Becoming perfectly proficient in English

zoro   Fri Dec 14, 2007 6:40 pm GMT
Every time I talk with someone, I can't immediately generate in English what I want to say. My English doesn't just come naturally, so my only choice is to translate my thoughts and feelings which are always first expressed in native language to English and then memorize them beforehand what I want to say.

Before meetings like an interview I often have to anticipate some questions and memorize certain expressions and answers to them, and then repeat them several times.

I had a volunteer interview several weeks ago. As always I prepared and memorized certain expressions to some anticipated interview questions.
The first question I was asked was exactly what I prepared for, so I gave the interviewer my answer I previously prepared for. As soon as I finished my answer, the interviewer said coldly, "That sounds rehearsed." After that I got about 10 more questions, then I got politely rejected during the interview.
She may have thought that I'm superficial and not very passionate, but that's not the case! It's just that I can't bypass the translation phase and just speak straight from my heart, which doesn't allow me to express myself fully and show my passion. :'( The misunderstanding that arises from this is unimaginably really frustrating.
How can you solve this problem?
beneficii   Fri Dec 14, 2007 7:16 pm GMT
One issue could be that you're relying on grammatical explanations of English in your native language to try to "crank out" English. Too many teachers rely on this, and it creates very unnatural language. Of course, they'll argue that you can figure it out from input, and you just have to get good at "cranking out" English, because that is the only way you would be able to figure it out, they say.

I disagree with that, in that trying to use nothing but grammatical explanations of another language in your native language to "crank out" that language is a very bad way of speaking language, which will be by consequence unnatural. Grammatical explanations may have their place, but probably toward the beginning you should have relied more on input, relying on grammatical explanations only when you really needed to.

My guess, is that you need to be iconoclastic with your output, but you may have moved to an English-speaking country and you can ill-afford to become non-functional output-wise, but that is the problem with moving to the country and having to be completely functional off the bat (kids don't have to be completely functional off the bat, which makes this environment better for their learning).

Still, be iconoclastic, completely throw out your ways of speaking the language, while getting massive input and just try to imitate the people you see; even play "shadow" or "mirror" or "copycat" games. Throw your mind into a period of chaos, while you continue to add massive amounts of English into your mind.
Cassis   Sat Dec 15, 2007 2:51 am GMT
Zoro, I understand exactly what you're talking about. I have improved my English greatly over the past couple of months and I would like to share my methods with you. They require a lot of work though but I'm sure you didn't expect otherwise.
Here's what I did:

* I read short stories (www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories) out loud and copy-pasted words and sentences into a document. I then used a dictionary to look up the meaning of the words and learned them all.

* I found a good blog that had been going on since 2003 and read through the whole thing. Whenever I found a sentence that sounded typically "English" in a way I would never write myself, I copy-pasted it. I also looked up all the words and idioms I wasn't familiar with and copy-pasted them into the same document. Later I very freely translated all the sentences and analyzed what I was doing wrong and how I could improve my language by using set phrases instead of translating directly from my native language. I repeated most of these sentences until I knew them by heart. (Sounds crazy but it worked tremendously well.)

* I started applying the things I had learned to my thoughts, at first, then I started speaking to myself, telling myself stories from my life (it made me feel really weird, but what the heck). I never allowed myself to make mistakes. As soon as I bumped into something that I didn't know how to explain, I turned to Google and did some research. If you want to search for phrases and you're not sure of, let's say a preposition, you can put an asterisk as a wild card in its place.

Hope this helps some!
Guest   Sat Dec 15, 2007 6:49 am GMT
You need to practice more with real native speakers. Your confidene and your ability to think in English will skydive after a while. Give it a try.
Guest   Sat Dec 15, 2007 8:02 am GMT
skydive? don't you mean skyrocket?
Guest   Sat Dec 15, 2007 8:50 am GMT
yeah, my bad. it was skyrocket.