Have you noticed that when you travel to a Spanish-speaking country, the people around you sound nothing like the Spanish you learned in your coursebook? Everyone seems to be speaking at a hundred miles an hour, using expressions you’ve never come across, and what’s that accent!?
This is exactly what happened to me when I first moved to Murcia, the city in the southeast of Spain that I know call home. When I first arrived here during my Erasmus year at university, I was confident that my high-school Spanish that I’d been refining for the previous 10 years would stand be in good stead for my year working in as an auxiliar de conversación (language assistant) in a Spanish secondary school. How wrong I was!
Although I could cover all the basics – get around the city, find somewhere to live, buy a SIM card for my phone – when it came to anything beyond transactional conversations, I was scuppered; not because I hadn’t learned the appropriate vocabulary or grammatical structures, but because I’d never been fully immersed in the language before and I was totally unprepared for how overwhelming it would be. Everything around me was new: sights, smells, noises, voices. It was a lot of sensory information to take in all at once.
At the time, I was too young to understand the mechanics of what was going on in my brain. I stayed quiet during big social gatherings, too scared of making a mistake and looking like a fool. I became a fantastic listener – and picked up a whole host of language thanks to those listening skills – but whenever it came to speaking, I froze.
When I think back to that time, I wish I could put my arms around that insecure 20 year old and tell her that her voice, her ideas, the things she wanted to say all matter. It doesn’t matter if her English accent comes across when saying words like jarra, if she uses the preterite when she actually needs to use the imperfect, or if it takes her a few seconds longer to remember the exact phrase that she wants to use.
What’s important is speaking up, sharing ideas and making connections.
Learning a language is a process, and it doesn’t matter if you’ve been at it for one year or ten. There are always new things to learn and mistakes will be made.
If you’re currently living in a foreign environment and struggling to speak up. Here are three tips I share with my students.
- Practise speaking out loud in a place where you feel comfortable. This can be on your own in your bedroom, or with a loved or a friend you can trust. Speaking confidently doesn’t happen by chance. It takes practice.
- Think about the kind of things that you would like to say when you’re in a group of people and practise saying them out loud. If you stumble over a certain word or expression, take the time to look it up, say it out loud several times, and repeat the conversation.
- Remind yourself time and again that learning is a process. Perfection doesn’t exist and by putting unnecessary pressure on yourself to be perfect, the only thing you achieve is creating an environment in which you want to stay quiet.
Unfortunately, there’s no quick fix when it comes to learning language or cultivating confidence. When the going gets tough, remind yourself of why speaking the language is important to you and that your ideas really are worth sharing.
By Sarah | English Teacher for Advanced Learners
Sarah es una profesora de inglés, promotora del Journaling y un enfoque más humano, significativo, sin ansiedad que nos acerca al aprendizaje de idiomas desde un lugar más compasivo y que nos permite disfrutar del proceso.
El aprendizaje va más allá del idioma y nos conecta con un conocimiento interno y a la aceptación. Si quieres transformar tu inglés y resuenas con este enfoque, Sarah es la indicada. ¡Gracias por este artículo Sarah!
Síguela en Instagram. @meaningful.english
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