Practice Speaking by Paraphrasing in Glisten

When you are learning a new language, one of the more difficult skills to practice is speaking, especially if you are not living in a country where the language is spoken natively.

In a language class, you might only get to speak for a minute or two once the teacher has said their piece, and the other students have taken a turn. An online service like iTalki is great for conversations, but you will still typically be limited to an hour or two per week at most.

Active vs passive

When you are ready to move beyond listening and reading and start speaking, it may be difficult at first. Speaking is an active skill, as opposed to reading and listening, which are passive.

Active skills like speaking and writing will generally require more effort, because you have to create something yourself. You aren’t just digesting content produced by others, you have to make things up, and then speak them out in a strange language — it’s a challenge.

Telling stories

You can practice writing quite easily, but how do you practice speaking when you are all alone? One thing I like to do is simply tell stories out loud. Pick something you know well, so you don’t have to think about the content too much, and can concentrate on the language. (I often tell Little Red Riding Hood.) Then start speaking as if you are telling the story to someone. If you want to challenge yourself, choose different tenses for each telling, eg, using the past tense for one iteration, and the present tense for the next.

Paraphrasing with Glisten

Recently, I have started to explore a new technique which is a bit like a micro version of storytelling. What I do is listen to a podcast in Glisten with the Read My Lips workout. Glisten plays each sentence twice, and then leaves a long pause.

In that pause, I try to repeat the sentence. Often I can’t do it exactly, but I try to at least paraphrase what was said. Not getting it exactly right is arguably even better than repeating the content verbatim, because you are extracting the essence through listening, and then retelling it in your own words. Ultimately, that is what you want to achieve when learning to speak a new language.

Going beyond listening

If you’ve been using Glisten for a while, you probably think of it as an app for listening to podcasts in foreign languages. It certainly is that, but you can use it for much more. It works great for practicing speaking too, whether using the paraphrasing technique mentioned above, or other techniques like shadowing, where you try to speak along with the text. Whichever you chose, Glisten’s Listening Workouts also work great for learning to speak.