How long was it before you were actually speaking?

Language Learning
#1

I’ve been learning Romanian for nearly 2 weeks now, but the same question can be applied to any language I guess. How long was it before you went from “I know 250 individual words” to “I can string these words together to create sentences have have a basic conversation with someone”?

I’m at the stage now where I can probably understand a basic beginner conversation, but being able to formulate my responses in real time on the fly and speak quickly is not there yet.

I still have to stop, think carefully about word order, how words change based on tense, gender etc, how the pronunciation of the word actually sounds.

I’m trying not to get discouraged as it’s early days but at some point I hope I get to a stage where I know so many words off by heart and how sentences are structured, that I can start creating my own brand new sentences.

1 Like
#2

The premise of the question fails to account for how the process of language learning works. To be completely honest, knowing a few hundred words was already enough to start “actually speaking”, but by that I mean to have very basic conversations like “Hi, how are you, where are the toilets, thank you, where are you from” etc. It’s less of “can’t speak” and “can speak” switch to a gradient from being able to talk about only basic things, to building up over time, until gradually I am able to go out and do pretty much any task and have any conversation I want in my target language. The 80-20 rule applies here. The majority of human interactions will be made up of the most common words that a beginner knows, but the minority of words used per conversation come from a much bigger pool that takes much longer to learn, which is why most language learners hit a plateau of sorts as the marginal gain per word learned decreases rapidly.

1 Like
#3

I feel like you kind of skipped over the core problem about what I’m experiencing.

Knowing 250 words is not the same as being able to construct 20 grammatically accurate sentences, because when you make a sentence, you need to consider word order, how the word changes based on if it’s a man or female speaking or past tense present tense etc.

An example in English you might know how to say the following words “I” “am” “going” “to” “the” “shops” “do” “you” “need” “anything”

But when you try to say that sentence in real time, you may end up producing “I am to the going shops you do anything need”

Because knowing words is not the same as knowing grammar.

1 Like
#4

The problem here is being grammatically accurate and speaking is also two completely different skills. In all three languages I can speak at a comfortable advanced level, including my native language, I make grammatical mistakes all the time, which means I “actually speak” zero languages. This isn’t to diminish the importance of grammar, but the point is to illustrate that you shouldn’t beat yourself up over grammatical mistakes, especially if its your second language. Fluency and grammatical accuracy are different skills, in fact I am sure if you look closely, you can find grammatical mistakes in pretty much everything I post, and so what?

#5

It’s very early days, if I may say so. Enjoy remembering the words you do know, experiment with speaking longer sentences but don’t rush. A solid understanding of basic grammar bodes well for future learning. Hope I’ve covered some of your points.

2 Likes
#6

What strategies do you recommend? A strategy I used before was keeping a full list of words that I know in Anki and then parsing them to a LLM and telling it to generate short stories using the words in the list.

#7

There are two very important factors here: (1) your psychology and (2) the psychology of the person you’re speaking with.

If you are comfortable with making mistakes, you will be able to speak much earlier. And if you find a conversational partner who enjoys talking with someone who is not an expert in the language, you will be able to talk with them much sooner than with someone else.

However, I think our psychology in this area is pretty much fixed by the time we’re adults. It’s hard to get yourself to switch from being a self-monitoring type to a free spirit just by giving yourself an encouraging talk. And it’s pretty much impossible to get someone who does not already have the characteristics needed to speak to a non-native (patience, fascination with language, understanding of one’s own language, clear speech) to acquire them on the spot.

Having said that, two people can grow together as conversational partners. I’m thinking of someone at work who used to drive me crazy because he spoke so quietly and because when I didn’t understand him, he would switch to English. However, over time, I became a better Hebrew speaker, and he became more willing to stay in Hebrew when talking to me. He really understands his own language, and enjoys language-learning himself, and these traits helped me overcome the fact that he speaks quietly. Also, we know and like each other and have a lot in common. Striking up a conversation with a stranger who may or may not be interested in “small talk” is a very different matter.

Another way to look at it is that with time, the number of people you can talk with, and the number of people you can understand, will increase. If you can find yourself a good conversational partner to talk with on a regular basis, you’ll get a feeling of satisfaction that will make you stop worrying as much about how long it will take you to get to the point where you can talk to just about anyone. Another thing that will get you through is your ability to take pleasure in your growth in all your language skills other than speaking, since that could well be the last piece to fall into place.

As for quantifying how long it takes, that depends not only on the first two factors, but also on the “difficulty” of the language (how different it is from your original language), as well as many other psychological factors. I wouldn’t feel qualified to guess how long it would take you to get to the point where you can speak Romanian with anyone you want.

5 Likes
#8

Never be afraid to “get it wrong”. I learnt very quickly that mistakes started conversations and good humour,

3 Likes