Improve your speaking fast with 3 simple exercises

If you want to speak a foreign language well.

There are 3 skills you need to develop:

1. Fluency

2. Accuracy

3. Pronunciation

These are 3 different skills you need to train with specific exercises.

In this article I am going to show you how to do it.

As quickly and efficiently as possible.

But first of all, a disclaimer: 

This will only work if you already you already understand the language well. 

If you don't, go fix that first:

1. Memorise vocabulary with associations.

2. Get Massive Input with reading and listening.

If you don't know how to do those things, go watch my tutorials.

If you don't understand the language you can't speak well.

Maybe you can say some things, but you can't communicate effectively.

Because you don't understand other people.

And if you can't understand native speakers

Once you understand the language let's focus on speaking better.

What are Fluency, Accuracy and Pronunciation?

Fluency is the ability to think fast in the language and be able to say what you want to say, without running out of words.

Accuracy is saying it with the least amount of mistakes possible.

Good pronunciation means sounding as close as possible to a native speaker.

Fluency is not "speaking well" necessarily. It's just one aspect of speaking.

You can be fluent but not accurate, or vice versa. 

Some people can speak all day and basically every single thing they say is gramatically wrong. They need to work on their accuracy.

Others, the perfectionists and the chronically shy, will only speak when they are 100% certain that what they are going to say is correct.

So they barely speak. 

You need to work on all 3 aspects and there is no single exercise that works all 3 well at the same time.

No, speaking to native speakers is not the silver bullet.

Speaking to native speakers will work some areas more than others, depending on your personality type. 

It helps but it's not the perfect solution.

You need to do specific work for each one of these three sub-skills.

Let's start with fluency. 

This one is easy: You have to speak more. A lot more.

I'm not going to tell you to "simply" move to the country and talk to native speakers.

Let's look at simple exercises you can do on your own at home.

First of all, you should use Language Islands.

Write a list of all the topics you usually talk about.

All the situations and interactions you usually have.

Write a list of useful sentences for each situation and conversation.

Translate the sentences and learn them. Easy.

You can watch my tutorials on how to do use Language Islands.

It's the fastest way to increase your fluency in any language.

Once you've learned around 500-1,000 USEFUL sentences with Language Islands, you can try the next exercise:

Questions and Answers. 

This is a simple but highly effective exercise.

You get a long list of questions about a specific topic.

You try to answer them in speaking, with no prep.

Saying as much as possible in each answer.

One or two different topics every day.

Doing 5 or 10 minutes a day of this exercise is excellent training for real life conversations.

You can find a long list of topics inside the NLL course.

You can also create your own list using AI.

Keep doing this and you'll soon be fluent.

Now let's talk about accuracy. Getting rid of your mistakes.

But Mikel, if you're learning alone on your own...who's correcting you?

Ever heard of AI? Google Translate?

The XIX. century called. They want your learning methods back.

The only thing you need is a bilingual text.

English (or whatever your native language is) on one side.

The language you are learning on the other side.

All you need to do is to read in your language and translate mentally into the target language.

Say the translation aloud, then check the translated text.

If you made any mistakes, repeat the correct sentence aloud.

Your Language Islands are the best bilingual text to start doing this exercise.

Then you can move on to any text, the only thing you need is Google Translate.

Don't cheat! Don't look at the translation until you've said the sentence aloud and you're going to self-correct!

Do this exercise regularly and you'll soon make much fewer mistakes.

Finally, pronunciation.

This one is easy.

The only thing you need to do is to listen and repeat native speaker sentences.

5 minutes a day listening and repeating native speaker sentences is all you need.

Pay attention to detail and try to sound as similar as possible!

And that's it! That's all you need!

Keep doing these exercises daily, 5 minutes each.

You'll soon be speaking fluently, with very few mistakes and with good pronunciation.

Want to become fluent in any language in 3 months or less with this type of exercises? 

Join the NLL course!