I think it’s a strange belief that everyone should be honing their speaking skills from day 0. I think that is an inefficient system. Of course you should learn pleasantries and repeat the words you hear the best you can (In order to develop a foundation for word pronunciation), but I don’t think you should try to drill in on speaking until later on in your studies.
Here is my reasoning:
When you start a language from day 0, your first few major tasks include
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mimicking native sounds
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cramming common vocabulary
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tuning your ears into the language
When learning phrases and sentences, you will retain much less if you don’t fully understand them. When you have a solid fundamental base of the language, it’s easy to use and reuse phrases by substituting other words into the phrases and you can remember the phrases easier because it makes sense to you. Memorizing 42 sounds in order is harder than memorizing 5 words in order that make sense.
Example: I like to eat pizza.
If a L2 only memorized the sounds, the pacing of the sentence will sound off, and the L2 would not be able to effectively tell us what he/she likes to do otherwise than eat pizza. With further practice, the L2 could twist the sentence around and produce beautifully-sounding sentences.
I remember the first day I started learning Persian. I was told to memorize 5 sentences, and after ~45 minutes of study, I had them down good. Thinking back on that, that took forever. It was a bad spend of time. I would have been better off studying vocabulary.
Now, when I memorize a sentence in Persian that is full of words that I know, it’s quick and easy. A majority of my speaking improved when I hit the intermediate stage. The biggest reason for this is that I had the necessary vocabulary to speak faster and more fluidly. Not only that, but with enough reading exposure, I was able to guesstimate how a native would phrase something, and I did pretty good.
Conclusion: Learners should emphasize getting comfortable in their L2 over fluidity at first. After the learner acquires a comfortable vocabulary amount and a comfortable feel for native phrasing and pronunciation (A2-B1 / 1+ to 2), speaking can be practiced much, much more effectively.
In terms of time efficiency and learning efficiency, beginners shouldn’t be focusing on how to speak very well from day 0 unless that is their one and only objective (i.e. you’re going to France in 2 weeks and just want to be able to speak broken French), otherwise, beginning learners should be focusing on vocabulary and getting generally comfortable in the language — building their foundation first before they begin practicing hard on speaking.
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via Learn Online English Speaking
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