Getting better at speaking

[Jan Finster]

I have largely been following an "input first, output later" approach to learning Chinese for about a year now. So far, I have "only" had 16 lessons with an online tutor. The majority of those lessons were in the early stages to make sure my pronunciation and tones were OK. I took a 4 months gap from working with my tutor, because I felt unless I first improve my vocabulary tutoring sessions are quite boring.

 

Now, my passive vocabulary is much better and I wonder how to get better at speaking. The obvious thing would be to do more tutoring sessions on Italki and the like. But I wonder what I can do outside of those tutoring sessions. My main concern is that I feel unsure if the sentences I create in my head are correct or not until I check them with my tutor in the next session. 

 

I wonder how you would approach let's say a homework assignment to prepare a 5 minute talk about Chinese tea culture?

How would you prepare the sentences?

How do you ensure grammar, word order and the words chosen are correct?

Do you have a memory bank of sentences or parts of sentences and then pick and mix them as needed?

 

Here are my strategies at the moment:

Option 1: I pretty much learn a text on Chinese tea culture by heart and then "replay it" to my tutor.

Option 2: I can steal sentences or parts of sentences from online texts and pick and mix them create hopefully meaningful new sentences.

Option 3: stumble and create my own sentences from scratch  only to google parts of those sentences later on and realise there are hits or zero hits... 

Option 4: use google translator to "help" me.

 

All these approaches remain frustrating, because until I check the result with my tutor, I have no way of knowing if my sentences are correct or not.

 

 

 

 

[suMMit]

Could you really do a year of mainly input and expect to be able to do a 5 minute talk about tea? I would consider five minutes to be pretty lengthy output, and the topic of tea would require quite a bit of vocab.

[abcdefg]

10 hours ago, Jan Finster said:

But I wonder what I can do outside of those tutoring sessions. My main concern is that I feel unsure if the sentences I create in my head are correct or not until I check them with my tutor in the next session. 

 

A more "real world" approach is to try the sentences on the street and see whether or not you are met by blank stares. That's the value of conversation early in the learning process. It lets you "try out" ways of saying things and see whether they work for actual communication.  

 

If one of your sentences doesn't work, you rephrase it and try again right away. Keep doing that until you successfully communicate. Make a note and then ask your teacher about it next time you have class. 

[Flickserve]

9 hours ago, Jan Finster said:

until I check the result with my tutor, I have no way of knowing if my sentences are correct or not.

 

Language partners who communicate by voice messages. You can give the same sentence to three different language partners and wait for the replies.

[Jan Finster]

4 hours ago, abcdefg said:

A more "real world" approach is to try the sentences on the street

 

Sure, but if I try this on the street in Germany... ??

4 hours ago, Flickserve said:

Language partners who communicate by voice messages.

 

Do you mean something like tandem partners or the Hello Talk app? 

[Flickserve]

17 minutes ago, Jan Finster said:

 

Do you mean something like tandem partners or the Hello Talk app? 

 

Yes. Or on italki. Although it may be hard to get real time conversations, recorded messages have a better response. 

[jannesan]

3 hours ago, Jan Finster said:

Do you mean something like tandem partners or the Hello Talk app? 

 

3 hours ago, Flickserve said:

Yes. Or on italki

 

I can recommend looking for language partners on Italki.  From my experience there are tons of people that want to learn German.

I have only had 2 language partners from there, on of which I am now in regular contact for one and a half years already (video calls).

We do 30mins German, 30mins Chinese

[abcdefg]

Apologies @Jan Finster -- I thought you were still in China. 

[Jan Finster]

I guess the bottom line is that you can do input all by yourself, but for  outputting you do need feedback of some sort. Fair enough! I will do more sessions on Italki ?

 

21 hours ago, abcdefg said:

Apologies @Jan Finster -- I thought you were still in China. 

 

Unfortunately, I was only in China for business last year and in Taiwan for 4 weeks. I wonder however, if speaking on the street provides you with good feedback. Because, even if grammar and word order are not correct, people may "get" what you mean. However, this does not necessarily mean it is correct. If a Chinese person told me "You Chinese no good!", I know what it means and I would not correct that person's grammar....

 

 

[roddy]

9 minutes ago, Jan Finster said:

Because, even if grammar and word order are not correct, people may "get" what you mean.

You can do a lot by paying attention to the interaction. Repeating what you say, paraphrasing, slow responses - something's wrong. Quick and instinctive responses - pat yourself on the back. I've noticed taxi-drivers stopped repeating my destination back to me once I got my pronunciation better. They just start driving.

[Jan Finster]

Since May during my Skype lessons, I have tried to focus on speaking. We would prepare a text at home and then during our Skype class she would ask me questions about it. Overall, the results were pretty disappointing. I tried to answer the questions, but she seemed unhappy since I did not consistently use the vocabulary and/or sentence structures from the text, but just whatever words/structure that came to my mind. Also, I would forget words and structures from previous classes. We then moved to the HSK 4 standard book.  I have never followed HSK. So, now my level is really out of sync with HSK. I already know most of the vocabulary of HSK 4, but my speaking is probably only about HSK 2-3 ish. So, even though I can understand the texts pretty easily, I cannot use the grammar patterns and words actively. While the idea sounds good, the book feels too much like "classroom"to me.  "Fill in the blank" exercises, "retell the story in your own words", "match the right sentences together"...I just cannot be bothered ? ?

 

I told my teacher, I needed a break from Chinese. Not sure what to do.  Should I go back to an input-focussed approach and read & listen until I get a chance to spend a couple of weeks in China or Taiwan again and then go bezerk (=speaking 8 hours a day with a tutor in China) to get good at speaking?

I keep rereading this thread: https://www.chinese-forums.com/forums/topic/58698-ideas-on-how-to-have-a-purposeful-speaking-lesson/  but I am still at a loss.

 

If you guys feel like maybe my teacher is not ideal, feel free to PM me your teacher's Italki name. I would be happy to try different approaches

[xinoxanu]

37 minutes ago, Jan Finster said:

Overall, the results were pretty disappointing. I tried to answer the questions, but she seemed unhappy since I did not consistently use the vocabulary and/or sentence structures from the text, but just whatever words/structure that came to my mind.

 

I'd say that's pretty normal and falls in the dual category of passive/active vocabulary. You simply can't talk naturally in a way you are not used to, and the kind of lesson you mention sounds pretty unnatural/awkward as well... situations that people don't usually thrive on. Even if you managed to do exactly what your teacher wants you to do, once you were put in a random real-life situation it wouldn't come out anyway... not at first at-least.

 

My advice: focus on finding a comfortable way to communicate the message and forget about making it sound pretty or native-like. 

 

Personally, when speaking in Chinese I tend to backtrack on what I am saying if I suddenly remember a better way of saying it. People don't mind, and you can actually see how their faces go from puzzled (due to not being used to a broken chinese structure - even if they are already understanding what you are trying to say, nevertheless) to relieved once you get it right. Just try different combinations until you make your point understood and eventually those pretty sentences will come out naturally and replace the old ones, provided that you keep studying them... you are just not there yet.

[Moshen]

Quote

If you guys feel like maybe my teacher is not ideal, feel free to PM me your teacher's Italki name. I would be happy to try different approaches

 

Have you tried topical talking?  That is, you choose a subject or situation, so you can first study up on relevant vocabulary, and then simulate interaction around that situation with your teacher.  Eg, taking a taxi, getting a haircut, buying fruit at a shop, ordering at a restaurant.  My Chinese lessons were organized that way when I started and that made it really easy for me when I got to China after 3 months to transition to real-life situations using those skills.  It was also satisfying because I was making obvious progress. 

 

I'm not clear, though, on your motive for learning Chinese and how you plan to use it, so perhaps this would not be as relevant for you as it was for me.

 

Whatever language I have learned, I had minimal emphasis on grammar after the very beginning, because the more familiar I became with the language, the grammar would mostly sort itself out on its own.  Maybe you and your teacher are taking too academic an approach?  That is, you're more focused on getting things right than in getting communication going?

[Jan Finster]

19 minutes ago, Moshen said:

Have you tried topical talking?  That is, you choose a subject or situation, so you can first study up on relevant vocabulary, and then simulate interaction around that situation with your teacher.  Eg, taking a taxi, getting a haircut, buying fruit at a shop, ordering at a restaurant.

 

Yes, the texts we read covered a certain topic, which we would discuss. We would talk about topics like bike sharing in cities or being a vegetarian (including their pros and cons), tea culture, Chinese festivals, etc.

 

19 minutes ago, Moshen said:

I'm not clear, though, on your motive for learning Chinese and how you plan to use it, so perhaps this would not be as relevant for you as it was for me.

 

Since I am not going to be living in China in the foreseeable future, we did not focus so much on topics of everyday life. I do not mind, since I will not be getting a haircut in China anytime soon. 

[Moshen]

So your goal is to be able to carry on dinner-party type of conversation in Chinese?

 

In that case, I don't see why it's important to you (or your teacher) to be using certain given grammatical patterns while doing so.

[Jan Finster]

20 minutes ago, Moshen said:

So your goal is to be able to carry on dinner-party type of conversation in Chinese?

 

In that case, I don't see why it's important to you (or your teacher) to be using certain given grammatical patterns while doing so.

 

I guess one of my goals is to be able to have a conversations with friends on a wide range of topics that go beyond small talk and to be able to read non-fiction books or newspapers at some point in the distant future.

I totally appreciate that she teaches me sentence patterns. I believe they are very helpful and add variety of the SVO basics. However, unless I use those patterns again and again, they are just "grammar" to me right now. Maybe hoping to get good at speaking Chinese with only one lesson per week outside of China is delusional and just an exercise in futility....

[NinjaTurtle]

2 hours ago, Jan Finster said:

unless I use those patterns again and again, they are just "grammar" to me

 

This is the answer to your question.

 

2 hours ago, Jan Finster said:

Maybe hoping to get good at speaking Chinese with only one lesson per week outside of China is delusional

 

Go online and do "language exchanges" with Chinese people. There are bunches of Chinese people who would love to do an online language exchange with you (30 minutes English only, 30 minutes Chinese only, or whatever time frame works for you). You can do this everyday,  which eliminates the once-a-week limitation. If you want to know how to set up an online language exchange, please do not hesitate to ask. (I am sure several people here on this forum know someone they can set you up with as an exchange partner.) Do not worry about the logistics problems. Plenty of people here on this forum can help you work out all of the logistics problems.

[Flickserve]

13 hours ago, Jan Finster said:

I tried to answer the questions, but she seemed unhappy since I did not consistently use the vocabulary and/or sentence structures from the text, but just whatever words/structure that came to my mind. Also, I would forget words and structures from previous classes.

To be honest, I think it’s pretty difficult! 
 

Perhaps you are trying to do too much? Also unfamiliarity with expressing multiple sentences means you are dropping into old thinking patterns and perhaps translating from your main language into Chinese. 
 

How about half an hour of conversation, then the tutor corrects the sentences. You repeat saying a few times and trying to get it out smoothly without reading. I.e. shadow and repeat. Keep the list and repeat practicing these sentences the next lesson. 
 

If you want, you can put the sentences into anki translating from your first language to Chinese. The material can be from your old lessons which is probably the best material to use. Some people have also put sentences from grammar books into anki to translate from English to Chinese. But you can pay someone to record your sentences into audio, add that to the anki deck and use those for shadowing. 

 

[Dawei3]

On 8/16/2020 at 11:11 AM, Jan Finster said:

I guess one of my goals is to be able to have a conversations with friends on a wide range of topics

Do you have a language partner(s) now?  If you find a person whose personality "fits" you, it's a wonderful way to learn.  It's never boring and it's easy to discuss spontaneous topics.  The best partners will also give you feedback.  

 

Also, although you're not a native English speaker, you are a "foreigner", so your English is automatically assumed to be better than Chinese and they will welcome the interaction with you (and most Germans I know have excellent English).  

 

More people want to be language partners than I have time, so I spend time with those with whom I connect with (我们的个性很合.)  Sometimes we have specific things to discuss, other times we just have random fun discussions.  

 

 

[amytheorangutan]

On 8/16/2020 at 1:47 PM, Jan Finster said:

Since May during my Skype lessons, I have tried to focus on speaking. We would prepare a text at home and then during our Skype class she would ask me questions about it. Overall, the results were pretty disappointing. I tried to answer the questions, but she seemed unhappy since I did not consistently use the vocabulary and/or sentence structures from the text, but just whatever words/structure that came to my mind. Also, I would forget words and structures from previous classes. We then moved to the HSK 4 standard book.  I have never followed HSK. So, now my level is really out of sync with HSK. I already know most of the vocabulary of HSK 4, but my speaking is probably only about HSK 2-3 ish. So, even though I can understand the texts pretty easily, I cannot use the grammar patterns and words actively. While the idea sounds good, the book feels too much like "classroom"to me.  "Fill in the blank" exercises, "retell the story in your own words", "match the right sentences together"...I just cannot be bothered ? ?

 

I told my teacher, I needed a break from Chinese. Not sure what to do.  Should I go back to an input-focussed approach and read & listen until I get a chance to spend a couple of weeks in China or Taiwan again and then go bezerk (=speaking 8 hours a day with a tutor in China) to get good at speaking?

I keep rereading this thread: https://www.chinese-forums.com/forums/topic/58698-ideas-on-how-to-have-a-purposeful-speaking-lesson/  but I am still at a loss.

 

If you guys feel like maybe my teacher is not ideal, feel free to PM me your teacher's Italki name. I would be happy to try different approaches

Hey Jan,

 

I'm having similar issues as you. My listening and reading are probably at Upper Intermediate level but my speaking is at Elementary level at best. I'm having a lot of issues constructing coherent sentences spontaneously and struggling with tones in longer sentences especially when it's in spontaneous/natural conversation (I suspect both issues are due to me panicking when being put on the spot, I'm an introvert and really not that talkative around new people even in my native language). If your goal is not to pass the HSK, I think maybe you don't necessarily have to follow the HSK books?

 

I've been having Italki lessons (10 lessons in total) lately with 2 teachers alternately. Both of them are very flexible and not particularly stressed about me following any textbooks. I find that it's probably quite important to find teachers that have similar interests to you so that you can talk about topics that interest you instead of topic from a textbook. My first teacher normally would suggest a topic a few days before my lesson and then I'd have a couple of days to think about what I want to say, the topics she chooses are normally light current events, interests and everyday life situations. She'd let me talk/present for about 5 mins while she types what I say and then she'd ask me some questions and we both talk about the topic a little bit and then she'd correct my mistakes and makes me read a paragraph from my "presentation" and correct all my pronunciation mistakes which are mainly tone problems and makes me repeat until I get it right. 

 

The second teacher actually asks me to suggest a topic before class and prepare a series of questions to ask him about the topic and he in turns also asks me questions so that it's more like a natural dialogue. He also corrects my tones and introduces new vocabularies. He said my problem is that I need to build a habit of using common Chinese phrases so that I can say them automatically and give me more time to think about more complex sentences, which I think is a good point. 

 

Honestly, I'm still unhappy about my speaking at the moment but 10 lessons is nothing so I'm hoping if I keep at it, I will see improvements eventually. Outside of lessons, everyday I listen to Chinesepod and a few podcasts, I also use Chinesepod's dialogue for mimicking practice in the hope that it would improve my tones.

 

If you are interested in trying out my Italki teachers I can PM you their names.