Stop Talking

Why active listening is the most underrated skill in language learning and how training it will transform your speaking

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.

A conversation is mostly listening when done right, so working on your listening skills will be just as important as teaching yourself to think in your target language. When you are able to read body language you are able to use critical thinking to discern what is being said to you. Eventually, of course, you are going to want to understand everything. Until then, though, tying a person's body language to their intended message in a meaningful and logical sequence will be an incredible addition to your language skills.

Ideally you will be able to learn the mannerisms that are typical of the people who speak your target language natively. These will generally change depending on the region, but there are often things that stand out across native speakers. For example, Italians always speak with their hands. Stereotypes do come from somewhere!

Once you have a decent grasp of the mannerisms and body language you can integrate into your speaking practice, you can use introduce them as communication strategies. This will simultaneously build your confidence and buy you time as you learn to express yourself more eloquently. You might also find that more and more people are mistaking you for a native speaker which is always a fantastic feeling.

Using context clues to fill in the blanks

When you can read a message by understanding what someone is saying with their body language you will find conversations far more simple. As you practice speaking you should be focused on three things. Spoken language, body language, and context clues. Each of these things will ensure you are able to develop masterful communication strategies.

1. Spoken Language

The words that are being said. Obviously this is important. The goal is to get to a point where you can understand every word someone is saying. Listening skills are the most important when you have a decent grasp of the language. In all likelihood you will spend more time listening to the new language than you spend doing just about anything else with it. However, even if you do understand every word you might not understand the message in its entirety. That's where body language skills come in to play.

2. Body language

Everything that happens in a conversation that is unspoken. So many teachers try to teach speaking without also working to teach students how important unspoken communication strategies are. When you can read someone's body language you can understand the message before even hearing what is being said. If you know a decent amount of the new language and you can understand over half of the words that were said you need only one more thing: context clues.

3. Contexts clues

Being able to fill in the blanks when you have context is vital for reaching fluency in a second language. You are going to need to work with context clues for months, even years, before you are able to understand everything without them. Even people who have been speaking a language natively for decades find they need the help of context clues to understand different terms in the books they are reading. Never underestimate the power of filling in the blanks with educated guesses.

All of these things will help you slow down. The reason shutting up sometimes is the best way to learn to speak is because you need to be comfortable with silence. It is a loud world, everything happens quickly and it can be easy to feel awkward when there is silence. Being silent is not a problem. Awkward is not a problem. People are generous and gracious, they will be patient with you and slowly speaking is better than never speaking. Learn to use context clues in your conversations and when you are reading. They will help you develop your language skills and open you up to entirely new sets of vocabulary words.

Finding the confidence to speak

The reason these things do not work in a classroom environment most of the time is because people are not comfortable. People rarely get to tell their own stories in controlled practice environments and that can and will affect their body language and word choice. That is why speaking ability is tied closely with one's ability and desire to hold conversations. Speaking requires creative thinking because you are going to be telling a story. How interesting that story is will be heavily dependent on your ability to weave words together on the fly.

Understanding and learning to use body language will make spoken language easier to deal with in conversations. When someone can guess what you are saying simply by watching your gestures you can save yourself lots of heartache trying to explain to them after the third "what" they launch your way. There are many ways to build confidence in oral communication. It is a shame that body language is not more focused on in schools. Fortunately, you are in control of your education now and you can add body language skills to your routine. For a look into that check out BowTiedOwl on YouTube!

Once you have your body language skills fleshed out a bit, it is time to add correlating language. When you know how to demonstrate frustration with your gestures you can think about ways to connect frustrated language with those gestures. The same goes for happy, sad, excited, every emotion has language that coincides with it.

All of that spoken language also has body language that correlates. Adding all of these things to your language learning repertoire will give you a huge boost. Not only can you walk into several different situations confidently, you can read more real life situations accurately even if you do necessarily know a bunch of new words.

Mastering this is going to involve role plays more likely than not. If you are not willing to make mistakes in front of yourself, you are going to have a difficult time speaking with people in real life. You are invariably going to make mistakes. The more you do it in front of yourself when you are practicing, the less you will do it when it is game time and you are speaking to people in real time.

Whether you like it or not, unless you are taking classes you have to teach speaking to yourself. These are some excellent ways to go about it. Self evaluation will be difficult, but if you are speaking, reading, and writing often you will feel it when you progress.

Conclusion

Learning to speak involves more listening than most people might think. More importantly, though, it involves more watching than people realize. The truth is, most communication is non verbal. Learning a language is phenomenal, but memorizing vocabulary and practicing grammar are not the only things you must do to become fluent. Body language is everywhere and classroom activities for speaking skills always miss it.

Discerning the meaning of sentences based primarily on the message you are getting from someone's body language is a super power. You do not have to learn to read body language to learn a second language. In fact, if you spend too much time on it you will likely be hindering more than helping. That said, if you can find the perfect balance between spoken language, body language, and educated guesses via context clues, you become conversational quickly.

Becoming bilingual is difficult, but you can do difficult things and be great. So go do difficult things and become great. Here I’ve given you some of the tools, but in the end, there is no comprehensive guide, no tips or tricks to carry anyone across the finish line. Language acquisition requires time, effort, and consistency. That said, it is something that anyone of any age is more than capable of accomplishing. I’ll be here rooting for you and watching your progress.

If this post made you rethink your approach, the next step is replacing what isn’t working. My free downloadable PDFs give you exercises and frameworks that no app provides. Real output practice designed to get you speaking, not just tapping.

Want to skip the trial-and-error entirely? My private students go from zero to conversational in 12 weeks with a course built around their goals, their schedule, and their life. See what that looks like.