Benefits of Conversation

Today I had my first conversation exchange with Spanish (with my student Angelina).  I must admit, I was nervous before doing it.   I'd never tried to chat in Spanish before and figured it would be a disaster.

But, in fact, it was great.  We talked about 40 minutes.  At the end of the chat, I felt fantastic.  I felt a huge surge of confidence... and a feeling of real accomplishment.   Wow-- I communicated in Spanish for 40 minutes! 

Was my grammar perfect?  No... far from it.  Was my pronunciation great?  No... far from it.  

In fact, I'd say Angelina spoke about 80% of the time.  She was great about using very easy Spanish.  But that's fine.  I'm a low level Spanish learner.   What's important is that we communicated.

In fact, that was lesson number one about this experience-- once I relaxed and focused on communication-- everything went great.  When I didn't know a word I needed, I used a similar word.  I often found it difficult to speak full sentences, so I spoke in short phrases and single words.  I asked a lot of questions, and kept her talking... since my speaking was low (but my listening is better).   And it worked.  We had a nice chat about her home country of Paraguay.

As I think about it now, I see two big benefits I gained from this chat:

1. Confidence
There is nothing like actually communicating with a native speaker in the language-- even if you make a lot of mistakes.  This is the big goal for most of us, isn't it-- real communication.  After the chat, I was very enthusiastic and my motivation is now much higher.  As a result, I'll definitely be doing more Spanish study this month than I did last month.   Connecting with real people with the language is the biggest motivator of all.

2.  Input
Using my bad Spanish was not really the best benefit.  The best part of the conversation was hearing Angelina use Spanish phrases I needed... and then copying her.   For example, if I didn't know whether to use "sobre" or "para" or "por" in a certain sentence.. I just guessed.. then let her finish the sentence using the correct word.  Then I repeated what she said.  In this way, I got correct input from her and picked up some useful phrases (and grammar by the way). 

This suggests that when we chat, we should probably be a lot more focused on the phrases that the native speaker is using instead of worrying so much about ourselves.   They are a great source of correct and useful phrases, we should pay attention as they talk and try to remember how they communicate certain ideas.  This is very helpful.