How To Practice A Foreign Language And Start Speaking Fluently?

SpeakMatesCom
Aug 28, 2017 · 3 min read

I know exactly how difficult it is to learn a second language because I have been there twice. First time when I started learning language was when I was 22 and started studying English.

Although I was not very young to learn a new language I now think that it was still a pretty nice age to focus on learning something.

Actually I believe the age is not relevant in education we must continuously improve ourselves and learn new things. However it is also a fact that as you get older it gets more difficult to race with kids or youngsters especially when it is about learning a new language.

I am in my early forties now and trying to learn Japanese with little success till now. Thanks to technology, there is great deal of online materials and resources to speed up the language learning process. 20 years ago I would not be able to imagine having such a rich and almost free resources.

But the problem remains the same, you need to have a strong commitment to achieve some level of understanding the grammar and accumulation of at least a daily vocabulary. If you have these then you just have to try to communicate with people using all you have.

So I could say there are basically two parts in learning; first is the understanding of the framework of the language and second is just to practice it as much as possible.

First part is relatively easier if you really put your heart to learning the language, as I said there are plenty of resources over the Internet or even offline. What is more difficult is the second part that is to use whatever you know to speak the language and communicate, because it requires to be brave enough to make a lot of mistakes, be laughed at and even feel stupid.

And that is where many of us get stuck in learning language. Sometimes it is even difficult to find an environment to practice the language with a real world setup. Although there are online live practice sites, which are actually great in some ways, I think it is very important to practice the language on a face-to-face basis.

It may be frustrating or intimidating to talk to people face to face with a language you are not comfortable with but that is exactly the point. You have to feel the reaction of the people when you say something right and when you say something wrong, you have to feel stupid sometimes when you make mistake so that you will never do it again.

You also have to hear others speaking with the same confidence and making the similar mistakes then you will even be more appreciative of your efforts, more comfortable with making mistakes because everyone is same.

This is why we started to bring people together in SpeakMates.com to practice a language with a peer group and a language mentor.

We believe it is very important to collaborate in small groups where all mates can find a room to speak and listen about a topic with the facilitation of the mentor. We don’t want you to feel like you are studying; on the contrary we want you to socialize with peers, have fun and also get some practice as bonus.

You can find the original at https://www.speakmates.com/blog/how-to-practice-a-foreign-language/

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We are a Language Speaking Club, meet like-minded people in your city and start speaking. Visit www.speakmates.com

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