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by Arc_Orion
833 days ago
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Take the initiative to talk to other people. That's honestly the best way to improve. You just have to work out of that zone. Go to your local library or go to your local college/university that has an ESL (English as a second language) option. Ask for help finding a group to practice English with. They'll often have free or inexpensive ways to speak English with others. The discomfort you feel when speaking a second language is because you don't feel confident speaking. Building that confidence usually requires speaking with others. If you are in an environment where others in the group are learning as well, it should be easier to get over that initial discomfort. *Edited - I was using pointlessly long sentences. |
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Yup.
If your goal is gaining native/near-native fluency then there is no other option but to talk/write to people.
Lots of people will try to tell you "just use Anki", just use some AI-gimmick, just read books or just listen to lots of podcasts. But they are wrong.
The problem with the one-sided immersion as I listed above is that you will become very good at comprehension. You will be able to perfectly understand what people are saying, you will be able to perfectly understand complex written documents, or documents with lots of native slang and abbreviations.
But comprehension != fluency.
If you want to be able to speak and write like a native, then there's no shortcut. You have to get off your backside and interact with the natives in live bi-directional form.
AI will NOT help you with this. AI is very good at being very confident at being very wrong, that is not what you want. You want humans, real life humans, the more the better (then you get exposed to different dialects, different age groups etc. etc.).
If you absolutely must have an app, then look at something like HelloTalk which is basically 21st century pen-pals, find a human language partner and chat with them.
But really, just join a sports club, do some hobbies, go down the pub .. whatever gets you in the room with humans.