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About the development of speaking skills

“Knowing a foreign language” and “being able to speak it” are VERY different things. Professional translators know the language very deeply, but sometimes they speak worse than the secretary girl, who cleverly operates with two to three hundred memorized phrases. They have different tasks: translators deal with complex texts, and the job of a secretary is short typical conversations.

If a person already knows a foreign language, learning to speak for him is a matter of several days or weeks. That’s really difficult, and what you need to strive for is to “learn” a foreign language, that is, to understand how words are related to it in each other, to understand the internal principles by which it works.

“A thick cuira of shteko budlanula boquer and curls little bokrenka”. This phrase from nonexistent words was proposed at the beginning of the 20th century by academician L.V. Shcherba. It is clear from it that “budlanula” is the action that kuzdra (zh.R.) performed in relation to the bokra (m. R.), The bokrenok, most likely, the cub of the bokra. For a Russian, this is immediately obvious. A foreigner will have to learn Russian first. The phrase shows that language is NOT WORDS. Words easily pass from one language to another. Language is the principle by which words communicate with each other.

There is absolutely nothing complicated in learning to speak - this is an invented problem. And the main reason for frequent failures is that people try, as the English say, put the cart before the horse, to put the cart in front of the horse. They are trying to start talking, not understanding how the words in the language are connected - with disastrous consequences. Which we observe everywhere. Trying to speak without learning a language is like trying to run without learning to walk.

The article does not examine the level of Rousseau tourists when they say "half infinitives, half signs" - this is not a language at all, strictly speaking. The ability to "speak a foreign language" means three levels:

1st level:The ability to express your thoughts in a simple but grammatical way. For example, not knowing the expression “close the window” they say easier: “close the window, but not completely.”

Level 2: The ability to speak on specific topics with exactly those phrases that native speakers use (cover the window).

There is a real story about a Russian mathematician who lectured in English for an hour and a half in Oxford. He mentioned degrees, roots, numerators, denominators of fractions and other mathematical things that not every translator will be able to describe without special training.

And after the lecture, a girl approached him, probably with the aim of flirting, and turned with a simple colloquial phrase. Do you know what the Russian mathematician who just gave a lecture in English answered her? He said: "Sorry, I don't speak English." He answered, of course, not quite correctly - in English he spoke quite professionally, but only on one topic - a description of mathematical formulas and actions.

3rd: Media level - the ability to speak on any topic with phrases that sound naturally in this language.

How soon can I go to these levels? You can go to the first level “just to be understood” in 2 weeks - it’s checked by yourself.

The second language at my university was French. Taught him, to put it mildly, badly.
The material that was studied for 4 years, with a competent teacher, could be mastered almost between cases in a couple of months, there was no conversational practice at all. And right after graduation, I needed to urgently speak French in 2 months. I decided to go to France.

Landing in Marseilles, in French I can’t connect two words, in the mouth a phrase book. However, I favorably differed from the ordinary tourist in that the phrases in the phrasebook were not a random set of sounds for me - I understood the laws by which these phrases were built, and if I wanted, I could easily make, for example, a negative or replace one word with another . Three days later, without looking into the phrasebook, I fluently spoke on the main everyday topics: how to get there, how much it costs, what it is called, who you work for, because the situations in which these phrases were needed were repeated several times
a day.

In just two weeks I was already quite fluently talking on socio-political issues!

Of course, due to lack of vocabulary, it was easier to formulate: instead of “falling higher education standards causes growing concern among the intelligentsia”, something like: “Smart people think that university education has become bad.”

The first stage in the development of speech - we learn to express our thoughts so that you are simply understood, but at the same time grammatically correct.

And after 2 months of staying in France, the people who watched me throughout the whole period were very surprised at how quickly I learned to build common sentences, and sometimes even without errors - I managed to pick up and work out many stable phrases for typical situations. I was amazed how quickly I managed to speak a language that, as it seemed to me, I did not know at all.

After analyzing my experience, I realized that at the time of my arrival in France I had something more important than the ability to speak: I had an understanding, if not all, but of the basic principles of constructing the French proposal.

If this understanding did not exist, not two months, not even a year in France would give me such a result. And yes, every day before lunch, I performed exercises for translating from Russian into French for a couple of hours on the beach.

And yes, all 2 months constantly looked in the dictionary. I didn’t do anything supernatural - anyone can learn to fluently speak a foreign language in a couple of months without a teacher. On simple topics necessary for tourists - even in a couple of days. Under one condition - that a person already understands the principles of the connection of words in a language.

The 2nd level is when a person is no longer satisfied with “just conveying a thought” and he begins to search for exact, naturally sounding phrases that native speakers themselves use in a given situation. For example, our expression “catch the bus" does not correspond at all to the English sit on the bus. There is a separate stable expression for this.

For almost every situation, each language has its own stable phrases, each situation should be considered separately if you want to sound absolutely like a native speaker in all situations. This level has less than 1% of professional translators with experience. So try to ask the male translator of the English language how to “thread the needle” in English. 9 out of 10 chances - he does not know. But to say so that the Englishman understands what kind of thought he is trying to express is fully within his power. But this phrase may know a girl with an Elementary level, who watched the embroidery video on YouTube.

Yes, people who work as interpreters, who look very authoritative and representative, in fact often do not know the stable phrases that native speakers use in a given situation and slide down to the first level - they simply convey the necessary thought so that they are understood.

Professionals who want to sound exactly like a medium are searching for phrases that sound natural in a given life situation for 20-30 years. To cover the whole spectrum of these situations, and still keep all these phrases in mind, even in the language environment it will take about 10 years. And this is provided that you make serious efforts, and not just “live” there. By the way, some “naturally-sounding phrases” used in England will sound strange in the USA and vice versa.

Speaking is primarily a reaction, the ability to instantly compose a phrase. And these reactions need to be developed and maintained, as a sports form. If you ran a marathon in three hours today, this does not mean that you will have the same result after a month on the couch. With speaking a foreign language the same thing happens.

Just speaking fluently does not mean that you will speak fluently after a serious break.

When I arrived in Russia after 6 months in the USA, my relatives asked me a question in Russian, and I automatically answered in English. Two days later it passed. Two months later, in a conversation on Skype
with American friends, I found that the reactions were no longer the same - I sometimes had to think about how to build a phrase. I did not become worse at knowing the language - I just weakened the reaction.

The principle of the development of reaction in colloquial speech can be illustrated with the help of a sports metaphor.

Professional marathoners train up to three times a day, sometimes running up to 400 km per week. If they stretch these 400 km per month, there will be no result, although it seems that they are the same 400 km. The same thing happens with speaking skills. People go for 2-3 times a week for a variety of conversational courses and wonder why they never learned to speak.

The mode of 2-3 lessons per week is quite effective for studying the grammatical base, the basics of the language. If the task is to start talking, it makes sense to revise the class schedule.

Otherwise, what happens? In an hour and a half of conversation, you have developed subtle, unsteady reactions. Break day - these reactions are gone. You will develop them again in the next lesson. Then a 3 day break - these reactions are gone. Phrases that you learn, understand, remain in my memory, but for some reason they are not remembered in a real conversation.
Therefore, going to the conversation club once a week, by and large, is pampering, although better than nothing.

Words and phrases that a person knows are divided into active and passive. Active ones are those that you can use at any moment - they are worked out to full automatism (an example - I love you - everyone knows and can use at any moment). Passive words and phrases are those that you recognize in someone else’s speech or in the text, you understand, but you cannot remember at the right time. They will automatically start to “fly out” only after they have been used several times in a real or game communication situation.

Russian people, by the way, know a great many English words well, not knowing about it. And they constantly learn new ones. It would seem paradoxical - borrowed words are absorbed without effort: spoiler, discount, website, boyfriend. And when it comes to similar words in the same English language, for some reason they are not remembered. This happens exactly for the same reason that many people cannot speak - the language itself first learns - speaking and vocabulary after this is no longer a problem. Words are much easier to remember if they fit into the finished operating system of the language.

The skill of speaking develops in three stages.

1. We understand how words are related in a language. If you take European languages, a good teacher will give it in 3-4 months. This is the most difficult stage in learning a language when the help of a teacher is really necessary. In English, I personally went through this stage myself, it took several years with good abilities.

Incidentally, I intentionally do not use the term “grammar”. Textbooks and teachers love to tell HOW to build a phrase and call it grammar. But almost never make out, WHY EXACTLY. Without understanding WHY, SO man will always be confused when constructing even elementary phrases.

2. Be sure to understand what specific topics you want to learn to speak. And already starting from this, choose the right material for the preparatory work.

There are a series of convenient textbooks for independent work containing a set of the most popular conversational topics. These textbooks are built very simply: at any turn one of such topics is given, for example, “Student Life”. On the left are shown (often in the form of dialogs) standard words and phrases on this topic, on the right are exercises for fixing these phrases. The correct answers are given at the end of the tutorial. One textbook is not enough - you can take another from the same series, for example, devoted entirely to phrasal verbs. It will have the same topics, but the words and phrases will be slightly different. Few textbooks - in the public domain there are dialogues voiced by native speakers with transcripts
for each of the relevant topics.

Thus, if you need to learn how to speak correctly on some simple topic, preparatory work can be done in half a day without any teacher, armed with a pair of such books and dialogues. Phrasebooks, by the way, are also very useful and inexpensive thing - the phrases in them are given really running and verified by native speakers. I repeat, all these wonderful books and dialogues will really help only if you already know a foreign language, i.e. you understand how words are connected in it.

For some time it is necessary to slowly, thoughtfully carry out translation exercises from Russian into a foreign language.

Thousands of students fail because they are trying to speak, bypassing the stage of translation exercises. It’s the same as learning to ride a bike right away without holding the wheel.

Anyway, of course, you will learn in the end. But things will go much faster if you first learn how to just balance, controlling the steering wheel with your hands, and only then try to let go.

3. And only shortly before the moment when the ability to speak is needed in real life, you can begin to develop conversational reactions. Here, elements of lively conversational practice are needed, and classes will have to be made more frequent - breaks, even on the same day, are fatal for the development of reactions.

If the spoken language is not urgently needed, it is much more useful to develop not reactions, that is, the ability to instantly pull out the necessary turns from the memory, but to concentrate on the preparatory work described in the previous paragraph.

The basic principle in the development of colloquial speech is to speak a lot and speak often, with minimal breaks between practical speaking situations. If the process is started, it cannot be stopped. Therefore, you need to think carefully before proceeding with the development of the speaking skill: do you have enough free hours, do you really need to urgently develop it. Because you run the risk of wasting your time, and by the time the language is really needed, the reactions that you have developed will be gone.

The fulfilled words and phrases will not be forgotten for a long time, but they will go into passivity - you will still recognize them in someone else's speech and texts, but you will not be able to use them at the right time.

But there is good news: if once the skill of fluent speaking was developed, it is easier to restore it than to develop it for the first time - it works the same way as muscle memory.

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