Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Live Example of a 1-minute Cantonese Speaking Exercise
Introduction: Getting Started Speaking a Foreign Language
“You arrive at the perfect opportunity, meeting a native speaker of your target language that you have been studying for weeks on months. Having rigorously reviewed grammar books and heavily binged one too many YouTube videos of your target language, you feel ready to take that leap. You open your mouth to speak and… nothing. All of a sudden your mind goes blank. The words and thoughts in your head turn into jumbled shapes and figures kind of like the letters of a bowl of alphabet soup that has been left out too long.”
As a language learning enthusiast, I’ve tried a variety of different methods to learn languages. One of my biggest issues when starting a language was getting enough speaking practice. Over time, I’ve been able to put together the ultimate speaking exercise to practice speaking your target language on your own.
I want to emphasize that this is an exercise that I still use to this day for all the languages I learn. In this post, I’ll share with you my language learning secrets for free on how I was able to practice speaking at home alone! I assure you that you will find it useful no matter what language you are learning, no matter what level you are at.
If you want to jump straight to the guide, feel free to check out the table of contents on this page.
Reasons to Practice Speaking By Yourself
There are a variety of reasons why someone might want to practice speaking a foreign language at home by themselves.
Some reasons include:
- Lack of confidence / Fear of sounding ridiculous
- Lives in a country/region where the language isn’t spoken
- No friends/family who speak the target language
- Not being able to hold a full conversation
- Doesn’t want to spend money on a tutor/class
- No language exchange partners or partners are not helpful
- Practice on your time and schedule
- etc.
The list can go on and on.
Whatever reason that might be for you, knowing how to practice speaking your target language will be a critical skill to know at some point in your language learning journey.
Who is this Language Exercise for?
This exercise is useful for both beginners and advanced learners of a secondary language.
Let’s see how it can be helpful for each type of profile.
Language Learning for Beginners
For a beginner speaker who has trouble holding a basic conversation in their target language, this exercise will help give them the much-needed repetition needed to train their muscles and reinforce their memory.
Why is Speaking Practice Important for Beginners?
Think of an archer who is learning to shoot an arrow. They need to know how to grip the bow steadily, how to pull back the string at exactly the right force, and how to clench and loosen their muscles to be able to get exactly the right potency to launch an arrow with a precise force. Do you think someone can do that on the first try? Of course not! After days, weeks, months, and years of practice, the seasoned archer is able to know the exact positions, tenseness, posture, and breathing techniques without thinking too much. All of this is thanks to practice and training.
The same thing applies to language learning. A beginner in a foreign language needs to spend time positioning their lips and forming the right shapes with their mouths. A language learner needs to know how much air to let out of their throats and in what direction and movement they should move their tongues. They need to know how to associate certain sounds and mouth positions with words and concepts.
That is why speaking practice is so essential for beginners because we as language learners need that time spent with the language physically training our mouths to be able to produce the right sounds.
A Note on “Beginner Fear”
A typical problem among beginners is getting over their fear of speaking with other people. It’s normal to feel uncomfortable speaking in a language where you can barely string together a sentence. With other people, that stress is magnified by the fear of sounding stupid or making a spectacle of yourself.
In this post today, I won’t try to convince you to get over that fear. (We’ll save that for another day)
However, I do urge you to practice speaking out loud on your own, even if you aren’t ready to practice speaking with native speakers or other language learners yet. Scroll down to the step-by-step guide to practice speaking by yourself below to see how!
Language Learning as an Advanced Learner
Additionally, this exercise is still useful for advanced learners. By doing this exercise, you’ll be able to pinpoint your own mistakes and learn how to be even more conscious of your learning.
A common struggle that intermediate and advanced learners have is the feeling of getting stuck or reaching a plateau. That is because the words and phrases that you are learning are much less common than compared to the words, grammar concepts, and expressions you learn as a beginner that open a thousand doors every time you learn something new.
This exercise will help you become more in tune with your speaking habits and help you discover where you need to improve and sound more natural.
My Step-By-Step Guide for Solo Speaking Practice
In this step-by-step guide, we will go over all the things you need to do to be able to practice speaking at home without the help of other people.
What You Need
To improve your speaking on your own with this exercise, all you need are a couple of things:
- Camera (smartphone is perfect)
- Timer
- Conversation topic generator (can be physical or online)
- Notebook and pen
For the conversation topic generator, you can think of various topics beforehand and write them down on sticky notes or little pieces of paper. Another option is to simply google “conversation topic generator” and pick the website of your choice to create a random topic for the exercise.
With just these three things, you’re ready to get started!
Exercise Overview
This exercise mainly consists of four major phases:
- Improvised Speech
- Transcribing Your Recording
- Self-Review
- Re-writing a Second Version
- Reading Improved Speech
Going through these four phases and repeating this exercise will be a sure-fire way for you to improve your speaking abilities in your target languages.
1. Improvised Speech
In the first phase, we will use your conversation topic generator to pick a topic at random for improvised speech. Even if you have trouble holding a basic conversation, try to limit the topics to something where you can at least say a couple of disjointed phrases or sentences. If you are a little more advanced, then feel free to pick topics that might have more difficult vocabulary.
The key here, however, is that we will time and record ourselves. That way, we can watch our recording back and study the mistakes that we make when improvising. I personally like to limit my speech to 1-2 minutes to have a decent amount of content to work with.
When improvising, the important thing is trying to express yourself naturally. If there is a word or concept that you don’t know how to say in your target language, say it in your native language and you can make note of it later when reviewing your mistakes.
2. Transcribing Your Recording
Once you have the recording done, what you want to do is play back the recording and attempt to transcribe it by listening to it various times. I prefer to transcribe with pen and paper but a computer can work as well. I just think there is something to forming the letters with a pen on paper that helps reinforce your understanding of your target language.
Transcribing is important because it gives you listening practice and encourages you to notice mistakes and habits that you have while speaking your target languages. At the same time, it gives you a text where you can review and write notes and corrections. The simple thought-process of re-reading your own text, correcting mistakes, and analyzing better ways to describe what you had first tried to describe is going to be beneficial to your comprehension of your target foreign language.
Depending on the language and your level in that language, you may choose to transcribe only a portion of your recording. I like to do this also for languages where the writing system is different from my native language (English). So for example, for Cantonese, my ability to write Chinese characters is limited so I choose to only transcribe a paragraph, or a small portion, of my recording.
3. Self-Review
Great! Now that we have your transcription written down, let’s analyze some of our mistakes.
No worries if we are not able to detect all the mistakes that we make (if you have help from a friend, family, or tutor you can ask them as well to review your recording). At the very least, take note of the mistakes that you do know you made.
Tip: Transcribing your speaking practice and making corrections allows you to internalize your habits and mistakes.
Above you can see an example of a transcribed Spanish exercise that I performed. Not only have I’ve made some corrections and grammar mistakes but I also put in some suggestions for word choice and tried to add in some words and phrases that I had learned previously. If you want to see the video where I do this, check out the a video of my Spanish speaking practice in the appendix below.
In general, I like to review my transcripts in three distinct passes:
First Pass - Mistakes
For the first pass, I like to go over all grammar mistakes, bad word usage, spelling mistakes, etc. I make a note on the sidelines of my transcription so I know where I need to make changes for when I draft my second version of the speech.
Second Pass - Missing Vocabulary
Then I take a second pass to look up the words that I had to say in my native language or that I left blank. These are known gaps in my target language so I make sure that I write a note of how to say the word in my target language. This is a great way to build a vocabulary list for words you want to study and review shortly.
Third Pass - Improved Flow and Word Choice
For my third and final pass, I tried to improve my speech by adding more native phrases and word choice. This is also a good time to add new sentences for words and expressions that you have recently learned.
The main benefit of doing this is it allows you to think critically about how a native speaker might phrase a particular sentence. Adding sentences for words that you recently learned is a great way to get even more repetition and reinforce your understanding of the word.
4. Re-writing a Second Version
After your self-review, it’s time to draft up the new version of your recording. Taking into account all of the mistakes you had made plus all of the improvements you want to add to your speech, write down – physically with pen and paper – the second version.
You can then, of course, review this second version and make improvements to it.
5. Reading Your Improved Text
Finally, for the last part of this speaking exercise, we will read our second draft of the speech out loud. It’s not important to memorize your speech or that this second version is not improvised. Reading your improved version out loud helps you internalize the changes that you made. So make sure that you don’t skip this step and speak out loud.
Additionally, I like to record this second reading to be able to see the contrast between the first version and the second version.
From here on out you have many choices. You can make further improvements to your second recording. You could also try to improvise a second conversation topic and rinse and repeat. This also can be a good stopping point for your language learning study session.
Conclusion
That’s it!
I would recommend performing this exercise at least once a week (ideally various days a week), to start seeing some improvements in your speaking abilities.
If you want to see more video examples of this technique in action, please check out one of the video examples I made on my YouTube channel below in the Appendix. I’ll add an example for both Spanish and Cantonese, which are two languages that I am studying.
I hope you found this step-by-step guide helpful for your language learning study routine.
Happy language learning and see you next time!
Appendix
Below are some more examples of where I utilize this exercise to improve my speaking level in a foreign language. Feel free to check them out for some inspiration.