Don't Talk Before You Can Speak

A really important distinction in language learning is between speaking and talking. A lot of language learners confuse them for the same thing when they’re not. As any crazy person will attest, you don’t need someone else in order to speak. You can speak to yourself, you can speak to a wall, you can speak whenever and wherever you want.

Why talking is so much harder

Talking, on the other hand, requires another person and it includes both speaking and listening. And the speaking component is different from speaking when you’re by yourself. It is subject to implicit rules such as how long after someone finishes speaking should you take before you respond (it’s not a long time). It involves using a range of mannerisms and body language as well, which increases your cognitive load. It generally requires relating to the topic that another person has introduced and that you may not be familiar with, so on and so forth.

The mistake most learners make

Talking is much harder than speaking. And the mistake that a lot of language learners make is they completely avoid speaking because they think they can only speak when they have someone to talk to. There’s no point in them practicing talking when they’re not ready. This isn’t entirely wrong. Conversation with, say, a native speaker at full pelt will be too much for most novice language learners. There are caveats to that, but even in friendlier contexts, such as with a tutor, or a language exchange partner, speaking with a native is still going to be too much because you don’t have the base vocabulary to understand and contribute to such a conversation.

Why you don’t need to wait

However, you can still, and I argue should, practice speaking from day one because speaking is a different skill to talking. Contrary to what comprehensible-input proponents say, who propose not even thinking about speaking for two years until you’ve been exposed to the language enough to build up a sufficient vocabulary.

Whilst that isn’t entirely wrong, it means for those two years you’re not practicing speaking at all. And when you finally get around to doing it, it will be massively neglected as a skill and you’ll be playing catch up. You don’t need a huge vocabulary to practice speaking. You need some knowledge of the sound system of the new language. You need some knowledge of pronunciation. You possibly need some knowledge of spelling rules but it’s far from essential. That’s really about it. And those things can be learned in a week, a few days, unlike building up a vocabulary of, say, a thousand words that will allow you to have the most basic of conversations. And once you’ve learned those basic things — sounds, pronunciation, spelling rules — you can then practice your speaking.

What this actually looks like in practice

At first, you may not be fully speaking, but just vocalising. That’s producing the new sounds and new sound combinations of your target language. Saying the French “u” sound (/y/) on repeat, which you make by saying E with your tongue and mouth, but with your lips making a circular shape. And then slowly you can introduce another sound before that so you’re saying two sounds at once. And then you can contrast that sound grouping with a minimal pair, so you’re able to recognise and pronounce two similar but different sounds. So on and so forth. And then over time, once you’ve learned spelling rules, you can start reading out sentences, even if you don’t know all the words in the sentence. I appreciate for some languages, such as French, this is harder than others, but languages like Italian and Spanish, which have very consistent phonetic spelling, you can do this very quickly.

You don’t need to know the words to be able to practice vocalising and speaking the language. Listen to an audio clip of a native speaker speaking a passage and then repeat. You can repeat right after them to try and mimic their cadence. You can also get feedback. Maybe record a bunch of clips and send them to a language exchange partner. You can find a tutor online to correct your clips or you can do that live in a lesson. These are all things you can do to improve your speaking well before you have a base vocabulary that allows you to actually talk to people and partake in conversations.

Just speak

And if you don’t do this, you will find maybe you’ll do comprehensible input for three years, have quite strong vocabulary, then start working on your speaking skills and you’ll realise they’re behind. You’ll realise your mouth feels funny because it’s not used to actually reproducing the sounds of the language. So I write all this to say: speak, as soon as you can, and then when you’re comfortable and have a wider vocabulary, you can start to talk.