When would you start speaking in a language? perhaps when you have acquired enough of the language so you can express yourself and have built up a low intermediate level of comprehension?
on a side note what do you think would happen if you never spoke just listened and read?
I assume you would have a very high level of comprehension and a high number of vocabulary but your pronunciation would be poor or would there be more to it?
Look forward to your replies thanks!
Some time ago I wrote an article about it - “When to start steaking?” THis article is in English, German and in Russian in lingq.com.
Here is the link to the English vershion:
Login - LingQ
“When would you start speaking in a language?”
Possibly never to be honest.
“Perhaps when you have acquired enough of the language so you can express yourself and have built up a low intermediate level of comprehension?”
Perhaps. But really never if you’re going to wait around for you to be able to speak. If you want to learn how to speak then you have to speak. It helps to have a lot of experience with the language but you cannot learn to speak it by reading it. As an example I read a Swedish article today about some mad Danish professor and his sunken submarine and when reading it I recognized many words as if I know them because I watched a lot of Swedish movies when I was a child, but I still cannot speak Swedish if I tried. If I see a number I don’t remember the words for the numbers even though I probably have them stored somewhere in my memory. Take it from me. If you want to speak then speak. At least after building some kind of base knowledge of the language.
“on a side note what do you think would happen if you never spoke just listened and read?”
You would be able to understand written language to a high level at some point and spoken language to a certain point but you would not speak it.
Other viewpoints are welcome. I only have five years of experience with this but I think it’s becoming pretty clear to me that the ability to speak isn’t going to come by itself.