Hi.
I had an English conversation yesterday on Discord. And it was AWFUL. You know... it was so bad it hurts. It was in some ways painful.
I throught I was doing great but actually I don't. And it sucks.
It's very disappointing when you think you are making progress and situations like that happens.
So I'm decided to develop my spoken skills on discord. The good thing abou discord is that's complete free, the bad one is that we talk with strangers and random people in each conversation. It's hard to keep a deep conversation with someone there because probably you won't talk anymore with that person.
I was thinking about creating a server on Discord and put the invitation link here in my posts but I think nobody's gonna join it anyway.
That's it. I need to develop my spoken skills. Do you have any tip for that?
Bye for now...
You just need to speak more often and I think that you are going to improve fastly. The site that I would recommend for speaking is "www.free4talk.com". I'm not native so don't take my corrections like they are 100% right. All the best to you!
Hey, Bruna! Don't be so frustrated about this - it happens all the time. Sometimes it even happens in our own language! Just try to relax and have fun while you talk to people - you'll see how better it gets if you do that :) Anyways, my tip would be to find a language exchange partner. I have one for each language I study and it works great for me. Check out the 'language exchange partners' on italki, that's where I've found mine.
@Bruna I think you did rather well, just a bit of polishing here and there. English is a pretty robust language you would have to really mangle it for people to not understand you.
Don't feel bad about a bad conversation on the internet. Lots of people are horrible online! It's their fault, not yours. If you keep looking, I'm sure you'll find friendly places to chat.
As a non-native english speaker as you, I know how hard it is to develop speaking skills when you're studying by yourself. And the first time you have a conversation in your target language tends to be utterly awful. My first one was a job interview, so you can imagine how bad it was. So, if you don't have someone to have a conversation in a daily basis (or you're just shy), what you can do is speak alone until you get confident enough to have a conversation with a stranger. You can start trying to answers questions you know are usual in a conversation or just trying to shadow an Youtube video. Have a look on this videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxHKkfbcRKQ&t=592s and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-Dj74TJoOI
Good luck! I'm sure you'll improve your english,
When you make mistakes that means you are learning. Making mistakes is part of the process.
@mladen_ thanks for sharing this platform. I'll check it out for sure. Is it really free?
Thanks for your tip, @HeyItsMe. I'm trying to find a language partner, but it's difficult.
Thanks for your corrections, Claude
@PhilH. It's hard to find a person that really wants to talk to you. There are so many trolls on the internet
@Matheus. Thank you. I'm thinking about studying the episodes of How I Met Your Mother. It's just 20 min long and very informal. I really want to get out of the intermediate level and reach an advanced level of speaking fluency. That is my goal for 2021, but it's frustrating most of the time.
@filipmowipopolsku. For sure, but I'm not going to lie, sometimes I get really frustrating. I need to practice A LOT.
@Bruna Yes! The site is completely free. I visit that site about 3 times a week, so if you want we can talk together. HIMYM is my favorite tv-show too, I think it's a great idea to study from HIMYM because English there is so natural and informal ( I did the same in the past so I recommend that :D)
Hey Bruna, I know you are frustrated, these kinds of things happen all the time. Try to be proud of your persistence and not look back at your losses. At the time, I'm obsessed with "roll the dice" by Charles Bukowski. One more thing, what kind of server is that? Can I join this server too?
Don't be too hard on yourself. Speaking/communicating with other people (especially strangers) is also a skill in itself. So you are working two skills at once!
Sometimes I cannot speak coherently in my own language (English) in front of others I do not know. There are also some accents of English even as a native speaker that I do not understand (such as some of those in Northern England as a Western Canadian). English is such a crazy flexible language, sometimes its hard to know what to consider English anymore. But, that's also what makes it cool ;).