In the first half of this post we’ll unpack the benefits of talking to yourself in more detail. Then, in the second half, you’ll find some practical tips on how to go about it as you learn that language.

Why is self-talk a good idea in language learning?

There are at least four headline reasons why talking (out loud) to yourself in your target language makes a lot of sense:

Self-talk removes performance pressure (builds confidence)

You may get anxious in real situations where people can get impatient, for example during transactions in a store or on a phone call in your foreign language. In short, you’re under “performance pressure”.

If you’re practising such scenarios on your own, though, you are freed up to experiment and take risks. This is your chance to push the boundaries of your powers of expression in your new language while not being “under the spotlight”, as it were.

Nobody’s listening, so you can also exaggerate your accent / intonation in a way that may initially feel too flamboyant for real life, but which might actually get you closer to where you need to be.

Self-talk puts the focus purely on your own speaking (builds accuracy)

Live conversation is a two-way experience. That’s the whole point! If you’re talking to yourself, in contrast, you don’t have to give some of your attention over to anticipating how the other person is going to respond and interpreting what they do say (and their wider body language).

When you practise speaking on your own, you can’t get away with mumbling or half-expressing something and leaving your interlocutor to fill in the gaps.

You can’t resort to gesticulation as a get out for lack of language.

You have to fill the silences and, as you do so, you will hear yourself more (including any errors).

Self-talk enables you to get extra practice without depending on others (it’s convenient)

Self-talk is an always-available way to reinforce your understanding of vocab and grammar that you’ve already learned and tp practice recalling it (essential to lodging it in your memory).

You can broach awkward topics that you may not be comfortable discussing with others or subjects that are simply too niche for your average language tutor or exchange partner (such as work technicalities or unusual hobbies).

Self-talk helps you “flag and fill” gaps in your knowledge

When you come up against something you can’t say due to missing vocabulary or grammar, you can jot it down in English, keep talking and then check later. It wouldn’t be so practical to take even quick notes like this in real life. I bet you’d be less likely to follow up, as well.

How to talk to yourself when learning a language (pro tips)

So, then, how do we do self-talk right?

Here are my pro tips:

Keep it short

The exercise will be quite intense, so keep it short. Start with talk to yourself sessions of just three to five minutes. You can always build up to longer as you gain in experience.

Actually speak out loud!

It’s a real thrill when you catch yourself thinking in a new language but, for the self-talk technique, it’s important to speak out loud.

Why?

First, in order to train your mouth as well as your mind.

Second, to keep you on task. If you were to depend on your thoughts alone, you could easily wonder off topic (and back into your native language).

Third, hearing yourself helps normalise the idea of speaking in your new language and will help you to notice mistakes.

Monologue or dialogue?

A simulated two-way self-talk “conversation” is closest to most “real life” scenarios, but you’ll see that some of the topic ideas below lend themselves to a monologue as well.

Begin with whichever appeals most and try the other every now and again.

Don’t be shy about playing roles. Instead, get in touch with your inner drama queen and ham it up a bit!

What should I talk about?

Here are some initial topic ideas, but the possibilities really are endless:

• narrate your day so far
• describe what you can see in your immediate surroundings
• role-play a scenario from your recent life (or from the life of somebody you know or a celebrity or historical figure)
• give somebody directions (how to find the way somewhere, how to do something)
• have an imaginary argument
• re-enact a well-known scene from your favourite novel or film
• talk on a topic that you think you’ll need
• find a short YouTube video or podcast in your language (or in English). Watch or listen and try to retell what you’ve heard. Or turn off the sound and narrate what you see, pressing pause when you need to
• imagine a future or conditional scenario (to practise those future or conditional forms of expression)

What if there’s something I can’t say?

Have a notepad and pen to hand. Jot down the roadblock very briefly. Try to talk round the gap, using what language you do have. If you’ve forgotten the word for “dog” you could maybe say “animal friend” or “my animal” or “like a cat but not a cat”.

How to supercharge your self-talk

We said that one of the benefits of talking to yourself was that it removes any worry about how you’re coming across to an interlocutor. It lets you focus exclusively on your own speaking.

But if self-talk is going to feel realistic, you do need some pressure.

So, record yourself as you speak.

This will force you to keep up the pace and to articulate clearly.

You can then listen back and evaluate yourself or play the recording to your teacher, exchange partner or other helpful advanced speaker. Ask for constructive feedback.

Keep (and date) some at least of your recordings. They’ll be great evidence of how far you’ve come six months and six years down the line.

So that’s a quick round up of the reasons why talking to yourself is a useful addition to your range of language learning techniques and there as some top tips for how to do it.

Nobody is saying, of course, that self-talk can take the place of speaking with other people.

But many of us have found that it’s an effective and efficient way to build up our confidence and accuracy, learn more, get in some extra practice and then go on and have better conversations. What about you?

What about you? Are you already an accomplished self-talker, one who’s had the last laugh with family members who initially thought you had a screw loose?

If the self-talk technique is new to you, how about giving it a go?

If you’re already an old hand, do you do it along the lines I’ve described here or have you given it a slightly different twist?

Follow up questions, comments or suggestions are, as always, very welcome, so share your thoughts in the comments below.

Related posts

How soon should you speak your foreign language?

Sound more fluent: nine tricks

The post Talking to yourself to learn a language? appeared first on How to get fluent, with Dr Popkins.

The distinction between good mistakes and bad mistakes when you use your foreign language

First, let’s be clear! There’s lots of scope for errors when you’re learning a foreign language. You might choose the wrong word, make a grammar mistake, use the language in a way that’s technically correct but just doesn’t reflect the way a fluent speaker would naturally use it.

Making errors and mistakes in your foreign language is inevitable and it’s a sign that you’re out there actually using it.

That’s something to celebrate and, indeed, a willingness to dive in and not to be afraid of making mistakes is a characteristic of the successful language learner, as these enthusiasts told me at the Polyglot Gathering a few years ago:

At the same time not all mistakes are created equal.

Good mistakes happen when you’re trying to stretch yourself, when you’re using new structures or words, pushing yourself forward on the long road to fluency.

Bad mistakes are rather different. They are MUCH more common and they are the mistakes that are in our sights in this post.

I’m talking about those repetitive errors in bits of language that you’ve already been taught, studied and already come across many times before.

There’s no admirable s-t-r-e-t-c-h-i-n-g going on here…

…More like (unconscious) slouching!

These are foreign language mistakes that you probably could avoid, if only you paid a little more attention. If a teacher or other helpful advanced speaker points them out to you, you’ll often realise at one what you’ve done wrong.

The thing is, though, that most people, most of the time, won’t point out your mistakes..

The onus is on you to root them out.

Otherwise you run the risk that they become a “fossilised” feature of your personal version of the language.

Here’s a three step process to stop this happening.

Step One: spot your common mistakes using these three techniques

In order to blitz these bad boy recurring mistakes, you first need to shine a searchlight on them.

For this first step, you can use any of the three techniques below. You could use each one without the help of a teacher or other advanced speaker. If you do have access to an expert, though, we’ll flag exactly how they can help.

Then come two more steps, which we’ll briefly explain at the end of the post.

Compile a personalised mistake list

Sit down, take a pen and paper, reflect and then write down the, say, five most irritating slips that you think you regularly make.

These could be individual items of vocab or word combos (short phrases or “chunks”) that you mix up or regularly mispronounce. Or they could be mangled points of grammar, such as misusing a verb tense or getting word order wrong in a certain type of expression.

It may be that you’re not sufficiently aware of your errors to make a list at once. In that case, put it together gradually, by reflecting after your next two or three times “in action” (speaking or writing the language).

Once you have the list, try to get somebody with whom you use your new language (teacher, language exchange, friend or relative) involved.

Don’t show them your list (yet). Instead, ask them to tell you the five most grating mistakes that they notice you making time and time again. To focus their attention, you might ask them to compile their list over the course of several conversations with you (or, if you’re having written work corrected, as they read several texts that you’ve written).

Then, you can compare both lists (preferably with the other person’s help and explanation).

There’ll probably be some overlap, but you might be surprised to find that what they think needs attention is different from what you were worrying about most yourself. Now, combine the lists so that you have up to ten items (less if there was some overlap between you).

If you don’t have anybody to help you, you could write down examples of your supposed mistakes and use a text auto correct to confirm your hunch (or not!). Then move on to step two.

Record self and listen back

Pick a relevant topic that you could talk about briefly.

Take your mobile phone and record yourself speaking to yourself on a topic that’s relevant and interesting to you.

You can do this as a monologue or as a conversation where you imagine what the other person would say (you don’t have to play their part as well, but it may be fun to do that).

To keep this quick and concentrated, speak for not more than two or three minutes.

This experience may feel a bit weird at first. Just why, then, is it so different from a from a real two-way exchange?

Well, it’s not just that nobody else is as sparkling a conversationalist as you.

In a live interaction, the pressure is on to focus on the other person (and rightly so). We have to take in the wider scene, including the non-verbal reactions from our conversation partner. We’re also braced for the ball to come back over the net, in the form of the next utterance from that other person.

In stark contrast, when you’re doing a short “record self and listen back” exercise, all that live performance pressure is taken away, leaving you free to hear your own voice much more even as you speak.

Next listen back to the clip through several times, giving it your undivided attention until you have a put together a short list of your suspected mistakes.

You could, of course, record an actual two-way conversation as your “sample”.

But remember, the magic of this technique comes not just from listening to the recording but from the initial total focus on yourself as you speak.

Plus, the idea is that this is a simple little exercise that you can do often, without needing to line up somebody else.

Where a helper can come in handy is when you’re unsure whether something in your recording is wrong, when you’re collecting examples of correct usage and when you’re ready to practise them “live”. If you don’t have a helper, you could prepare a transcript (typing or using voice to text AI) and then use an auto correct (just as in the writing technique that we’ll discuss next).

Make a list of the mistakes that you’ve managed to identify from your recording(s).

Stream of consciousness writing

Choose an appealing topic.

Take a pen and paper and write a short text about it in your target language (200 to 300 words is ideal).

Usually, when writing, you’d want to think carefully about accuracy. This time, in contrast, try not to overthink it. Just write what comes naturally, for better or worse. If you hit a vocab or grammar block, write your way round it (by expressing yourself differently or even leaving the thought out).

Why the stream of consciousness approach to writing in this exercise?

Because it will help make clear how accurate your more or less spontaneous use of the language is at this stage on your learning journey.

Once you’ve finished, review your text.

Underline any obvious mistakes and things that might be wrong (but you’re not quite sure).

It could be that quite a bit of you’ve written is spot on. But you’ll probably also have written some phrases that are technically correct, but don’t sound natural, or something that’s just plain wrong.

If you have access to a tutor, exchange partner or other advanced speaker, you can now ask them to point all this out for you.

If you don’t have somebody to help, you could type up your text in software that has a mistake highlighting function (Google Docs will do this pretty accurately for many languages).

Note what Google (or whatever) flags up as wrong.

Step Two: Understand your mistakes and collect examples of correct (natural) usage

Using any one (or more) of these three techniques, you can come up with a personalised list of, say, the top ten killer errors that you’d like to cure.

If there are corrections that you’ve received from a native speaker (or from a text auto correct function) that you still don’t understand, try to find explanations from a teacher, another advanced speaker, in your course materials or online.

Is the problem that you’ve chosen the wrong word, mangled a set phrase or that you’re making a mistake of grammar? Is it that you’re saying something that’s grammatically correct but just doesn’t sound natural?

Once you’re sure you understand what was going wrong in each case on your list, arm yourself with three or four on-point examples of the correct usage for each. Embed the point in a short phrase that you could actually see yourself using. A teacher (or ChatGPT) can help here.

Step Three: Make the corrected usage your automatic default

It’s a fair bet that once you’ve identified and corrected your own common mistakes, you’re more likely to notice the correct usages again and again in your regular listening and reading.

You can take more active steps, too to make the native-style pattern on your own language production (speaking, writing).

For a start, you can regularly review your stock of illustrative examples.

You could practise writing them (by hand, please) or saying them out loud (with a bit of dramatic verve) every few days for a couple of weeks, for example .

In subsequent months, go back and practise your illustrative phrases every now and again,

Then, try to use them too, of course, in your writing practice and, above all, when you speak, both in a learner context such as in class or during a language exchange and out and about “in the wild.”

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So there we are. Three techniques and three steps to identify, understand and correct mistakes and to make sure that you actually use the correct version as a habit.

Of course, don’t constantly obsess about your errors that you make in your foreign language, whether they are new or repeat ones.

But if you want to do some deliberate work on your accuracy every now and again, those are three techniques that could really help.

If you give one of them a try, don’t forget to let me know how you do in the comments below.

The post How to find and fix mistakes in your foreign language speaking and writing appeared first on How to get fluent, with Dr Popkins.