Speaking out loud..

At the moment, in our Melbourne Centre, we have a few students who are learning English as true beginners –when they started they could only say ‘Hello’ and ‘thank you’…

It is interesting to watch that they are having EXACTLY the same problems that we all have in our foreign language journey, yet they are LIVING IN AUSTRALIA, so surrounded by people who speak English. As I have mentioned in many of my blogs, language learning is NOT osmosis – just by living in a country doesn’t mean that you will automatically learn and speak it. You need to do a few things to make it happen.

Doing your online lesson, tutorials and homework are a great start – but you can supercharge your learning by spending time – even 5-10 minutes a day practising random sentences OUT LOUD to yourself.  When you speak aloud, your brain is actually listening to yourself speak and becomes accustomed to you speaking your new language. It begins to sound normal and you are training your brain to accept your new skill.  You can double the efficiency of your learning ability if you say the words and sentences aloud while reading them. Once your brain has accepted that you are an English, Russian, Spanish speaker – it will start to help you achieve your goal. The more you speak your language, the easier it will become.  Language learning is cumulative – as you build up your phrases, sentences and vocabulary you are building a critical mass of information that will start to form part of your new language brain.

Don’t make excuses that you need to have someone to talk to; that you need to be in the country etc etc.  Start talking aloud, start practising and it will come….
Happy learning
Jo