're not speaking and you're waiting for maybe 1,000 hours, 1,500 hours of English before you're gonna start speaking, that's totally fine. But definitely start speaking a little bit before you're ready. Because you're never really gonna feel totally ready. And it's gonna be awkward at the beginning regardless. I felt super weird, I was sweating a lot. I was still nervous today. I had to take off my sweater because I got super sweaty and just like nervous. because it's weird like you're speaking a literally a new language but the difference like the difference that i feel when i had this lesson versus when i had um so i took a spanish lesson i think like five six years ago at this point when i didn't speak spanish like at all with a teacher and I was so unable to say anything that she had to go down to the point of being like, this is a ball. Do you see the ball? And I really wanted to not do that because I'm not a child, right? But today, the difference was humongous. These people, they understood right away that I was like, oh yeah, this person can understand me, I can just use Czech normally. I can use some slang, I can speak more naturally. Sure, he's awkward, he can't really speak exactly correctly, but I understand what he's trying to say. And that difference in the feeling of being in a class like that is so amazing. Both of the teachers that I ended with felt It felt to me at least like they were happy to be in that lesson and not like they're trying to drag a child to dinner or something like that. We're like, come on, it's time to eat. No, I don't want to go, right? Where if you're trying to get somebody who just can't do anything, it's a lot more difficult. But if somebody's actually improving and they're understanding their mistakes and all these things, it's a very different experience for everybody involved. So I definitely recommend waiting to speak just because it's going to be a much better experience because of that. But that's all that I got for today. Um, I hope that you enjoyed listening to me talking about talking and I would love to hear your experience down below. Have you started to speak? What was it like? I'll see you again tomorrow for another episode. Bye.
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