Stop Talking

The secret tool for mastering speaking skills in your target language

Welcome, aspiring polyglot! As with most things, there are quite a few counterintuitive pieces of learning a new language. Learning to stop talking while you practice your speaking skills is one of those. Part of oral communication is listening and when you add active listening to your learning process you will find it is easier to speak. Finding ways to be comfortable with silence is vital for developing public speaking skills.

While not all speaking is public speaking, if you do develop high level public speaking skills you will notice that they also help you speak your target language with native speakers. Understanding open ended questions is a big part of learning to answer questions. There is, however, a cheat code.

Learning body language will allow you to get comfortable speaking without having to understand everything anyone says. Training yourself to read body language is one of the most effective strategies in teaching yourself to speak proficiently. When you do not have to think about what was said you can spend more time formulating your response.

A gesture is worth one thousand words

Most language learners focus on the right things. They do tend to miss quite a bit, too, simply because of how much there is to learn. Body language is an entirely different subject and most will find it surprising that I recommend studying it when you are teaching speaking to yourself. Real life communication contains mostly body language effective instruction would include body language in second language acquisition. When you are developing communication strategies it is important to remember that at least half of what is being communicated is not being spoken.