A common problem is when you want to practice a foreign language with natives, but every time you say something, the native speaker responds in English. It’s frustrating because you spent a lot of time studying the language and the one response in English seems to belittle you with a “Nice try, but why bother?”.

Without practice, you feel that you can’t improve. This seems like a catch-22 situation: people won’t speak their native language with you until you get good, but to get good you need practice.

The question is how can you attain a high proficiency in a foreign language if you don’t get enough practice opportunities?

While we learn language for speaking, never forget that there is listening, reading, and writing, any of which can provide just as much enjoyment on their own. If you really want to succeed, you should put yourself in complete control of your language learning instead of depending on others who may not always be there.

Practice Isn’t Everything

First off, practice doesn’t make perfect if it’s not quality practice. Far too many people think that without practice, they cannot make any progress in the language. This is not true and leads many people to settle for bad practice and even disrespectful behavior from others.

Practice is useful for constructing correct sentences in real time because it forces you to actively recall words and phrases. However it is not the place to be learning new words or grammar because you can learn vocabulary all in your own time.

So much advice on language learning blogs say to seize every single moment as an opportunity for practice because natives are friendly and will try to help you. While this is true for a lot of people, there are just as many unavailable and possibly negative people who will try to destroy your motivation.

As an example, suppose you try to practice a language but the person continues to respond in English. The common advice is that you’re supposed to keep jabbering away in their native language in the hope that they relent and switch.

What no one mentioned is that these power struggles are a complete waste of time in improving your language skills. Even if the native speaker reluctantly switches to use their native language, you will only get a very unnatural and stilted conversation. You cannot exchange any meaningful ideas or use a lot of varied vocabulary and so your communication improves barely if at all.

By settling for bad practice, you insure that you won’t get to experience quality practice. If you need to practice, you must be able to differentiate between quality practice and bad practice.

Quality practice is talking to native speakers on a wide variety of topics, where the native speaker communicates at a normal speed and uses the same vocabulary that they would use with any native speaker.

Bad practice includes oversimplifying language even when you understand advanced expressions, speaking extremely slowly, power struggles over which language to use, deliberately giving you wrong translations, etc.

With bad practice, you still have an opportunity to use the language, giving you the illusion of improvement. However by tolerating bad practice, you allow people to disrespect you just so that you could speak a few words in their language. It is not only a waste of time that does little to improve your skills, but will also slowly erode your self-confidence and sense of worth.

As you wouldn’t tolerate rude behavior from another native English speaker, the same standards should be applied to natives of other languages. If you are getting bad practice, it is better to abandon ship and seek other natives who treat you better.

Before You Seek Natives For Practice

If your pronunciation isn’t close to perfect, you need to fix it now. A lot of learners will undervalue pronunciation hoping that natives will accommodate them because they are foreigners.

But what you need to realize is that your speaking is your identity, often times the only basis on which you are judged. If your speaking is mediocre, you will be perceived as mediocre. You will get little respect, even if you know more vocabulary and have better grammar than an educated native speaker.

If you think this is unfair, think of the last time you judged a foreigner who spoke English with a strong accent. How did you perceive him/her? You judge other people just the same, so try to keep that in mind.

If you don’t fix pronunciation now, you could end up in a resentful situation months or years later like below. Don’t let this happen to you:

So, I basically learned Mandarin Chinese from scratch, as an adult, about a decade ago… I am fluent in all senses of the word, but my accent is horrible. That said, it often happens at work (at a bank) when someone assumes I speak Mandarin because I’m Asian and starts off with that instead of English, I often get them saying, “It’s okay, we can speak English,” or something to that effect because of my accent. I find it extremely impolite! Like, c’mon, if you came up to me expecting me to speak your language and I DO AND AM MAKING AN EFFORT, WHY SO RUDE?!

Impolite it may be, but natives aren’t going to change their perception of you unless you make a deliberate effort to change your accent.

It is far easier to blame others for not accommodating you than it is to introspect and improve. Only those who take full responsibility for their pronunciation and language learning are going to keep on improving, the rest will passively accept mediocrity and wonder why they never get respect.

Even if you have a near-native accent, you may have other problems such as incorrect grammar and/or lack of vocabulary. The solution to that problem would be obtaining massive amounts of comprehensible input through reading and listening, so that you can form sentences quickly and naturally.

Conclusion

Practice is useful, but it isn’t everything. If you really want to improve your command of your target language, you need to be self-sufficient and willing to take full responsibility.

Lack of practice won’t hinder your language abilities much, but bad practice will certainly hurt your motivation and dignity.