What To Do When You Don't Have a Partner To Practice Language With?
Especially if you're learning by yourself, it's sometimes hard to find a partner to practice the language with. Here in this post, I'll share how you can do it by yourself!
Sorry for having abandoned this series for quite a time :”D
In the last post, I have talked about how I self-learnt Reading and Listening, today I’m gonna talk about Speaking and Writing.
The reason why I separate Speaking and Writing is that these two skills require you to actively produce the language. You have to express your opinion either verbally or the shape of words. Hence, this is the most challenging things for me as I have no one to practice with. Thus, I have to do everything alone.
If you’re struggling with these two skills, this post is perfect for you!
And the general practice here is:
Be your own critic
🤨 Are you saying that I’m going to split my mind in half, one half criticises the other?
Well, no actually :’D
This is a technique that I learn from making art. After drawing for about an hour, I will leave the painting, go around a bit, do some chores, or simply go downstairs and hug my dog and play with him for a while.
The magic here is, when I get back, I see my painting with a fresher mind, and is able to spot what’s not going well in my painting. Sometimes I even gain new ideas thanks to it.
So how can I apply this to learning Speaking and Writing?
Here’s how I did it: I divided my week, so that I will learn each skill every other day, meaning that Speaking on Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday, while Writing on the other days.
As I have said in the last post, I only learn German from 7PM to 10PM, from 7PM to 9PM I would learn Reading and Listening. Then from 9PM to 10PM (or a little later if I haven’t finished it), I would dedicate it to Speaking and Writing.
Is 1 hour a little too little?
No I don’t think so. It’s not how many tasks that I can complete, it’s about the process of doing those tasks that gains me the most experience, which I will talk about later.
In this one hour, I will divide it again, 30 minutes for practising, 30 minutes for self-critic.
And here it gets a little bit confused, I will try to explain it :’D, I’m more than happy to help you if you have a question.
Okay here it is:
For example, it’s Wednesday, and I supposed to learn Speaking today, so I will practice speaking (Let’s talk about the general technique first, then I will talk more deeply how I learn it) for 30 minutes.
Then after 30 mintues, I will stop, and take out the work I have done the day before, which is Tuesday’s work, and it is Writing. I will open it and correct it.
Here’s the technique of how I learn:
30-minute Practice Phase:
Speaking
I will pick out the Listening tape I have learnt from Listening task, I will hear it again, and try to summarise the text in my own words. If you don’t know the words or phrases in your target language, say that in your mother tongue. After that, you listen to the tape again, note down the sentence that you cannot say, put it in DeepL. Then, I record the second time, this time, I try to add more details, and use the words or sentences I have translated. This process repeats itself until the 30 minutes have passed.
Writing
In 30 minutes, I try to summarise the Reading text in my own words. Dictionary is not allowed during this. Try to use your own vocabulary, formulate your own sentence. I give myself 20 minutes to write it. After that, I will read my writing again, and use the dictionary to enhance my sentence.
30-minute Self-Critique Phase
Speaking and Writing
In 30 minutes, I will listen to the record or read my writing from the day before again (I repeat, the day before, not the one you’ve just done), using DeepL to enhance the sentence, and put those sentences into Anki to learn in the future, which I have talked about in the earlier post.
How to make your sentence better?
For example, I’m learning German, and my fluent language is English
I put my German sentence in DeepL, let it translate to English, then I twist the sentence English so that it sounds smooth to me, and let it translate again to German. The sentence will sound much better, and most important, correct.
Does this technique work?
For me, Absolutely! I have been quite successful with this technique. In fact, this method have been proved in the book “Why we sleep”: A full-night of sleep may help with problem-solving in which they help linking together related information. Thus, after a day, you will gain a fresh view on the problem.
But most important is… you have to be patient!
You can be struggling at first: You don’t have any words to say, 20 minutes have passed and you can write nothing…
It’s okay, I myself also used to struggle a lot, and what I have just described, is me in the past. But after a month of dedicating to this, I have yield a lot of good results: I was able to write faster and can instantly produce the sentences straight away (as the more you write, the more you are used to writing, the same is true with speaking).
So, keep believe in yourself. :’D
To summarise:
I learn Speaking and Writing alternatively, meaning every other day I will learn Speaking, and the other day I will learn Writing. I will spend 30 minutes practicing one skill, and 30 minutes correcting the other skill. Notice that the task I correct is the one from the day before, as after a day, I will have a fresher perspective on my work to correct it.