How I Learn Languages, Part 5: Speaking
Everything so far has been reading and listening. Speaking is the most important part of a language, and the hardest.
I’m not in a rush to speak. Starting too early locked in bad habits for me. The two that stand out:
- Leaning on the few words you know. A small vocabulary means you keep circling the same words, and that’s a hard habit to break later.
- Mistakes become automatic. If you say the wrong gender or case ending enough times, it turns into a reflex that’s hard to unlearn.
This is what worked for me, not a hard rule. I started speaking Romanian at around 3,000 known words in LingQ, and for me that was too early. Next time I’d wait until around 6,000. (LingQ counts every form of a word separately, so that’s fewer distinct words than it sounds.)
When I’m ready, I start with anyone in my life who speaks the language. If you can afford it, I highly recommend a tutor on iTalki for a few lessons a week. For free practice, I use OmeTV.
Getting the most out of a tutor
A tutor’s incentives and a learner’s don’t line up. Tutors do better when you keep coming back, but the goal is to eventually speak without them, so the learner has to drive the expectations. In my experience, many tutors want to pull up a PowerPoint and walk through grammar rules while charging $20 an hour, which I think is a waste of both time and money. The only way to get better at speaking is to speak, so the goal of every lesson is to maximize the time you spend speaking.
So I set it up like this:
- I do the talking, no matter how bad it is.
- The tutor writes down my mistakes as I go instead of interrupting.
- At natural pauses, I ask them to go over the list with me.
- They only explain why something is wrong when I ask.
- No PowerPoint. I ask them to explain with example sentences instead.
Free practice with strangers: OmeTV
OmeTV is a free video chat site that pairs you with random strangers, and it’s another great resource. If you’re afraid of making mistakes like I am, it’s the perfect environment. When I accidentally said “I gave birth in America” instead of “I was born in America” (true story, unfortunately), I just skipped to the next person and will (probably) never have to look them in the eyes again.
The downside is that strangers don’t know your life the way an iTalki tutor eventually will. I got really good at introducing myself, my background, and why I’m learning the language, but the conversations rarely went deeper than that.
Still, it’s free and super useful. My Romanian speaking practice outside of family was probably about 60% OmeTV and 40% iTalki.