Anyone using Tagalog on LingQ?
I find it bringing together all I learned and acquired in my eleven-year failure in trying to be conversationally fluent here in the Philippines. It’s just awful here with few helping. The traditional grammar lessons I spent a small fortune on totally failed, of course. Then getting help with Natural Learning did not achieve what I thought it would. I think I misunderstood directions using children’s books. I had people read the text. I have been given new instructions. So now I just have people tell the story from what they see in the pictures and not what is written in the text. And half the time readers will describe pictures from magazines and other sources in detail.
I pray that and this will get me fluent and speaking. Even though I can read a great deal of basic text, I am incapable of coming up with speech. I hope all this reading will get me to use the correct verb conjugations which are numerous.
@geodecarlo Yeah, the whole premise of the ‘natural method’ you are describing is you actually understand what they are saying. Then through enough ‘comprehensible input’, you slowly start remembering words and phrases.
I think you are referring to this, right?
It does work, but you actually have to understand what they are saying! Without understanding, it’s literally background noise and pretty much useless.
This and LingQ will not get you speaking fluently. To speak fluently, you have to do a lot of speaking. But building up a large ‘passive vocabulary’, i.e. understanding the meaning of lots of words and phrases, and lots of listening goes a very long way towards being a decent speaker. Especially if you focus on studying lots of spoken language and conversations, such as podcasts and YouTube videos.
The problem is initiating talk. I just stand there and nothing comes to mind. Nothing or so little it is meaningless. After I might think of what I should have said. So speaking is something I do not understand how to get it to come together in a sentence I need.
There seems to be no solution for this. I start trying to construct a sentence and it just crumbles.
So you know how the words and how to structure the sentence. It’s just that you are slow to think of them. This is normal, when you first start speaking. With more speaking practice, the words will come to mind faster. This is especially the case, when you have a decent level of passive vocabulary and listening comprehension. No sweat.