Jump-start Your Target-Language Fluency
Today someone was looking for advice because he had lived in Finland for 3 years and spent approximately 1000 hours on the language without yet being able to have conversations. He was planning to spend another 500 hours on watching TV, working his way up to understanding reality TV, and then start conversing. That might sound like a reasonable approach to language-learning when you’re new, but languages (like swimming or piano-playing) are one of those things where passive ability does not readily translate to active ability. So here’s the advice I gave:
The human brain would be unable to speak any language fluently if it had to retrieve each word, apply the grammar, and then send it to the mouth. Neuron speeds simply aren't fast enough, at least not for regular conversational speed. So how do we do it? Through the magic of chunking. Chunking means storing several words and grammar as one item. For example, the phrase "I'd like a chicken sandwich please" probably consists of three chunks: "I'd like", "a chicken sandwich" and "please". 3 chunks can be retrieved vastly faster than the 6 words of this sentence, not to mention applying the conditional tense to "like", minding the shortening of "I would" to "I'd" and so on.
Chunking does not happen when watching TV. It does happen when memorising sentences or when speaking. After the brain has laboriously retrieved words often enough, it will develop these shortcuts (chunks). There is no way to develop these shortcuts without having the brain laboriously retrieve words often enough.
Imagine being a new piano player. At the beginning you have to look for each key and then place a finger on it and press it. After only a few hours of practice, you know the location of the keys by heart, so the process of playing a single note speeds up. After some more time, your brain has "chunked" notes together that often appear together, so that you can play transitions of 2, 3, 4 notes pretty fluently. This is what active practice does. By contrast, watching concert pianists or piano classes on Youtube will not help with this at all.
If your goal is to achieve conversational fluency, 60 hours of active practice will do more than 1000 hours of listening. Just look for the "Add1Challenge" or "Fi3M Challenge" (= Fluent in 3 Months Challenge) videos on Youtube. These are people, many of them monolinguals, who wind up being able to have okayish 15-minute conversations, including in non-European languages, after studying 45-60 minutes per day for 90 days. This Youtube list includes my challenge videos for Hebrew, Russian, Croatian, Japanese, Vietnamese. I usually put in 45-60 hours in 90 days (starting from zero) to achieve those and those hours include zero TV, only vocabulary study, some initial textbook study, and a lot of 1:1 conversation practice with tutors. A lecture in which I explain more of my fast-track approach.
Concrete plan:
1. Use italki to find Finnish tutors and tell them you want conversation practice only and that they should write down every word you don't know in the textchat. Start every sentence in Finnish, even if it's just "I am". Then use an English word whenever you don't know the Finnish equivalent - continue conversing in Finnish. Meanwhile the teacher will write the Finnish word in the textchat. Try to include it in your conversation.
2. Make Anki cards for all words and set expressions that came up this way. Study Anki for 10-20 minutes every morning.
3. When you don't have time for a session with a tutor, imagine conversations in your head, or write down scripts of how you might talk about things that usually come up (your situation in life, how and why you are learning Finnish, the weather, your family, particular anecdotes you often tell...). Practice telling these scripts, don't aim for 100% memorisation but aim for being able to have a short, fluent monologue about these topics without searching for words. This is what Boris Shekhtman calls Language Islands. (Read his book "How to improve your foreign language immediately" for more tips; he ran successful bootcamps to improve people's fluency in just one weekend.)
Don't take my word for it. Try at least 3 different italki tutors to find one that you have good chemistry with, then take just 10 hours of conversational classes with them, and see if you aren't vastly closer to your goal of being able to talk to Finnish people. If so, continue for the full 60 hours.
Thank you so much for this, Judith!