Notes · Note 02 · 3 min read
How to practice speaking a language when there’s nobody to talk to
Your app says you’re on a 90 day streak. Then a real person asks you something and you point at the menu.
Language apps are very good at getting you to recognize words. Producing them is a separate skill and it needs its own practice. The usual advice is to find a conversation partner, which is good advice and hard to follow at eleven at night.
01Talk to yourself on purpose
Narrate what you’re doing while you cook. Describe the room you’re in. It feels silly for about two days. After that you start noticing the exact words you don’t have. That list is the most useful thing a learner can keep.
02Answer a real question every day
Narrating keeps you in simple sentences and the present tense. To stretch, answer something with an opinion in it, like what makes a good day or whether a quiet life is a wasted one. You’ll need the past tense, reasons and the word for “but”, which is where a language starts to get hard.
03Keep going when a word won’t come
Describe around it. “The thing you use to open wine” gets you to the end of the sentence. Stopping to look it up trains you to stop, so write the word down afterwards instead.
Stopping to look it up trains you to stop.
04Listen back once a week
Record yourself answering one question. Listening is uncomfortable and very informative. You’ll hear the filler you lean on, whether it’s “basically”, “matlab” or “o sea”.
05Make it something you’d come back to
We built Color with Words for this. Pick English, Hindi, Spanish, Japanese or German. Each morning a painting arrives as a sketch with one question. Answer it out loud and the color comes back while you talk. The wrap afterwards shows the new words you reached for and the filler you leaned on.
Try it tonight
Answer one question out loud and watch Young Woman with a Water Pitcher color in while you talk.