Alan Palmer's Language Chat Podcasts

Hello everybody. For my weekend words this week I want to talk about conversation practice and speed of speaking. Over the years, I've met a lot of people who are learning English as a foreign language. I'm always surprised how hard they try to learn English and their level of language, their high ability to handle difficult grammar points and how much vocabulary they have. In some cases, maybe it is the first time they have had an opportunity to speak with a native speaker (me) and they want to be able to have an intelligent interesting conversation. This means that very often, in order to develop the conversation, they speak much faster than they need to, and sometimes forget that a conversation is two-way - speaker and listener. I often find myself doing a similar thing when I speak French or German. I speak faster than I should do. It is like I am in a race against time, to say what I want to say and hope that I have made myself understood. As a native speaker of English, what I can tell anyone who spea