How to succeed in speaking a foreign language confidently #practicing #informal style Speaking is the hardest part of learning a foreign language. Someone out there may not agree with that. It must be someone who loves jumping into things, who feels ‘born ready’ for anything and who doesn’t blush every time he makes a mistake – overall we learn better and quicker from our own mistakes. Anyway most of us like being prepared before going out there and starting talking and break up conversations. We spend lots of time reviewing our vocabularies flashcards, reading books and articles and writing. We even try to translate in the language we are learning every thought that comes into our mind. All of that is very useful. Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not gonna say everything we have been doing is bullshit. Of course, it’s important to perfectly know the grammar rules and keep reading to increase our vocabulary but the hard truth is that we’ll never feel ready and confident to talk if we don’t start making conversation with native speakers regularly. Learning a foreign language is like learning how to play an instrument, such as piano or violin. You can know everything about your instrument: what its history is, how it changes throughout the centuries, how it is made. But you’ll never be able to play it if you just sit there looking at it and studying about it. You actually gotta picked it up and start striking its cords. That’s it. And I know that’s easier said than done. But that is the only thing that helps us get fluent and build confidence. And we’ll make a bunch of mistakes for sure, we’ll probably make people laugh about them. But we don’t have to make an issue about it, we do have to accept that and keep going forward. Failures are along the way for success, so to get there we gotta face them. It will worth our efforts.​