Output_–_When_You_Can’t_Wait_To_Talk

Today I want to talk about output. Now, obviously, you know that I’m a believer in input, developing comprehension, developing vocabulary, specifically passive vocabulary, at least initially, but eventually you want to speak well. Well, eventually to speak well, you have to speak a lot. Until you understand well it’s difficult to speak a lot, but there are things you can do. Of course there are language exchange sites. You can find language partners. At LingQ we have an exchange where you can talk to native speakers. There are many opportunities on the Internet to meet people, even if you aren’t in the country where the language is spoken. I would just like to touch on a few tips, some of the things that I find useful to do at LingQ.

First of all, when I read a text where we have the audio and we have the text, I save words and I save phrases. Now, one thing we can do to liven it up, because we want to mine this material for words and phrases that we can use, is to record ourselves speaking, pronouncing these phrases, particularly phrases, if you save some good phrases.

Now, on the LingQ page on the right-hand side there’s a list of all the words and phrases that you have saved, but to isolate the phrases you need to go to the vocabulary page and then there’s a little button you can click on which says ‘Only Phrases’, something like that, ‘Phrases Only’. That will bring up all the phrases you have ever saved, but there’s also a filter there that allows you to filter by creation date. So if you then click on ‘By Creation Date’, the most recent phrases that you have saved will show up there

So then you can record these. I use Wiretap Studios, but there’s lot of software out there for recording and then you can take away and listen to these phrases on your mp3 player. So you are reinforcing these phrases in your mind, you’re practicing pronouncing these phrases and then you can review them in flashcards and in the flashcards they have text to speech for each of these phrases at LingQ in most of our languages. I find that for individual words and phrases text to speech is very helpful. You might be able to correct your pronunciation. You might even want to redo your recording of them. So that’s one thing you can do.

While we’re on the subject, sometimes you have things you want to express or you want to develop vocabulary in a particular area, another thing you can do is to find say material in your own language on the Internet. Put it into Google Translate, that will translate it into the target language. You can then import that as a lesson into LingQ. You can do the same thing saving phrases.

Now, there will be aspects of the Google translation that are not accurate, there will be mistakes. However, I find that it’s quite good enough in order to acquire a specific vocabulary, specific phrasing for a particular area. So if it’s medical terms, economic terms or simply how to express ‘why’, ‘therefore’, ‘because’, ‘from my point of view’, if you put all of those in some text that you grab from the Internet or even which you create yourself in your own language, translate into Google Translate, bring it into LingQ and then go through and do the same thing as I suggested. Collect out the phrases, identify the phrases, record them, listen to it, then do it again in flash cards comparing to the text to speech. All of this is an ability to mine that content for useful words and phrases that, over time, you’re gradually going to be able to use in your conversation.

So I hope that’s useful, I look forward to your comments. Bye for now.

 

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