I’ve finally done it; I said enough is enough, and I pulled the trigger to talk to a tutor to get me speaking! I went on italki and found a tutor for a good price. I was too self-conscious to start speaking, but I’ve hit a plateau recently and figured this is a good way to change the pace.
Even affter months and months of reading and listening on my own, I understood what the tutor had to say. We mostly spoke in Russian, and she was nice enough to speak slowly (I digress: this seems to be a problem with informal speaking with language partners; a lot of them have no idea how fast they are speaking). I give credit to LingQ on this. Lots of passive vocabulary brought to the surface and was spat out from a little pressure on the tutor’s part. It felt good to speak. She was impressed with my pronunciation and knowledge of grammar.
Just thought I’d share an accomplishment I had tonight. I can’t wait to speak again!
I’m just about at the point where I’ve got to start talking too. Once over that hump it probably won’t be a big deal, but it’s tough to take that plunge!
May I ask how long you have been studying the language until this point? Just trying to gauge how long it may take for me to build a large enough passive vocabulary to begin speaking.
On and off for about 2.5 years. I’ve put in about 600 hours in Russian. My LingQ word counter is low, but I do a LOT of reading and listening. Over 550k words of reading and 250+ hours of listening.
I started speaking right away, but it was in the form of reading out loud.
I used to speak a bit with my friends, but it was just small talk, so to say that I did zero conversing until now isn’t true at all.
I know how you feel! I bet you’ll do fine. Tutors are generally really patient and know you’re in a position of awkwardness and don’t know what to expect. It’s just like jumping into a swimming pool; there’s no sort of, it’s either do it or not!
Thanks 4 asking! It’s pretty good. I would say the hardest part of Chinese is not the characters or the tones, but it is these weird words they make by combining smaller words, and a bunch of weird grammatical words.
Congratulations to a successful interaction in the great Russian language! Why did wait for so long before speaking? To me the interaction with speakers of russian is the most pleasant part of learning the language.
More out of self-consciousness and being busy. While studying at the university, my work load would be pretty variable, and it would be difficult to schedule a lesson.