You only learn speaking by speaking. There, I've said it.

Since airing a gripe about the CELTA course a few days ago, it's probably time to say something positive about it. Well, it has overhauled my thinking on a few points. And one of these is the importance of language production or "output."

The course made me realise that, as a learner, I'd always been very "input" focused. I'm a very reluctant speaker, you see, and I tend to place a lot of emphasis on reading and listening to the radio for hours on end in order to internalise the structures.

When attending classes in the past as a learner, I couldn't really see the point of engaging in speaking practice with other learners. What's the point, I used to tell myself, of listening to other people making the same mistakes that I was making, thereby reinforcing my own errors? Surely, to get good at speaking it's best to converse with competent speakers who can correct me...?

The CELTA course made a point of breaking down the language learning process into various components. It would draw a distinction, for example, between language "input" and "output."

Just to be clear: There has never been any doubt in my mind that speaking practice is important. Over the years, I've met so many people who told me, "I understand [insert language], but I can't speak it." The point is, comprehension alone is not enough. Consuming copious hours of input will only take you so far, but if you ever want to consider yourself a speaker of your chosen target language, you need to actually make those words come out of your mouth, no matter how haltingly at first.

Sonia, who was my Spanish teacher in London, once revealed to me that, after arriving in the UK, she used to sit herself in front of a mirror every night before going to bed and talk to herself until, eventually, she got to a place where she felt vaguely comfortable speaking English.

I'm sure I must have guffawed at this when she told me, but it clearly worked for her, and after finishing CELTA, I've come round to considering her "mirror chats" an effective method of fluency practice. However, I doubt that many would have the discipline to stick to it, and I've become convinced that a classroom setting is actually a very good place to make speaking practice happen.

In fact, I'd go as far as conceding that the core benefit of attending a language class at all is to get the opportunity to speak. Thirty years ago, it was still quite a challenge to find good quality input sources, and a class may have been one of the few occasions for the student to hear the language being spoken. In the online world, this is no longer the case. Magazines, blogs, articles, subtitled TV series, films, verb & vocab quizzes, YouTubers teaching you anything and everything from basic grammar down to colloquial expressions in bite-sized chunks - it's all right there, 24/7. And while it is true that you can quite easily find people for conversation practice online, from my own experience of having gone down that route, I'd say that, at least initially while you're still struggling to maintain a conversation, the classroom is a much better place for taking your first steps in this direction.

In an ideal world I personally still prefer working 1-2-1 with a native (or highly competent) speaker, but this isn't always feasible. In reality, it doesn't really matter whether your conversation partner stumbles over their words just as much as you do - the main objective is that you get those words out, no matter how. You first need to get used to producing the language - the quality of your output can be improved later on.

The upshot is, if I ever do get round to teaching, my focus would be on giving my students as much speaking practice as possible.

My Spanish is far from flawless. Have I failed?

Six months ago, I left Spain without ever reaching the level of linguistic perfection that I set out to achieve when I moved there.

There are many reasons for this, which I will go into at some point. In this post, though, I want to sum up briefly what these six years in Spain have actually done for my Spanish.

I'd been studying Spanish on and off since I was a teenager, and despite a couple of flashy certificates, including several from the London Chamber of Commerce which I clinched sometime back in the nineties, I could never really hold any more than the most basic of conversations. I don't think we ever even touched on the subjunctive, which seems like a bad joke, considering that I was certified to dominate the language to an "Advanced Level."

Little did I know then that it would take another 20 years for my skills to actually warrant this kind of certification. My time in Spain has made all the difference. In a nutshell:

• I am now fluent in Spanish and can hold my own on any topic, even in a group in a noisy bar. I can listen, read and speak without having to translate in my head.
• I'm able to read books at normal speed. Novels, biographies, anything. I wont lie - the first five nearly gave me a brain haemorrhage, but after that, things shifted to that very enjoyable place where you get sucked right into the story, rather than labouring over the lines and having to look up every fifth word. I've got tons of Spanish books on my Kindle and I read in Spanish every day. 
• Besides books, I watch series for escapism, and there's tons of them freely accessible on RTVE (Radio Television Española). Best of all, they come with subtitles and transcripts! I don't need those to follow the plot, but I like having them turned on so that I can pick out the odd word or useful expression that's not yet part of my repertoire. Every time I watch an episode, I learn one or two things. But watching series is definitely a recreational activity and not "studying." 
• Spanish is now firmly part of my hard drive. I will never forget it like some language learnt at school or in an evening class. Nobody can take it away from me - it's always available and ready to use for enjoyable activities. 

And I've just realised another thing: there are even advantages to my Spanish not being perfect: It could serve as a tool to expand my social circle, which can be hard to do when you suddenly find yourself being part of "the older generation." So, I've been looking at evening classes for next semester, and I found a couple that might make fertile ground for getting to know new people. They are both advanced level Spanish (C1), centred around conversation and discussing current affairs. Taking an English class to make new friends would be just plain silly, and as for signing up for classes in other languages, I've come to the conclusion that having to focus intently on the various in-class exercises sucks up all of my energy - I have none left for putting on a be-my-friend face. I get so frustrated wrestling with the language that I shut down instead of engaging openly with my classmates. I feel that in a Spanish class, I'd be much more relaxed. Well, that's the theory... I shall report on how it's working (or not) in practice. 

My Five Favourite Language Learning Milestones

The road to fluency is long and lined with potholes, into which we want to crawl and never come out of again. The threat of failure stalks us every step of the way, especially in the intermediate stages, and we'd never make it, if there weren't for those splendid little successes that crop up, sometimes when we least expect them. And they have nothing whatsoever to do with passing exams or getting certificates. Here we go:

1. You can identify "your" language(s). You can tell instantly that that book page with Cyrillic text someone's shared on Facebook is, in fact, Ukrainian and not Russian. Or even though you haven't the foggiest idea of what those tourists walking in front of you in the street are yakking on about, you know for certain that it's German and not Dutch, Danish or Swedish. And then you turn the corner really quickly, because it would be soooo embarrassing if they actually tried to ask you anything right now...

2. You've had your first successful communication with a native speaker. It was only half a mangled sentence, but, by golly, you've managed to order yourself a coffee! WHOOP! And the waiter came back... with a coffee! Double-WHOOP! Suddenly, all those hours spent poring over grammar exercises and combing through flashcards seem worthwhile. This experience is so intoxicating that it instantly turns you into a junkie, constantly on the lookout for the next fix. In fact, you're going to ask the waiter RIGHT NOW for the way to the toilet. Even though you can see the door with a big "WC" sign on it from where you're sitting.

3. Remember our tourists from #1? You've now arrived at the point where you can give them directions. (Except if you're me - I'm incapable of giving directions in any language. Must be something congenital. A few months ago, a French couple asked me the way to the cathedral. My response was to raise my right arm and point it in the approximate direction, accompanied by a couple of encouraging grunts - a bit like a gorilla attempting a Nazi salute. Not sure I helped those guys find the cathedral, but it did make them chuckle...)

4. You've understood a joke in your target language. It was trite, banal, barely half a notch above slapstick. But you laughed and laughed till you nearly peed your pants. Because you "got" it. Oh, you were so impressed with yourself that you shared that little gem of teenage humour with all those friends of yours who are native speakers of that language. The next morning, mysteriously, your friend count is down by a dozen.

5. You can follow and engage in a conversation in a noisy bar. This really is the acid test. Until you are in the situation of trying to communicate in another language in a busy place stuffed to the rafters with people and music blaring, you'll probably never have realised just how much work your brain is having to do, which you're mostly unconscious of. Usually, even if you can only hear every third word or so, as long as it's your native language, your brain fills in the blanks for you. It's like when you're engrossed in a book and you're not actually reading the words, but "recognising" them, and when you turn the page, you already know what the next word will be before you see it. If you're still grappling with a language somewhere at intermediate level, your grey cells won't, can't perform this task. You actually need to hear/see every single word in order to understand what's going on - especially since you're still struggling with so much unknown vocab. But once the switch finally flicks and you've mastered the heaving bar scenario, you know you have truly arrived!