English Recordings

Do you feel embarrassed when you speak English? Is your pronunciation bad? Do you make a lot of grammar mistakes when you speak?

Do people have trouble understanding you? Do they seem confused when you speak English?

Is it difficult for you to understand native speakers? Do you feel frustrated because you still can’t understand English speakers easily?

You have studied English for years. You read English well, but when its time to speak– you feel nervous, foolish, embarrassed, and shy when speaking English.

Is it possible that you will never speak English well?

Are you angry that you studied for years but still cannot speak English easily?

What is wrong? Have you wasted all of your study time? Have you wasted all of your English vocabulary? Will you ever speak English easily?

Will you ever feel relaxed and happy when you speak English?

Most programs are modeled like learning with flashcards: items to memorize are entered into the program as question-answer pairs; when a pair is due to be reviewed, the question is displayed on screen, and the user is supposed to attempt to remember the answer; when the user has succeeded or failed, he manually reveals the answer, and then tells the program how easily he recalled the answer or failed to. The program schedules pairs based on spaced repetition algorithms. Without a program the user has to schedule flashcards; this takes time and restricts to simple algorithms like the Leitner system.

Jingle A: From early on , three thoroughly surly, thirsty Thugs thought they could take baths throughout the night.

I used to preach outside.
I prepared my cards and put candy in them.
When giving out the cards I said,
"Believe Jesus" and "Go to your nearest church"!!
However they didn't not listen to me.
They refused to go to church and just only ate the candy
I felt and still feel sad.
How can I preach effectively?
"Jesus is really alive" I said, "in spirit:".
Many think churches are corrupted, that churches sell Jesus' name just to make money
I can't deny it and I can symphathize them who dislike church
It's our fault
I was once a non-believer myself.
Because of this...
I think that I become a more respectable minister

These days, when I am speaking English, I am too nervous.
I have many things that I want to talk about.
However, it is so difficult that I feel suffocated.
It's like a baby who is just starting to talk.

Judging from the content of this thread so far, two things come to mind. One is that is all but impossible to acquire a native-like phonetic ability after starting a foreign language at an adult age. What is certainly possible with a lot of hard work is the attenuation of a foreign accent to the point where it is not noticeable. But that is not the same as acquiring native-like pronunciation.

My other observation is that there is fundamentally only one way to acquire a good accent: extensive active meaningful interaction with native speakers starting at the earliest age possible.

I think there is something to be said for the idea of a neurological window for the acquisition of accent in the 0 - 14 year zone. This, by the say, is the basic idea of French immersion education here in Canada. French immersion in an English-speaking environment has its limitations of course and does not produce perfectly bilingual graduates. But it does expose the children to French at an ideal age and does create a foundation that may be useful at a later stage. Now that French immersion has been around long enough, we can now see the results in graduates who have a much better, albeit very far from native-like, grasp of French.

As others have pointed out here, learning a language, especially pronunciation, is basically a lot of imitation, repetition and correction in the right environment. This often means some combination of four things: live, love, work and study in the target language. It's not more complicated than that, but it's usually more easier said than done.

I suppose one of the issues I had in making this thread was whether reading, at an advanced level, is enough on its own to keep a language alive and to maintain listening comprehension. This is where I thought audio books would come in: one could expand one's vocabulary indefinitely by means of literature, all the while improving and maintaining aural contact with the language. This is based on the assumption that listening comprehension is harder, or at least takes longer, to build and maintain than mere reading abilities (with the important exception of such languages as Chinese and Japanese). At least that has been the case with me. If I can read French literature reasonably well, my listening comprehension is almost certainly a notch below. This is why I've considered "ditching" (at least for the time being) the written word and engaging with the spoken word to keep the language alive in my head.

I have cleaned my room and I feel fine.

My room is neat and tidy.

My room has been messy for almost two weeks.

When my room is messy , I do everything slower.

When my room is tidy, I feel more energetic!

I think "speaking" isn't actually one skill in itself, but rather the combination of a few skills. From experience, I can say that lots of audio input (as long as you're actually paying attention to it, and ideally memorizing it) does indeed help with certain aspects of speaking, i.e.:
- accent
- the "melody" of the language
- confidence in the sounds (this, to me, is something slightly different from a good accent; others may disagree)

One thing that lots of audio has not really helped me with is fluid production, i.e. stringing words together naturally and speaking at a normal pace.

A lot of people say that television is more helpful than radio, because then you have physical cues (topic, picture, facial expressions, etc.) to help you make the correct associations with the words. Personally, I don't have the patience for news broadcasts or the time to watch a lot of movies in my target language, so what works the best for me is cheesy soap-opera type TV shows. Plus, it seems to me that TV shows often have more dialogue than films do.

When you see the circumstances in which a particular character says certain words – and then the reaction they get to those words – you can learn very effectively, because you're bypassing translation and just going directly from oral expression to understanding meaning.

I actually think speaking and listening overlap quite a lot. Whenever we're speaking or writing we're basically reproducing words, phrases and grammar constructions that we've heard used a thousand times before by others, that's the only reason we even know how to use them. If you've heard a term fifty times on the radio one day, it will pop into your head quite easily during a conversation the next day. I've been listening to a lot of French for the last several months and I've noticed improvements in my accent, vocabulary and grammar, even though I've made no conscious effort to improve my speaking.

However, I agree with Cainntear that listening is not enough. It will give you the materials to work with but then you need to know how to use and combine them to fluently phrase your own thoughts and that takes practice.