545: 7 speaking tips to get fluent in any language FAST

The question comes from Matteo, who asks, " Oli, thank you for the podcast." You're welcome.

"I speak Dutch at a decent level, but I still can't speak very well.

I do a lot of immersion, and so the question is which exercises do you recommend next to listening and reading? Should I do flashcards? And also, how can I practice speaking alone without a tutor?" Right, so bit of a contradiction at the beginning.

He said, "I speak Dutch at a decent level, but I still can't speak very well." So what are you really saying here, Matteo? I guess what you're really saying is I think you know a lot, but you can't speak as fluently as you would like.

That's my guess.

Because you say that you do a lot of immersion, which is great.

You've been obviously been listening to some good podcasts.

And immersion means that you are likely to know a lot of things in the language, right? You're gonna have a good vocabulary.

You're gonna be able to understand a lot.

But as I always say, if you want to speak fluently, so if you wanna be able to interact in the real world confidently and fluently like a native speaker, you've got to be speaking a lot, right? Now, reading as a skill is, in my opinion, the single best way to learn a language, right? To learn everything you need in order to be able to speak a language.

But it- in- it's not sufficient in itself.

After that, in addition to that, alongside that, you also have to be speaking a lot.

In the last episode, I talked about how...

I gave a few examples about how I, in, in different languages that I'd learned, I talked about how when I learned Spanish, when I learned Japanese, things that I did specifically to cross that point into, like, real fluency.

And my, my recollection from that really was that I've learned eight languages all to a good level, and in each one, I've- I managed to find, in some way, an opportunity to do a lot of intensive speaking.

And I did that in different ways in different languages.

But I was very proactive in going out and searching for, uh, either situations or people or friends or groups or something that allowed me to spend days, weeks, months on end speaking a huge amount.

And I don't know how I could possibly have got fluent in any of those languages without doing that.

So you've got to go through a period of speaking a lot.

I think that is best done after you've accumulated a real body of knowledge in the language, and the best way to do that is through listening and reading, which is the foundation of the story learning method.

It's what we teach over here, right? So Matteo, it sounds to me like you are just ready for this next phase.

Now, you've asked for specific speaking recommendations.

I'm gonna give you some.