Speaking Boost For Beginners

In the early stages of learning a language it makes sense to use your energies on things that have a high surrender value – language that will be genuinely useful and that you'll be able to use over and over again.

I'd love to banish the term “self-introduction” to the language learning graveyard because it conjures up images of stale classrooms with nervous students who never get the chance to speak standing up one by one and telling the class how many brothers/sisters/cats they have.

So let's paint it in a more positive light. If you want to become fluent in another language, being able to talk about yourself is crucial.

By the way, if you want to speak your target language thanks to a fun and effective method that teaches you through stories, not rules, check out my StoryLearning® courses and claim your free 7-day trial.

Conversation Starter: Talk About Yourself

Not so much for the information itself, but for the fact that if you have a confident start to a conversation you're much more likely to continue the conversation, be more endearing to the other person and, as a result, probably end up having more conversations with more people and improving at a faster pace than you may otherwise!

So here goes.

1) Write a short statement of interesting things about yourself in your mother tongue
2) Get it translated into the target language and written out in parallel
3) Get it recorded onto your phone by a native speaker
4) Carry it around and learn it thoroughly

Congratulations! You can now chat with anyone you meet socially!

Other Advantages Of This Activity

But that's not all. You'll learn heaps of vocabulary that's relevant to you and your life (and therefore much more easily memorised). You'll learn a number of different grammatical constructions. Depending on how well naturally the translation has been done you'll also learn some valuable conversational phrases.

Even if you're not a beginner, this would be a nice refresher activity – up the level a bit and throw in some more interesting language!

Olly Richards

Creator of the StoryLearning® Method

Olly Richards is a renowned polyglot and language learning expert with over 15 years of experience teaching millions through his innovative StoryLearning® method. He is the creator of StoryLearning, one of the world's largest language learning blogs with 500,000+ monthly readers.

Olly has authored 30+ language learning books and courses, including the bestselling "Short Stories" series published by Teach Yourself.

When not developing new teaching methods, Richards practices what he preaches—he speaks 8 languages fluently and continues learning new ones through his own methodology.