How to use We-Speak
and improve your speaking quickly.
Skills to develop
Confidence & Flexibility
Ever felt nervous speaking? Stress and anxiety have negative impacts on cognitive performance and thus on our ability to speak [1] [2] [3]. So reduce stress and build confidence by speaking frequently!
Become an expert at expressing ideas flexibly. For example, “Ice-cream” can also be expressed as “a frozen sweet food”, “a cold treat for a sunny day”, or “that thing that goes with cake”. The skill of flexibly expressing ideas expands the number of ideas we can express -with the same vocabulary size- and improves the flow of our conversations.
Habits
Write it Down, Ask to Repeat, Don't Revert
Write down the important phrases & words you struggle with during conversation. Then, search how to express them after using a translator. Finally, study and then practice them in your next conversations! Using this process you are “finding the gaps” in your vocabulary and “filling” them.
Get comfortable asking someone to repeat what they say until you ACTUALLY understand it. No more nodding your head “yes” while inside you think “I have no clue what you are saying”. Try to never revert to your native language or English. This forces you to practice expressing ideas flexibly.
Build
Weak Connections
When we learn a new phrase or word, it becomes a weak neural connection that can be used in basic conversation. However, you’ll notice that it is difficult to use these connections fluidly- because you always have to stop and think about how to say them. You are not able to recall them naturally from your subconscious. Use all of your favorite study resources and the Conversation Preparation to build these weak connections before joining conversation.
Strengthen
Weak → Strong Connections & New Contexts
The next step is transforming these weak connections into strong ones, so that during a conversation, you can easily and quickly recall them in a natural or “subconscious” manner. How do we do that? By continually stumbling/failing/thinking/revising & using them until they are eventually cemented into our brains!
Finally, we need to continue this process until the quantity of strong neural connections, is sufficient to communicate in all of the contexts in which we would like to be “fluent” (based on our goals). This means intentionally practicing conversation in new contexts.
Motivation and Frequency
As you can see, practicing frequently is the key to speaking fluently. Join the conversation styles that keep you motivated to practice on a consistent-ish schedule.
Maintenance
Even if you aren’t hoping to improve your ability to speak, you probably don’t want to lose it… So at the very least, try to fit in one or two conversations a week so that you don’t lose progress.
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