How to practice a language

The elephant in the (practice) room is conversation:¹

Some suggest learning methodologies purely centered on conversation at the cost of all the other skills, others instead propose that conversation is not even necessary to learn a language.²

A few considerations:

• The ability to learn from conversation is very dependent on personality. Some people will experience higher degrees of anxiety, inhibition, and insecurity than others. Most people will feel uncomfortable when they become aware that they are making others feel uncomfortable.
• It is always good to get out of your comfort zone little by little. But that doesn’t mean you need to throw yourself at a total immersion party or give a public speech right from day one.
• It is more difficult to learn from conversation than from learning materials since the goal of a conversation is not your learning.
• Moreover, when you speak you can only use what you know. Conversation is a great way to reinforce knowledge, but not to gain new knowledge.
• On the other hand, the biggest benefits of conversation are increased motivation and confidence, and a better memory formation process: personal experiences always stick better than a cold table of facts, like a conjugation table.

This all means that for most people is better to lead with input and start speaking just a little before being ready. Keep in mind that there are more ways to produce language than a real-world conversation, and those are also important.

Fast and slow

Language practice can be done extensively or intensively. Extensive is the fast way, intensive is the slow way.

Extensive practice means reading, listening, writing, and speaking with as few interruptions as possible, focusing more on the message than on language. It allows you to gain exposure to lots of vocabulary, idioms, grammatical constructs, etc.

Intensive practice is thorough and intentional, more focused on quality than on quantity. It asks you to understand more deeply how a language “works” and capture nuance and different details between seemingly identical words and utterances.

Now, to achieve fluency you need a vocabulary of 7.000-10.000 words. You not only have to recognize those words when you hear them, but to understand when and how to use them in the appropriate contexts. Simple memorization is not enough. You need it to become second nature so you stop translating in your head all the time and consciously think how to say things.

For this reason, you need lots of extensive listening and reading, otherwise, you will never get there.

Extensive practice is optimal when you roughly understand 85% of a piece of content on a topic that interests you, and it is presented in a clear and engaging manner. This way you can fill gaps in knowledge through context without having to constantly look up words in a dictionary.

In linguistics, this is called Comprehensible Input. In the broader field of learning theories, it is called a desirable difficulty: something that is neither too easy nor too hard. Just enough above your level to trigger a cognitive effort.

Learning through extensive practice relies on the human capacity to find patterns and reason inductively. Inductive reason is when you draw a logical conclusion from observable evidence, like deriving a grammar rule by observing many examples of its application (for instance, the -s suffix for plural formation in English).

This is necessary to generalize to other examples and correct mistakes. The problem is that you need to find so many examples of a rule in order to “get it” that it will take forever.

So extensive practice alone takes forever, and intensive practice alone also takes forever. The solution?

That’s right. Mix them. When you approach a piece of content for the first time consume it extensively. Forget the language and go right after the message. But later you must come back to it again, this time with the lens of deliberate practice. Tear the piece apart, ask questions, find the answers, and understand them through and through.

Deliberate practice is harder to execute and there are many ways to do it. They are explored in more detail in the book linked below, but you need to follow some basic principles:

• Concentrate on one skill at a time first, and then start combining them little by little. For example, read a news article and then write a summary with your own words, listen and repeat recording yourself, read interlinear books, etc.
• Force yourself to understand what is going on and explore the possibilities. Translate everything you don’t understand, take notes, search for other examples with new words you encounter, create flashcards, etc.
• Go over each resource at least 2 or 3 times but in a different way each, seeking to find new challenges with each new repetition. For instance, you can read a text with a transcript first and without it later. Or listen to a podcast normally first, but at a lower volume and/or faster speed later.
• Seek corrective feedback from a tutor. Feedback on pronunciation and written homework is particularly important. Feedback is more valuable if it is explicit, frequent (so you don’t carry the same mistakes for a long time), and impacts the quality of communication, for instance when you say something in a way that can easily be confused by another word. You can always tell your tutor if you want more or less feedback.