Slow down

You have to walk before you can run

Welcome, aspiring polyglot! Believe it or not, one of the most common issues I deal with both as an instructor and as a language learner is people trying to speed up before they are ready. I do it, too. Over the last decade, though, I have learned that sometimes the best way to move quickly is by moving smoothly and, sometimes, you have to slow down to be smooth. This is particularly true when talking about speech in a foreign language, but it does affect every area of language acquisition on some level.

Reading out loud

In class I make everyone read out loud. If it were up to me, I would trust people to read out loud on their own time, but then I don’t even trust myself to do that. Plus, reading aloud in class gives me an opportunity to make any necessary accent adjustments in real time. As I repeat to the people with whom I work frequently, it is easier to address a problem in real time than to amend a bad habit.

The problem that arises almost every single time is the same: people want to go fast. I understand the urge, too. If you speak x words per minute in English why wouldn’t you expect the same in your new language, especially when everyone else seems to be speaking so quickly? You can and will get to that point, but before you do you have to train your muscles to work for you.

Most people overlook one very simple fact of language learning that is more physiological than mental. Whenever you speak a language, you are engaging over 20 muscles in order to form words and annunciate or pronounce things. As you learn a new language, you find out quickly that the shapes you make while speaking one language are not necessarily the same shapes you will have to make when speaking another.

You quite literally have to train the muscles in your face to move at the speed with which you wish to speak. That is not something that happens overnight. They are, after all, muscles. Training them daily for 20 minutes by reading aloud will speed this process up and get you to the point where you can speed through whatever sentences you happen to be reading or thinking.

Speaking

Slowing down is also effective when you are speaking, but not in the way you may think. When I say “slow down” while speaking, I do not mean speak slower. What I mean is that you should be taking time to think through your sentences before you start them. In one’s native language, it is often the case that a sentence is started well before it has been thought through. In fact, many times people will speak without thinking through the sentence at all.

While I may not recommend this in one’s native language, it is something that you absolutely cannot be doing in your target language. Over time as you improve, maybe you can start speaking without thinking, but I would still advise against it. In the beginning, though, you have to think all the way through to the end of your sentence before you start speaking. It is crucial for both coherence and confidence.

Nothing is more demoralizing than hearing “what?” three times after you lay out a sentence in your target language; and nothing brings that question about quite like starting a sentence before you know where it is going. Most people have the urge to fill the silence, so they will start the sentence because, well, everyone knows how to start a sentence. Then, quickly, they find out that they haven’t though through the verbs, who is doing the verbs, what the person is like, how they are executing the verb, or the consequences therein.

This lack of forethought leads to stumbling, ums, uhhs, and heins, which are fine, at first, but quickly become frustrating. From here it is a vicious negative feedback loop as frustration leads to stress and stress leads to cortisol spikes and cortisol spikes lead to an inability to think quickly and coherently which leads to more frustration. All of this is amplified by the amount of time one has spent learning the language as well.

Fortunately, there are a few easy fixes. The first is as mentioned above, always think through to the end of your sentence. If you put in the work to train your facial muscles, these two things should compound and make communication far easier from a physical standpoint. Fixing the mental portion is just as simple, but perhaps a bit more difficult.

Writing

People who speak to me every week are probably tired of hearing me say this, but if you write you will speak better. Writing is speaking without the time crunch and audience. When you write you are writing for you, but you are still thinking of the words in the exact same way you will do when speaking. Training your ability to recall words on demand for the right situations is vital. Well, I cannot think of a single better way to do this than writing.

Not only that, but as you begin speaking more and more and you realize that no one is really paying any attention to the mistakes that you are making you will see that writing is also the only way you can see your mistakes. Without seeing your mistakes they become almost impossible to correct. As we have already discussed, fixing bad habits is far more difficult than fixing minor mistakes as they first begin to appear.

Still, slowing down when writing is just as important as slowing down during everything else. The amount of times I have a student send me sentences or writing and I can tell they rushed through it by the mistakes they made would astound you. In fact, one of my favorite questions (and my students least favorite probably) is, “what do you see that you did wrong here?" because 95% of the time, they can see the mistakes they made if they take just a moment to look.

If nothing else, writing will show you just how important slowing down is and, hopefully, you will carry that into the other aspects of language acquisition. People fight me almost every day on writing. The benefits are very abstract until you start doing it and keep doing it for at least a couple of weeks. Try it, though. Write 10 sentences per day in your target language for 21 days straight. That’s only 3 weeks. Watch how much changes for you.

Conclusion

Slowing down is the last thing most people want to do when they are trying to capitalize on any momentum they have during their language acquisition. Unfortunately, it also happens to be one of the single greatest super powers one can have as they learn just about anything. Training yourself to slow down is no easy feat as it goes against almost every instinct you have, but it works. So, when you find yourself getting tongue twisted, try to slow down and remember: slow is smooth and smooth is fast.

Every time you succeed in stopping yourself you are one step closer to fluency. Thinking things through before you say them is how fluent speakers use language. It feels like you are taking longer than them because you are taking longer than them.

The only way to fix that is by slowly training yourself to think faster and faster. That is why it is so crucial to do this with every area of language acquisition and not just speaking or reading. It will be difficult, but you can do difficult things and be great, so go out and do some difficult things and become great. I am rooting for you.

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