Posted by Talking Spanish.
Let’s be honest, no matter which way you look at it, we are all here to be able to do one thing and that is talking Spanish well.
No matter how much we try to fool ourselves into thinking that we get more benefit from written exercises, or that reading about grammar will make us a proficient speaker, the bottom line is that if you want to speak Spanish well, that’s precisely what you have to do. You have to get ‘ talking Spanish ‘ like crazy.
Why do we avoid speaking?
The answer is easy. FEAR. We are typically frightened to speak because we are scared of making mistakes. Of course, this limiting fear, in turn, limits our learning and we get caught up in a downward spiral of the following:
We don’t speak so that we won’t make mistakes and because we don’t speak we don’t get the practice that we need to stop us from making so many mistakes so that, when we are forced into talking Spanish, we make mistakes because we haven’t practiced enough and that makes us frightened of speaking the next time and on and on…
We’ve all been there.
The reason I can talk about this ‘FEAR’ phenomenon is because I’ve felt it more times that you can imagine. The only benefit I had when I was first learning, however, was that I was in a Spanish speaking country and I simply didn’t have a choice. It was talking Spanish or going without food. That was a great motivator.
Generally, however, we learn our second language in our own native country and so finding opportunities to speak Spanish isn’t so easy. Quite often, the longer the gap between conversations, the more anxiety we feel about speaking. Yet, when you are doing it all day, it quickly becomes the norm.
The little words.
We have made this Podcast and the accompanying helpsheets to help you overcome your fears and more to the point, to let you make your Spanish conversation flow more naturally. When you are talking Spanish it pays to have a generous bank of filler words that allow you to hang on to your conversation. (Spanish people will jump into any lengthy gap you leave in your conversation so to avoid interruptions you need to fill the gaps with stuff that doesn’t really mean anything.)
By using these filler words when talking Spanish, you make your spoken word sound more authentic and natural. Why? Because every native speaker uses them. We all do. And you can too!
Listen in to the podcast and choose the little words you like the sound of and ones you can incorporate into your conversation. It will be the making of you! Oh, and get talking Spanish!
un saludo,
Gordon 🙂
Video for This Spanish Lesson
Audio for This Spanish Lesson
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 12:16 — 11.2MB)
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