This isn\u2019t an easy blog post to write.<\/p>\n
The truth is: we all know you\u2019re faking it.<\/p>\n
You can speak fluently enough, but we can all tell it\u2019s just the same hundred words over and over.<\/p>\n
We all know that you can get by with people who know you, but that things drop off pretty quickly outside the office. It\u2019s no secret that a lot of what people say goes right over your head.<\/p>\n
Okay, sorry to aggravate your impostor syndrome<\/a>. That post is written to everyone<\/em>, because it\u2019s something that everyone<\/em> struggles with. We\u2019ve all got limited vocabularies. We try to work around the, but we\u2019re stuck speaking foreigner-speak. As someone put it to me a few years ago, \u201cWe don\u2019t really speak Dari, we speak Glassman\u201d\u2014referring to the grammar book and vocabulary list that for years defined IAM\u2019s Dari curriculum.<\/p>\n What can we do about it?<\/p>\n You\u2019ve got to break things up. You\u2019ve got to find new words: try to understand things you haven\u2019t understood before, try to learn things you haven\u2019t learned before.<\/p>\n But wait, you say: I don\u2019t have a problem finding new words. It\u2019s mostly just a mass of unknown words!<\/p>\n Exactly right. And what will happen if you try to get new words in a conversation with your language teacher? In one ear and out the other. Next week, you\u2019re right back to where you started.<\/p>\n To solve this, you\u2019ve got to work from new texts<\/em>\u2014something that you can record and listen to, or re-read later. Maybe you\u2019ve already got a text that would be useful, or maybe you\u2019ve got to create a new one; any text will do, or anything else as long as it doesn\u2019t go away.\u00a0<\/em>If you study the words with flashcards<\/a> as well, so much the better; otherwise, you can study by listening to or reading your text.<\/p>\n If you have a text relevant to your life or work, that\u2019s ideal: perhaps curriculum from your project, or a translated policy. That\u2019s the raw material for your language lesson. Look up those words in the dictionary, talk about it with a teacher, in short: massage the text<\/a>. It\u2019ll be immediately relevant.<\/p>\n If there\u2019s no obvious text for you to work with, then you\u2019ve got to find something new. This can be written text, a TV show, a recording from the radio, a story that you record from your teacher or a friend (or a stranger!). Next post will suggest a way to get new vocabulary from that fount of all knowledge: Wikipedia!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This isn\u2019t an easy blog post to write. The truth is: we all know you\u2019re faking it. You can speak fluently enough, but we can all tell it\u2019s just the same hundred words over and over. We all know that you can get by with people who know you, but that things drop off pretty […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-231","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-goals","category-growing-participator-approach"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.iam-afghanistan.org\/lcp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.iam-afghanistan.org\/lcp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.iam-afghanistan.org\/lcp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.iam-afghanistan.org\/lcp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.iam-afghanistan.org\/lcp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=231"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.iam-afghanistan.org\/lcp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":245,"href":"https:\/\/www.iam-afghanistan.org\/lcp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231\/revisions\/245"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.iam-afghanistan.org\/lcp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=231"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.iam-afghanistan.org\/lcp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=231"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.iam-afghanistan.org\/lcp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=231"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}