Hi, fellow Journalers. I have a question and I’d appreciate your suggestions.
I haven’t had many conversation partners throughout my language learning journey. This means that I haven’t trained my mind to hold conversations in my target language. I’ve practiced giving monologues (i.e., talking to myself) and listening for extended periods of time, so those are easy for me. But I haven’t practiced constantly alternating between speaking and listening, so that remains hard.
For better or worse, learning Spanish has been a largely solitary journey for me. I’d like to ask for your advice. How would you practice having conversations without a conversation partner? How can I train my mind to alternate between listening and speaking if there is no one to do it with?
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You really can't. However, if you'd like a live speaking partner on Zoom, I'd be happy to oblige. I'm working with Norbert on pronunciation and he's doing really well. Let me know.
IMO, i don't think you can. I mean, practicing alone can still be helpful, but eventually, you gotta talk to others. It's surprising because you might feel good when practicing alone, but real conversations are entirely different, obviously. For me, I've tried lots of practice on my own, but still stumble when chatting with folks T,T
Hi @JGComm. In Tandem, an online platform, you can connect with native Spanish speakers to exchange language knowledge.
https://unlimitedspanish.com/ Courses from this website are interactive and are made to solve the problem you mentioned. You can give it a try to see if you like the topics, the accent, etc. You can find their podcast on YouTube too, but just some of them are interactive.
And, would you like to have a conversation partner if you could? There are a lot of options to do so. There are many apps like Hellto Talk and Tandem where you can find partners for spontaneous conversations, or other apps like italki and Language Talk where you can pay for scheduled and controlled conversations. Also, there are lots of language groups on Discord where you can just jump into group calls. Or you can join Zoom groups like CocoPop mentioned. I guess, if you want to improve conversations, you need to have conversations. Practice "speaking" on your own surely helps if you do a lot of simulations, but you seem to want to improve alternating between listening and speaking, so that's a different muscle to train. How well do you do with shadowing? Or watching and commenting on some YouTube or Instagram lives, whatever live events you watch? Does it take you time to respond/comment or not? You don't have to answer those, it's just something to think about. But, at the end of the day, conversation practice needs actual conversations.