Talking to Yourself to Practice Your Speaking Skills

Talking to others is certainly the most beneficial way to improve your speaking skills, but it is not always convenient and it can be hard to fit in your busy schedule. Luckily, there’s a way to improve your speaking skills that is incredibly convenient, easy and accessible: talking to yourself. It is surprisingly one of the best ways there is to practice what you have learned and constantly reinforce the language. Forget what society says! Don’t be afraid to look like a nut job, you are doing this for an excellent cause. You can simply think in the language you are learning, but we also highly recommend speaking aloud whenever you have the chance. Pablo Picasso once said: “Everything you can imagine is real.”. The sooner you start talking to yourself in your new language, the sooner you’ll start making a lot more progress. You may have watched several movies, read a good number of books, listened to radio and learned from all kinds of different resources, but you also need to apply that knowledge. The words are somewhere in your mind; you just have to practice accessing them quickly. Of course, talking to yourself doesn’t replace an actual conversation with another person, but it certainly fills in the gaps and allows you to practice literally all the time.

After all, that little voice in your head never really shuts up, why not try to switch to your new language? You can think about absolutely anything you want. That’s the beauty of it! It can be crazy and out of the ordinary, or boring and normal. It’s your own world. You can also make up sentences about a recent lesson you took in OUINO. If you have just learned the colors for example, describe the colors of everything around you. Your brain will associate the colors with real objects and the bonds in the brain will multiply. You can describe everything around you:“What a beautiful blue sky today”, “I need to get some rest.”, “What should I eat for lunch?”. It really doesn’t matter what you talk to yourself about, just create sentences and say them out loud. You can also invent a conversation and play both sides. Try to come up with the right words to say what you want to say. This is exactly the same action as having a real conversation with someone, except it’s with… yourself. (and that’s not crazy at all. Unless you start having an argument with yourself, that’s just weird)

If you’re in public, talk quietly or in your head if you’re afraid of what people are thinking. But the good news is that Bluetooth devices are getting so small nowadays that people will probably think you are simply talking on the phone in a foreign language; or they’ll think you are crazy. Either way, you’re getting better at the language so who cares what they think, right? Be creative and enjoy your own company in a new language.

It can also be a great idea to record yourself from time to time. Simply start talking on random subjects and record your voice or make a video. You can listen to yourself immediately after recording to see how well you did. You can look up a few words that you stumbled upon and try to remember them for the next time. Recording yourself also give you the opportunity to go back and listen to the recordings once you are a lot better at the language. This is one of the best ways to see concrete evidence of your progress. When you hear yourself again after a few months, you may think: “wow, I was really bad, but I’ve come a long way.”. That’s the way to go!

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