Today, I want to talk about conversational fluency.
We often hear people say that a language needn't be difficult to learn.
We can achieve conversational fluency with a relatively small vocabulary.
There's people promising, you know, four hours or three months or various short
periods of time to achieve some level in a language, and it's often suggested
that it's just this conversational fluency, I don't need to read.
Books, I just want to be conversationally fluent.
Is that meaningful?
Before getting into my video, I have an announcement.
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With my subscribers, with you people.
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And now for today's video.
Point number one, a conversation implies meaning and utterances
going in two directions.
It implies that people understand what is being said and that they respond to it.
If we say conversationally fluent, to my mind, it means I can talk about a wide
variety of subjects, even with mistakes,
but I will understand what the person is saying on a wide variety of subjects.
If you have two people with a very small vocabulary, they can have a conversation.
You good?
Yeah, me good.
Who he?
He friend.
Who she?
She sister.
She good?
Yeah, she good.
It's a conversation, but it's not fluent.
If you want to have a conversation with either a native speaker or someone who is
fluent, genuinely fluent, has 40,000-50,000 words in the language that you are learning, you
have no idea what they're going to say.
You have no idea which words they're going to use, which
structures they're going to use.
So you may say something and not be able to respond.
So conversational fluency, in my mind, implies that both sides in the
conversation have a significant familiarity with the language, a
significant range of vocabulary and can converse, albeit with mistakes,
on a wide variety of subjects.
So that's conversational fluency.
Let's look at some of the people who provide advice on the internet
about how to achieve conversational fluency, which they typically
don't define very specifically.
So Tim Ferriss, for example, talks about his 12 sentences
to deconstruct any language.
So this is sort of point number two.
It's this issue of the structure of a language.
I translate these 12 sentences into every new language I study.
They help me to understand verb tense.
Word order, sentence structure, and much more.
The apple is red.
It is John's apple.
I give John the apple.
We give him the apple.
He gives it to him.
She gives it to him.
Is the apple red?
The apples are red.
I want to give it to him.
I'm going to him.
I can't eat the apple.
Very compressed on one page, so whenever I get overwhelmed I can refer back to that.
Is it enough to give you an idea of what's in the language?
In my opinion, no, you're not going to understand what's said because
you won't understand the words.
Even as far as using those structures, I found that it takes so long to get
used to new structures in a language.
And even the idea that these 12 sentences are equally representative
of many different languages, languages, like in Japanese, where you have
やってもらう, やってあげる, it's a rather unique to Japanese structure.
There are many such unique structures in Japanese, Korean,
not to mention say irregular verbs, irregular plurals in Arabic.
I don't believe that 12 sentences will give you the full range of
structures, but even if it did, it won't enable you to get used to them.
I've noticed that in my conversation reports that I get from my
tutors at LingQ, which I import into LingQ as lessons and then
I save the words and phrases.
And I can look back over six months of conversation reports and I make the
same mistake week after week after week.
Let's not underestimate how difficult it is for our brains to get used to
new structures, even if we understand the rules, even if we know what we're
supposed to be saying, somehow the brain keeps on reverting back to, uh,
perhaps a pattern that's similar to our native language, it takes a long time.
So the idea that you can somehow deconstruct a language and
therefore you are now closer.
To speaking that language.
I don't believe so.
Point number three, now we move on to vocabulary.
So we need vocabulary in order to understand what's said and
eventually we need vocabulary in order to produce the language.
And so how do we go about acquiring the vocabulary?
And I don't believe that a very limited amount of vocabulary is enough.
The high frequency, uh, words, we're gonna learn them very quickly
'cause they're high frequency.
But, uh, my experience is we need.
Tens of thousands of words in order to be, you know, genuinely
conversationally fluent.
I don't want to pick on Tim Ferriss, who is a wonderful coach and inspires
a lot of people, but he, in one of his videos, talks about mnemonics.
Really all this entails is creating a link between the words that is image based.
So,
if we have a word like vaca, vaca, vaca, what does that sound like?
Vacuum, maybe.
Let's imagine that there is a cow, and it has a really oddly shaped head, that
looks like the end of a vacuum, and it's sucking up the grass on the ground.
Alright?
So it's cow, with a head like a vacuum, sucking up grass.
I just think that you have to invest so much time into each word, building
an association, a visual association, when we consider the number of words
that we have to learn in the language.
I just have never found it worthwhile to invest so much time into mnemonics.
Another favorite tool for people who want to acquire vocabulary in a hurry,
of course, is spaced repetition systems.
Uh, the most famous perhaps is Anki or there's Memrise.
And here again, as I've said before, I think it's so important in
language learning that we do things that we enjoy doing because very
often we don't know which learning technique is the most effective.
However, if we enjoy what we're doing, we'll continue doing it.
And that's the most important thing that we keep active in the language.
However, there is research that shows that in spaced repetition,
it's the repetition that's important.
An absolute, even regular repetition is just as effective as.
It's the sort of random or algorithm based repetition.
And if we do a lot of reading, we will in fact, encounter words over and over again.
So there is some degree of repetition there.
It's also true.
Research shows, and this is, goes back 10, 15 years, that repetition
is one factor that influences our ability to retain words.
But diversity of context is another, and in time it's that diversity of context,
which becomes more powerful than just how frequently we encounter the word.
So this, again, argues in favor of getting that repetition, getting that
repetitive exposure to vocabulary through natural and meaningful context, so that
we are also gradually becoming familiar with the language, seeing structures
and words in different contexts.
becoming more and more comfortable with the language.
So those efforts at short circuiting, you know, the acquisition of the words.
I don't think those are that helpful unless of course people
enjoy doing them, which is fine.
I must admit that I prefer listening and reading.
So I prefer that as
my sort of path towards acquiring the words that I need, but when we
get then to output, and this is point number five, we just have to go for it.
We can be conversational without being fluent in our conversation.
We have to accept that if we're going to get better at speaking,
we have to make mistakes.
And so we have to be willing to use what we have in a conversation,
struggling to understand.
Hopefully we've put enough effort into our input that we have passive vocabulary
so that we can understand what is said.
And then we can struggle to say what we want, what we want to say, say
with mistakes, go for it, relax, enjoy it, take every opportunity to speak.
And I think if we do that, and if we avail ourselves of opportunities.
And here again, I've said before, I'm not a great fan of role
playing or artificial situations.
Which again, is trying to force this conversational fluency.
I think it's better to find real situations with real people.
We have to try to understand what people are saying to us.
It's difficult at first, even if we have the words, even if our comprehension
theoretically is there, we are tense.
It's a new situation we haven't experienced before.
We struggle even to understand, but we have to continue to expose ourselves.
To these kinds of situations and gradually our conversational fluency will improve.
So that's my take.
Conversational fluency is not easy.
It's not a matter of three months.
It's part of the whole process of language learning, which takes a long time.
And I've talked a bit about some of these aspects before, and I invite you
to look at some of my earlier videos.
Thank you for listening.
Bye for now.