Here are some ways to practice your target language. They seem unique to me because I don’t hear these ideas that often. I’ve done most of these myself, and they’re pretty fun.
Culture
Describe a movie or TV show to a native speaker, and you'll learn the name of the movie/show in your target language.
Sneeze, stub your toe, trip over your feet, or commit a similar faux pas. Pay attention to the first thing that comes out of the native speaker's mouth. It might be a cultural reactionary phrase such as "bless you." (If your target language has a lot of online resources, you could search these reactions online without having to cause them yourself. If they’re not explicitly written out in webpages, look for them in vlogs portraying daily life.)
Listen to what native speakers say when they stub their toe or experience delays in traffic.
Similarly related, have native speaker friends take pictures of people and listen to how they prepare the people and count down to press the button. In English, it sounds like, “Ready? One, two, three!” Sometimes we add, “Say, ‘cheese!’” because the mouth widens horizontally when saying “cheese” to create a posture similar to a smile.
Vocabulary
Describe a word that you don't know using vocabulary that you do know. Learn the new word. (It’s like playing Taboo, the card game.)
Describe the same topic five different times in five different ways.
Recite phone numbers in your target language.
Deliberately include nouns into your internet searches. (E.g., searching for images of “brigadeiro”)
Quick Reactions
Play Family Feud-esque games in your target language. (In the game of Family Feud, players from opposing teams face each other from across a table and try to answer a question sooner than their opponents. Players must slap the table before answering.)
Watch comedy shows in your target language and try to process the jokes in real time. Count the number of times you laugh with the laugh track. (Laugh track means prerecorded laughs.)
Record yourself vlogging and try to give narration at a reasonable rate (i.e., you're not pausing too much or second-guessing how to express things).
Headline image by brett_jordan on Unsplash
I like the first part about culture. Recently, I've come across the quote Learning a language without learning the culture make you a fluent speaker and bad communication partner.
Counting quick reactions is also a good thing to do👍
Thank you for the feedback! I’d never heard of that quote; it’s quite thought-provoking.
Thank you so much for sharing the post. I totally agree with what you wrote. Without learning culture, we can't understand our learning languages. I've been speaking, writing, reading and listening every day, but my English is not still perfect yet. I don't think I can get the native level and speak like American people, but my goal is that I speak understandable English to the world, and I want to speak English without any stress. I want to feel confident as well. I've met lots of people from overseas and I know everybody has an accent in English, even Americans, Brits, Australians and so on . I have a Japanese accent too. Accent is like a tattoo on our bodies. It's hard for us to get rid of, but I want to focus on rhythms, pronunciation, making syllables (Japanese doesn't have them), making more natural sounding English and so on. Recording is one of the best ways even though I hate listening my recorded voice. It always makes me think I have a deep accent, especially when I make podcasts with my American friend. He speaks American accented English and I speak Japanese one. When I listen to both at the same time, It sounds horrible, lol. And plus, I think making why we are learning another languages clear is important. While learning, we sometimes forget the purpose. I think we sometimes should make sure to ask ourselves why I am learning this language? is important to keep our motivation. Yeah, keeping motivation is also important. Learning another languages is quite interesting, isn't it?