When I think of learning a foreign language, I realise that out of all the language skills, I have most\u00a0admiration for good speakers. When you read, you can take your time. When you listen, you can process\u00a0the language quietly in your head. When you write, you can revise what\u2019s on the page a hundred times.\u00a0When you speak, however, everything happens in real-time and you have nowhere to hide. Speaking in\u00a0a foreign language feels like treading carefully through a minefield of grammatical gaffes, pronunciation\u00a0pitfalls and idiomatic impasses. In reality, however, the biggest difficulties you face when braving this\u00a0minefield are only in your own head.<\/p>\n
During my own study of Japanese, the times when I have been most nervous, but equally most proud of\u00a0myself, were when I was pushed to speak in front of people. I still remember the first day I set foot in a mental health facility in rural Nara, where I immediately had a microphone shoved into my palms and was told\u00a0to step on the stage and introduce myself to two hundred patients in Japanese. I\u2019m not sure if my\u00a0audience could hear the trembling in my voice as I toddled through my self-introduction, but I can still\u00a0feel the rush of achievement that I experienced as I stepped down from the stage. I had managed to\u00a0speak for two minutes without tripping up, and without being booed off stage.<\/p>\n
On reflection I realise that my own perceptions of my speaking were probably wildly different to those\u00a0of the listeners. Knowing that Japanese wasn\u2019t my first language, everyone was full of encouragement\u00a0and smiles, which helped to soothe my nerves in the end. I went on to have a wonderful time living and\u00a0working in their community, and I slowly came to realise the language mistakes which seemed so grave\u00a0to me barely registered on the radars of the locals around me.<\/p>\n
This is just one example of the many times where I have found that having the confidence to speak up\u00a0can lead to fantastic opportunities that simply do not present themselves if you let nerves get the better\u00a0of you. The biggest obstacle to being a good speaker is really yourself \u2013 the people around you are only\u00a0going to give you encouragement if you show that you are brave enough to open your mouth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When I think of learning a foreign language, I realise that out of all the language skills, I have most\u00a0admiration for good speakers. When you read, you can take your time. When you listen, you can process\u00a0the language quietly in your head. When you write, you can revise what\u2019s on the page a hundred times.\u00a0When […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":11413,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[713],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.i-learner.edu.hk\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11412"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.i-learner.edu.hk\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.i-learner.edu.hk\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.i-learner.edu.hk\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.i-learner.edu.hk\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11412"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.i-learner.edu.hk\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11412\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12301,"href":"https:\/\/www.i-learner.edu.hk\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11412\/revisions\/12301"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.i-learner.edu.hk\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11413"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.i-learner.edu.hk\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11412"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.i-learner.edu.hk\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11412"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.i-learner.edu.hk\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11412"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}