Talking to Oneself Productively

by John Pasden in language

As an English teacher in Hangzhou, China, one of the questions Chinese college students most often asked me was, “how can I improve my spoken English?” As a member of the ChinesePod team and student of applied linguistics, learners frequently ask me, “how can I improve my spoken Chinese?” Unfortunately, the are no easy answers or “secrets.” If you’re working hard learning Mandarin on ChinesePod and you’ve found a way to practice speaking, then you’re doing the right thing. But surely there might be an extra trick or two out there?

Actually, there are a few tricks out there, but their effectiveness tends to vary widely from person to person. The one I hear most often is “find a Chinese girlfriend,” but this one clearly has limited application, and it sometimes doesn’t even work for those with Chinese girlfriends/wives. This “trick” is a subset of a larger idea, which is just spend as much time with Chinese speakers as you can. But that one is obvious, and probably not useful for most learners.

One method I have found useful is to talk to myself in Chinese. Now before you stop reading, let me explain. I’m not talking about “How are you? Fine, thank you” type conversation. I mean all day long, as I think about different things, I ask myself, how would I say that in Chinese? If I said that in Chinese, how would the Chinese person respond? If the Chinese person responded X, what would I say then?

Let me provide an example of such a train of thought.

OK, I need to buy a lightbulb. How do I say lightbulb? It’s “dēngpào.” So I want to say, “Wŏ xiăng măi dēngpào.” How will they react to that? Well, they might say, “méi yŏu.” If they say that, I’ll just say, “hăo de, xièxie.” But they should have them, so they’ll probably just say something like, “zài zhèli” or “yŏu de, zài nàbiān” and then I can just say “xièxie” and buy them.

Obviously, this is a rather simple example, but the method can be applied to much more complicated situations. The better your imagination, the more extensive and “branched” the “conversation.”

You might be thinking that this method has a major flaw… if you don’t know how to say these things in Chinese, then your every internalized “conversation” deadends rather abruptly. It’s true that the method works better once you get to the advanced beginner or intermediate stage, but the true value in the mental exercise is in identifying what you don’t know. It’s in identifying what you’re unsure of, before you actually have to use it. Then you can take these questions you come up with and either look them up somewhere (if possible) or ask your teacher.

Soon after I came to China and my Chinese was at the elementary level I would run through this exercise every time I needed to go do something that involved communicating in Chinese. I’d think of what I needed to say, how the other person might respond, and how I’d respond to that. I’d look up every word I didn’t know and write it down (making sure to get the tones right), then go and use it.

Talking to myself: it worked for me.

Share this: Facebook

Twitter

Email



Share