Do you guys find that you have a good foundation to speak well after you read a substantial amout of text?
Aslo, do you guys ever use something like Pimsleur to boost your speaking ability in a language you have read quite a bit in?
Just curious how to get my portugese speaking capacity where I want it without wasting time if you know what I mean.
I haven’t reached 1 million words read yet, anyway here’s my take. Read, listen and watch a lot, but also speak . Another alternative to speaking is writing, they complement each other, but they aren’t the same either. Lots of input benefits output too, but if we want to improve in ouputting a language (speaking), we also need to target this skill specifically. You can hire a tutor or find a language exchange partner. Reading is very useful, but it won’t be able to replace actual speaking practice. Regarding Pimsleur (I’d throw in also Glossika) I have tried them at the beginning while learning Chinese and they did help, they were a good boost at the beginning for speaking a few sets of sentences automatically without thinking/translating in my head, anyway I don’t think they are enough to make you fluent and I switched to other things after the initial phase. When you have a real conversation with someone they can judge your pronunciation, they can tell you if you are speaking in a grammatically correct way, they challenge your listening ability, they can teach you new words, they can correct you (otherwise you have to do all this work by yourself when you self study, but it isn’t only a matter of (wasted) time, since you aren’t proficient in the language yet, you won’t be able to correct yourself as good as a native speaker would). So you if your goal is speaking, you speak. 1 million words is just a number, I’m sure you will be very good after you read 1 million words, it also depends on how many words you learn out of those words, that’s why Lingq focuses on known words count. I think you can have a general conversation even with much less words read, obviously the more the better. Through exposure you gain new words definitions, but also words usage, you internalise patterns, eventually you’ll be fluent.
Wow thank you brother that is super helpful! Yeah i kind of figured that a combination of speaking and a way of aquirinv vocab would help.
I was trying to learn spanish at one time by only speaking with natives andit didnt work awesome.
I think a balancedcombo of reading a bunch and speaking a lot could be the way to go with portugese. Thoughts?
Yes, I think that’s the best combo.
I’m nearly 2.1m words read into Greek after 800 days.
It’s very hard but the fog has lifted.
I’m noticeably better every 100,000 words read.
CI and Lingq work. It depends on the difficulty of the language, Greek being harder than Portuguese.
Yeah I imagine Greek takes some high level of commitment. You have selected quite a challenge. What is CI?
I tried to teach myself French 25 years ago. I didn’t get far. Then at a party a friend encouraged me to speak and a fifth-grade boy attending an Alliance française school made fun of my accent!
That stung and I soon dropped French. I didn’t have the time for it anyway because of my job.
Nonetheless, it did teach me the importance and difficulty of pronouncing French properly. I’ve also heard French speakers really tough on bad accents or Quebecois.
I know from English how hard it is to unlearn the mispronunciations I made up for words I only knew from reading. I also read a story about a French speaking guy whose girlfriend was learning French only by reading and when she spoke he had no idea what she was saying.
So I really bang hard on listen/repeat/shadow, while reading. I consider it essential. It took me 2000 hours to reach 1,000,000 words. A lot of that time was listening and pronouncing.
What exactly do you mean by speak well? Pronunciation? Or being able to say what you want to say?
I think Steve Kaufmann says it best…to speak well, you have to speak a lot. So just getting to 1,000,000 words read is not going to do that.
Now having read 1,000,000, you will have acquired a lot of vocabulary and phrases, so even if you haven’t spoken one single word until that point, you will be able to say some things…slowly and poorly depending on how much it deviates from those words and phrases you’ve heard the most. In other words you’ll have a good base to work off of, but outputting is just so much different. It’s a different process for your brain to think the other way around and produce, that it really requires some practice with writing, speaking and thinking. Plus your active vocabulary is going to be limited if you haven’t been practicing.
So along the way, if you have a goal of speaking it’s best to practice along the way doing some forms of outpput…writing, speaking (even to yourself), or thinking during the day how you might say something that you just said in a conversation. Look it up if you need to. Learn how you would say all the typical things you say during the day. Topics that are important to you.
Great point. How much speaking practice do you get in when you study? If you dont mind me asking. I’m a little new at this.
I have reached 1.6 million words read. And I can not speak even a little bit of German. But that’s because I have put very little time in to speaking. I think though that at 1 million words read that you can definitely speak very well. Because you have already put a lot of the language into at that point. It really is true though, you will never get good at something if you don’t do it.
Not nearly enough =)
I’m a bit input oriented…I like to consume. I’m a pretty “quiet” person in real life. So speaking is a little lower on my priority list. I try to do some form of output work…like 5 minutes a days worth. Could be speaking (mostly to myself), writing, or simply thinking about how I can say certain things. I would much rather be in the range of 30 min a day of output based activity but time is limited with all my other activities. Speaking is definitely lagging, but I can communicate many things I’d like to say…poorly, slowly, with lots of hesitation. So it just takes repetition and getting more and more words in the “active” vocabulary.
I dont know if this is helpful or not but I’ve been using pimsleur to practice speaking when i dont talk to people. I’m introverted as well haha. I think Steve Kauffman has a bit of introvert in him as well lol. Thanks for the advice my friend.
I have plenty of ideas on how to practice speaking…it’s more a matter of finding time…or dividing more of my input time to my output time.
I also have not rushed the speaking part because I still feel I need a lot more listening work. It’s improved leaps and bounds…but still there are many times where I get lost with native speakers speaking so jumping into a conversation without fully understanding is a little difficult…especially for someone like me who would rather just listen than talk anyway =D.
Ah gotcha. Yeah i get it. Good luck with your studies my friend.
You guys think the 36 hours of speaking practice that link has for advanced 2 suffecient for communicating?
Reading 1.000.000 words will not make you a good speaker on its own. It might give you enough comprehension to learn to speak well. Whether it is enough though is going to depend completely on your circumstances.
I would suggest, assuming you aren’t learning an agglutinative or polysynthetic language, that 1.000.000 words read is near the low end of what could be enough to support “speaking well”.
Thanks for the response. What do you think would be a good goal as far as words read?
I would actually encourage you to not think in those terms at all 
. I know nothing about your background, but it looks like you have been learning Spanish and Portuguese. Based on how many words you LingQ versus mark known, I would guess you had some knowledge of them before LingQ.
Assuming you’re a native English speaker, you could probably start having meaningful conversations and meaningfully improve your speaking ability after 250 hours of listening, and say 1.000.000 words read. Listening will matter more for ability to speak than writing.
To answer your question though, is assess where you at and keep doubling your goal. If you still don’t feel you can speak well, keep speaking, but also target say 500 hours of listening and 2.000.000 words read. If you still aren’t comfortable, keep speaking, but target 1.000 hours of listening and 4.000.000 words read. Though really, if you are enjoying the process and how learning Portuguese is expanding your world, why stop? Just keep moving the goalposts and enjoy the ride.
Thanks for the feedback man. That is super helpful to get the perspective.
The forum profiles don’t show it, but the old LingQ profiles do.
If you go to a LingQ profile like this, remove the space and replace {username} with their username, you can see what languages they are learning, and things like Known Words, Words Read, etc. !
lingq.com /en/learn/fi/web/profile/{username}
