The Best Way To Improve | Real Russian

Tutorial Transcript

I think the best way to learn a language is to use it as often as possible in conversation or writing. I want to talk specifically about the conversation. Very few people use, speak the language they are learning. In schools in Russia, we don't speak the language at all, let's say English, we don't speak at all in classrooms, with rare exceptions, or we just read something, for example. But very rarely when a teacher somehow makes a person, let's say, talk about his day, his weekend, his plans for the future, and so on. That is, we rarely use our knowledge in practice. I suggest you, dear viewers, to do the following exercise every day, or every time you learn a language. It's just to sit down without anyone around, that is, just you and you alone. Choose a topic on which you would like to talk, take the phone, click on the recorder and just start talking. Just talking out loud about this topic, it could be politics, I don’t know food, your favorite city, travel, music, movies, books, it doesn’t matter any topic at all, that is, the topic is not important here at all. And just start talking about this topic. This exercise has three benefits. The first is that you train, the components of the language somehow to be put into one, that is, a successful conversation on your part is correct pronunciation, correct grammar and correct vocabulary, that is, a wide vocabulary. When you talk, you practice putting it all together, that is, you need to choose the right words, put them in a sentence correctly, and then pronounce it all correctly . And thus you practice doing all this in the moment. Very often students know grammar very well, they have a good vocabulary, they pronounce words quite well , but when they have to do all this at the same time, sometimes there are some mistakes just come out because they didn’t have practice, of this merging components, so to speak. The second advantage is that when speaking out loud, you find gaps in your knowledge. Sometimes, when you talk, for example, you understand that I can't talk well, I don't know about politics, I don't have enough words to express my thoughts, how do I say that I support this president, I don't support this president, I I like the policy of our state, I don’t like it, how can I say that, it happens that you don’t know this, but when you talk, it comes to light. Sometimes you have gaps in grammar, for example, when talking about plans for the future, you have problems with the future tense, for example, right? This is also an indicator that you need to learn a little of future tense. Well, it turns out that you have errors in your Russian, your English, your Spanish, and so on. They come to light when you speak out loud. And the third advantage is that you overcome the psychological barrier. Often times, people are afraid to speak the language they are learning because they are afraid to make some mistakes. They are afraid of not expressing themselves correctly. They are afraid to seem stupid. Well, because no adult would want to talk, well, I don't know, like a five-year-old. Well, often when we learn a language, we speak badly, express our thoughts very badly. And this feeling, I don't know, to seem stupid, is of course a very serious barrier that separates those who can speak the language and those who cannot speak the language. Therefore, of course, you need to try to overcome this barrier every time. I believe that if you speak, just like that, let's say with yourself ten times, twenty times, fifty times, a hundred times, then over time this barrier will be overcome. Well, this is a very useful exercise that I saw that this exercise works in practice, I saw that people really progress very quickly when they do this exercise every day and take some lessons from this exercise. Well, that's it.