As an English teacher in Hangzhou, China, one of the questions Chinese college students most often asked me was, “how can I improve my spoken English?” As a member of the ChinesePod team and student of applied linguistics, learners frequently ask me, “how can I improve my spoken Chinese?” Unfortunately, the are no easy answers or “secrets.” If you’re working hard learning Mandarin on ChinesePod and you’ve found a way to practice speaking, then you’re doing the right thing. But surely there might be an extra trick or two out there?
Actually, there are a few tricks out there, but their effectiveness tends to vary widely from person to person. The one I hear most often is “find a Chinese girlfriend,” but this one clearly has limited application, and it sometimes doesn’t even work for those with Chinese girlfriends/wives. This “trick” is a subset of a larger idea, which is just spend as much time with Chinese speakers as you can. But that one is obvious, and probably not useful for most learners.
One method I have found useful is to talk to myself in Chinese. Now before you stop reading, let me explain. I’m not talking about “How are you? Fine, thank you” type conversation. I mean all day long, as I think about different things, I ask myself, how would I say that in Chinese? If I said that in Chinese, how would the Chinese person respond? If the Chinese person responded X, what would I say then?
Let me provide an example of such a train of thought.
OK, I need to buy a lightbulb. How do I say lightbulb? It’s “dēngpào“. So I want to say, “Wŏ xiăng măi dēngpào.” How will that react to that? Well, they might say, “méi yŏu.” If they say that, I’ll just say, “hăo de, xièxie.” But they should have them, so they’ll probably just say something like, “zài zhèli” or “yŏu de, zài nàbiān” and then I can just say “xièxie” and buy them.
Obviously, this is a rather simple example, but the method can be applied to much more complicated situations. The better your imagination, the more extensive and “branched” the “conversation.”
You might be thinking that this method has a major flaw… if you don’t know how to say these things in Chinese, then your every internalized “conversation” deadends rather abruptly. It’s true that the method works better once you get to the advanced beginner or intermediate stage, but the true value in the mental exercise is in identifying what you don’t know. It’s in identifying what you’re unsure of, before you actually have to use it. Then you can take these questions you come up with and either look them up somewhere (if possible) or ask your teacher.
Soon after I came to China and my Chinese was at the elementary level I would run through this exercise every time I needed to go do something that involved communicating in Chinese. I’d think of what I needed to say, how the other person might respond, and how I’d respond to that. I’d look up every word I didn’t know and write it down (making sure to get the tones right), then go and use it.
Talking to myself: it worked for me.
Hi John
Very useful and one comment I have found. If I ‘tal’k to myself inside my head without vocalizing it becomes a sudden reality check when I did start speaking to others. Just as my golf swing looks as good as Freddie Couples when I visualize it on my brain’s screen so does my Chinese sound great when I “speak’ internally. Inside my brain perfect! out my mouth…. terrible. So I find even to myself I have to open my mouth and speak for it to have any value.
Mike in Jubei
I kind of do that already although I don’t usually think about the response. Good tips.
Nice tips. Kinda like a 4 y-o playing with Lego. Obviously not one for the complete beginner, as you have to have a working vocab and grammer to start with. I talk to my wife in Chinese all the time too (”ni he cha ba?”), it helps me at least. It may even impart some of the language on her too. After a year of irritating noise from me, I think she now knows ni, wo and cha!
It works when I am talking to myself for improving my English. And you could imagine a person you are talking to. Find a person you like to talk to, it is fun.
Thanks for tips.
As I drive to/from work each day in Changchun, I am sure that there are many a taxi driver who wonder what that crazy lao wai is up to! Of course I am repeating to myself the words and senences of Cpod lessons. I personally find this to be a good opportunity for both input and output and I would say that most of my vocabulary has been acquired by listening, formerly to CD’s, and now to podcasts, in the car. However, this brings me to another point. Having pushed on through the beginner and elementary lessons I had added around 50 new words to my wordbank. I am now, more slowly, proceding with the intermediate lessons, and the word bank is filling up rather more quickly. In order to get these new words to stick, what has and still works for me is to listen to them (and speak them) frequently, ideally in the car again. It is too time consuming to repeatedly listen to the lesson pods and ideally I would like the ability to be able to download an audio podcast of my wordbank. There has been talk about making the flash cards “speak” the words, I guess it would be not such a big step after that was implemented?
That’s very true and if it works for John of Sinosplice, that’s like a Sinocelebrity endorsement! When I was taking a break from univ. to work in an animal hospital for 2 years, I used to keep my French tuned up by speaking to the animals. Fond memories… after all the morning hubbub was over, the cage cleaning, changing bedding, walking, feeding, scheduled treatments, and all the barking and meowing and general excitement had quietened down, there was a lull in mid morning, and I’d be finished with my work out front, and I’d go back to the kennel and there would be a whole bank of furry faces with drowsy eyes looking at me, all calmed down by now, and I’d lean against the door and tell them things in French… When I finally went back to univ. after a 2-year absence from classes, my professor asked me, “Have you been in France?” He thought my fluency had actually improved in the interim. (”No, I’ve just been talking to the animals!”) You can definitely use your language skills anywhere, at any time. I do absolutely agree with Mike in Jubei that your “inner voice” can sound as good as Jenny when you’re “thinking” Chinese but it sounds way different when you say it out loud! And I remember something James said, too, some time ago– about speaking practice– that it has to come out at normal volume to count as speaking practice. Gosh, I tend to mumble or murmur things under my breath as I’m repeating them from the podcasts and even that’s not loud enough. So I try to talk Chinese at normal volume while taking walks around the neighborhood and listening to podcasts. I live in a weird enough little town that no one will care.
This reminds me of someone I saw on TV or read about, a musician, who said that the ideal of a composer’s music was the music that he heard in his mind; and when the music was transcribed and played by an orchestra, no matter how beautifully, it fell short of the composer’s vision (if you can have a vision of music). So this person would not listen to “played” music, but rather he would read the orchestral scores and hear it in his own mind; which he claimed was a truer approximation of what the composer heard and was the only “real music.” Well… maybe that was the “ideal” music but if the sound of it is not disseminated through the airways it seems to deaden the music instead of bring it to life. “Idealization as deadening.” So with that in mind I’ll make an effort to speak more imperfect Chinese and spread the soundwaves around!
Well something must have happened yesterday– I finally dreamed something in Chinese last night!
In the dream my Chinese friend was speaking English and I replied, 我不明白，你说什么？！ 我不会说英语！！
Oh gosh and it was such perfect dream pronunciation too
Actually before going to sleep I had learned a new expression, 我困了。 wo3 kun4? le. I’m sleepy!
Maybe that put my brain in the proper mode. What does anybody else dream about in Chinese?
Thinking must be good for the learner. This suggestion probably works well for some people, but as John describes it is a supplement rather than a major strategy. It can be used, I’m sure, as long as you do actualy have real speaking possibilities.
Speaking to yourself couldn’t replace real conversation, because it is really only through the trial and error interaction of real conversation that we truly acquire develop fluency.
But imagine if we could all learn new languages just by talking to ourselves.
Ken Carroll
Ken, don’t forget all the periods that kids have their own ’special language’, first only they understand, then their parents understand, later other kids understand, then the rest. I think it is more part of a development, rather than a side bar. I agree that conversation is key, but often it’s a penultimate skill. I prefice this with if the goal is toward a high-degree of fluency which includes native-like pronunciation and generation, in contrast if you want some survival-language then quick vocalization is imperative.
What I like about John’s example is that he noted the ‘carrying on’ of the conversation in his head, he role plays the other person and takes it 3-4 exchanges further. I notice I speak to myself a lot, but I’ve often only gone so far as the one-two exchange. In today’s podcast on “the clothes” look good I was able to generate the fun dialogue I posted quite quickly, this was all internal and I could say the conversation out loud with someone easily. Any 3-5 word length conversation is no problem these days. My ‘nativeness’ breaks down when I attempt any lengthier phrases, say 5-10 words in the sentence. I can’t do a similar exercise using mid-higher level Chinese yet, and certainly not the advanced vocab & monologues.
I’m gonna really start talking to myself more. Many Chinese people have tried to go into deeper conversations with me, but my comprehension plummets to zero and I start to mumble uh huh a lot in the conversation. I don’t think I can have ‘deep’ conversations with others in Chinese until I speak more to myself.
I agree with you that words, phrases, conversation needs ‘talking’ to become active, but I’m not convinced that ‘fluency’ comes as a result. I point to ‘fossilized’ SLAs as an example that ‘talking’ is not necessarily the ‘generator’ of fluency. As far as I can tell, it is the ‘lexical chunks’ of conversational Chinese that I get in Cpod casts and that I hear in TV or around me, that seems to enter my conversation reprotoire the easiest and with the most stickiness.
Hi Mike, about your talking sounds terrible. I think there are a couple variations. 1. Talking to oneself in your head, 2. mumbling out loud to oneself, 3. talking and clearly enunciating to oneself outloud, and 4. speaking to people.
I find number 3 the hardest for me right now. It’s like getting video footage back of one’s golf swing. Is that ME?!!! I think you’d benefit from #2 right now, mumble a whole conversation to yourself. I also notice my pronunciation takes a dive when I am really searching for a word in a conversation. It’s like my ‘English pronunciation machine” seems to take over to try to help convey my thought.
I have been talking to myself in the way described right from the beggining.
For me it works seems to work a treat, I will post more on this on my blog soon but I have just returned from a holiday with no Internet access (probably a good thing). Had to answer this post though as this is a hugely important part of my plan. I have a number of conversations with different imaginary people that just keep growing as I learn more. Usually to start off with I am just talking to the imaginary person and then it grows and branches.
I have just started using Skype to talk to Chinese people and the technique appears to help becasue it gives me some pre-prepared conversation to try. Some have been a resounding success (great when someone understands sentances I have constructed from scratch). Even the failures are highly useful because I Iearn whether my sentance has resulted in the confusion or just my pronounciation of it.
I am not afraid to use laboured or dodgy sentances in my imaginary conversations. That is the prompt to research the correct way. I wanted to say I have very few Chinese words, started off with my Mandarin is very small (poor but the nearest I could manage) looked up a couple of words, improved the sentance and tried it on a real Chinese person. They actually understood me (had to correct my pronouncation slightly but the context carried it through).
I don’t think this technique will be as useful for everyone but I used it for years (everything from creating flexible speeches when I don’t known the target audience very well (and need to build in scope for adaption) to rehearsing for Job interviews.
Great post — they did a study to see who could learn languages faster and a 97 year old man beat an equally smart and motivated 17 year old boy…. It’s wonderful to learn so much at your site and to see possibilities these lessons teach us that can open new worlds! Great site!
Brain Based Business
I talk to my dog when we go for our daily walk…responses are a bit limited…but she’s very uncritical. I practised numbers trying to say the house number before we walked past & progressed to car numberplates when driving. Worked really well! I like the English translation in the practice exercises because it makes me try to remember the particular phrasing again in Chinese (without looking!) In the past (another language) I’ve taught myself small scenarios or short stories with cartoon sequences. Would love these kind of exercises to help with Chinese too.
I spent 6 weeks teaching leaders in China more about how their brains could work for their benefit as business leaders, and loved my time there! This groups is great and I admire your efforts. What great tips to learning a language — especially the idea of taling to yourself. In Chongqing, where I was located, people sang in Englaisg and that gave them remarkable language skills — I was impressed. My problem is that I speak in so many countries the language keeps changing for me… I\’d love to connect with a leadership Blog in China but have not found one yet… It was two years since I\’ve been there and while I have good friends there I was not blogging at that time… In fact I did not know what a blog was… This is a great site — thanks!
Brain Based Business
I met a Chinese guy who said that this was his method for studying English. If he got on the bus, he would proclaim in his head “I am getting on the bus.” His english was killer. But he said he’d never been abroad.
Talking to oneself definitely helps.I used to do that back in highschool when i was learning french and english. i used to imagine that i meet tall dark and handsome foreigners on the street and they always asked me where XYZ street was, and then what kind of music i liked ( or whatever topic we’ve been studying) . Sometimes we even discussed Flaubert. Later on when i started with chinese, talking to oneself was less frequent, but i noticed how my sister’s dog mysteriously barked in perfect chinese tones, and i questioned my mom where she had found the sofa drapery, because i could see chinsese characters in the patterns. Needless to say everyone thought i was going crazy. :):) Sweet times…..