M2M Day 152: Attempting to hold a 30-minute conversation in a foreign language
This post is part of Month to Master, a 12-month accelerated learning project. For April, my goal is to hold a 30-minute conversation in Hebrew on the future of technology.
Today, I start a new month and a new challenge: Can I hold a 30-minute conversation on the future of technology in Hebrew (a foreign language) after one month of intensive practice?
Defining success
At the end of this month, I will invite over a friend, who speaks Hebrew, to have a 30-minute conversation on camera. I won’t prep my friend in any capacity, other than telling him that we will be conversing about “the future of technology”. He may prepare some questions. He may not. That will be up to him. Once the camera is rolling, we will converse for the 30 straight minutes entirely in Hebrew.
If I can keep the conversation going for the all 30 minutes and remain completely in Hebrew (unless I’m saying the English name of a thing that doesn’t have a Hebrew equivalent), I’ll consider this month a success.
My starting point
Like most other challenges, I’m not starting from zero: I studied Hebrew at Brown for a few semesters, and also lived in Tel Aviv for six-months during my junior year of college.
Based on my time spent in the classroom and in Israel, you’d probably expect that I can string together reasonably decent Hebrew sentences. Sadly, this isn’t exactly the case.
While studying, I was comfortable reading and writing Hebrew at an intermediate level, but I always had a fear of speaking. As time passed and the expectation that I could speak intensified, this fear (and my speaking) became worse. Also, since my language classes were mostly assessed on paper, I wasn’t extrinsically motivated to overcome my fear.
While living in Tel Aviv, I barely spoke Hebrew outside the classroom. Almost everyone in Tel Aviv speaks English, so, as soon as they heard my accent or mangled sentence, they would speak in English, which I regretfully went along with.
It’s been three years since I was in Tel Aviv, which was essentially the last time I spoke in Hebrew.
One year ago, I tried to start Hebrew lessons, but after a couple sessions, I felt too busy, and cancelled them.
So, I’m starting from a point where 1. On paper, I should be able to speak Hebrew (at least decently), 2. I never got to the point where I could sound reasonably intelligent in the language, and 3. I’m very rusty and have forgotten most of my vocabulary.
But, I’m also starting from a point of intense desire to break through my fear. I’m prepared to work very hard for this.
A few more words on my fear
I don’t think my fear of speaking a foreign language is unique. In fact, most people who have learned a language in a classroom (i.e. high school Spanish for a lot of Americans) can’t speak much more than “¿Dónde está el baño?”.
In general, learning a language in a classroom isn’t a great way to become a proficient speaker, and I can certainly attest to this.
Anyway, beyond just being unprepared from my classroom training, I have a particular fear of speaking that materializes in the following two main ways:
- When I’m conversing in Hebrew, I struggle to comprehend what others are saying, which means, in these situations, I usually don’t know how to respond and so stare dumbly back at the speaker. To some degree, my personal identity is tied to my ability to speaking reasonably intelligently about things, so Hebrew conversation definitely challenges this.
- My grammar skills in a foreign language are actually quite good. I have a strong memory, and find it easy to remember the rules of Hebrew. The problem is that, on the spot, when I mentally construct a sentence in Hebrew, my grammar filter usually knows that the sentence isn’t quite right (but doesn’t know how to fix it). So, rather than saying the slightly broken sentence, in the past, I’ve chosen to say nothing.
I’ll talk more about my fear, and how I plan to overcome it, in upcoming posts. For now, the important thing is… My personal combination of not wanting to look dumb and my strong grammatical filter turns me into a very mute conversationalist.
Why “The Future of Tech”?
This month, I’m specifically trying to have a conversation about technology and it’s predicted impact on the future. Thus, I will be heavily catering my Hebrew studies to this topic.
The idea is that, by having this focus, I’ll be able to reach a high level of proficiency in a narrow topic that I like, rather than low level proficiency in many topics. Additionally, by limiting my focus and learning with a thesis in mind, it’s easier for me to make associations between the words I’m learning and the concepts I’m trying to communicate, which certainly eases the acquisition process.
Finally, if I ever use my Hebrew for a practical purpose, it would likely be in the context of technology, so this seems like a reasonable place to focus.
Anyway, I’m really excited about this month and can’t wait to get started…
Read the next post. Read the previous post.
