Practice What You Preach (Arabic Week 10)

Each week I spend some time with a few graduate students, going over different interview questions and allowing them to practice how they would answer the questions. As we work through the questions I give suggestions about how to appear more confident in what you say. I've been trying to instill different methods of how to improve language learning lately but I haven't been following that same advice that I've tried to offer. It makes it a little more difficult to convince somebody to believe these methods would work if I'm not following them myself, right? Today, I'm going to take a look at three of them and how I plan to approach them.

Self-reflection after using a language. One good thing to do after using a language is to ask yourself how the interaction went. What worked? What didn't? Where do you see some areas of improvement to focus on? A lot of times I am so happy I was able to use a language that I immediately go running around my apartment in celebration. I forget a lot to ask myself some of these questions for improvement. This past week I noticed some improper words I had used in my Arabic chat due to tenses and plural forms of words. I've revisited some of these words this week in my video.

Refrain from using "umm" or other filler words. We do this because we are searching for words and at the moment we don't have them yet. The silence feels awkward to we fill it with something, "umm" What I've learned though is that when you are talking with another person, we don't feel these awkward silences as much when we are the listener instead of the speaker. I've encouraged people to become more comfortable with those silences as they actually become more effective speaking tools. I've yet to follow this advice when speaking in other languages because I always feel pressured to speak. This has caused me to keep speaking which has also lead to more grammatical mistakes when speaking because I'm not taking the time to form the proper sentence. My goal is to focus more on forming a correct sentence and allowing those silences to feel comfortable. My hope is that this will allow me to listen more and improve on that at the same time.

Lastly, maintaining eye contact is important for all communication. It's hard to really connect with somebody who is always looking away. I have a MAJOR habit of looking to the sides when I'm trying to find new words. This shows lack of confidence and can easily make the person you're communicating with lose interest in what you say. This is going to be a big goal for me in the upcoming weeks. This weeks video is all focused on that. I apologize if you decide to watch the video. My goal was to stare DIRECTLY at the camera as I worked through some phrases I struggled with this past week. One is to finally allow me to explain what I do at work in Chinese and the other are words/phrases I learned from my previous chat in Arabic.

I apologize for the audio on this one. Not sure what happened. I say two things in Chinese which you can note I am more comfortable saying "I am a mechanical engineer" than actually what I do.

Until next time!