How do you practice speaking?

Japanese
#44

What I do is have a tutor on italki for specifically conversation practice, and I talk to them for an hour twice a week.

I’d say I’ve noticed some improvement after a couple months already. I also find it helps highlight your weaknesses in the language in general.

I’d say my speaking ability before I started doing that was by far the lowest compared to reading/writing/listening. Over time I find it’s starting to get closer to my listening ability. I’m generally better at reading/writing.

As far as speaking anxiety goes, I’d say the more stock phrases/speaking patterns you pick up over time either by hearing people you talk to use them or developing them on your own, the less anxious you tend to be.

I’d say it went down for me a fair bit when I could clearly communicate that I didn’t quite get something or could ask them to repeat something or when I got into the habit of explaining in simple terms a word that doesn’t come to mind rn etc.

Doing that and realizing that being stuck on something doesn’t mean that your conversation is joever and that you can just communicate it, clarify it, and then keep on going helps a lot. Over time it becomes second nature and everything goes smoother.

#45

My brother for a while had really bad health anxiety to the point where he was essentially agoraphobic. He couldn’t go more than a few hundreds metres from our house without thinking he would die, constantly checking himself with his phone camera when he thought he had something wrong with his brain, measuring his pulse when it was a heart problem and carrying food when he thought he was diabetic.

The first thing that seemed to help was watching videos from people who help people with anxiety, especially ones where they work directly with them. Patrially I think because hearing your thoughts in other peoples mouths makes them seem rather more normal. He gained a much more detached view of what he was feeling and how to conceptualise and deal with it in any given situation.

The second was that other people aren’t as interested in you as you imagine they are. He used to worry about what people would think about him if he had a panic attack or something, eventually just had to accept that people would probably just be vaguely helpful in the moment and then forget it ever happened shortly after.

The final part was just being proactive about steadily (Forcing it is often counter productive) expanding the edge of his comfort zone. Slowly walking further from home than before or staying somewhere longer than he could have tolerated previously etc. He’s currently working a job that takes him all over the place and about to have a daughter in a few months. I don’t know if any of this advice helps, but anixiety is absolutely something that can be dealt with.

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