other resources

You've probably never heard of "crosstalk" before. Maybe you have heard of "language exchanges" though? A language exchange is typically when 2 or more people get together to have a conversation in order to practice the languages they are learning. For example, if it is a Japanese person and a person from Spain, maybe they would speak in Japanese for 30 minutes, and then in Spanish for 30 minutes. There are 3 problems with this approach.

Traditional language exchanges are difficult for people at lower levels of the language they are trying to learn.
Traditional language exchanges can make some people very nervous. (This is not just unpleasant, but it may actually be harmful to language learning!)
Traditional language exchanges waste a lot of time. In fact, they waste half of your valuable time!

"Crosstalk," a language exchange method that was developed by a linguist named J. Marvin Brown, solves all of these problems.

Put very simply, crosstalk is a language exchange where:

each person speaks only their own language

Crosstalk solves problem 1 because you don't need to be able to speak the language well before doing it. It solves problem 2 because each person speaks their own language, so there is no need to be nervous about speaking in a language you are not yet comfortable with. And it solves problem 3 because, in a 60-minute crosstalk exchange, each of the participants gets to listen to the language they are learning for the full 60 minutes, not just 30 minutes each.

You can think of crosstalk as one kind of extensive listening. However, some people think that they need to practice speaking their target language, and that a language exchange should be used to practice speaking and not listening. Actually, speaking practice is not as important as many people think, and it may even be harmful, especially if you do it before you have spent many hours listening to the language. This is because you would be trying to produce the language before you have really gotten to know it intuitively through hours of listening. This will likely result in poor pronunciation, a heavy "foreign accent," and worst of all, a need to "translate" in your head before you can say anything. While it is necessary to speak your target language a lot in order to really get fluent, this practice has to do with retraining your muscles to produce the sounds of the language. This practice needs to come later on, after you have developed a really good sense of how the language should sound and an intuitive sense of how sentences should be put together. If you try to "practice" speaking too early, you will only end up practicing your mistakes. This is important, because as English footballer Bobby Robson once said, practice does not make perfect;

“Practice makes permanent

No wonder so many speakers of foreign languages sound like, well, foreigners. Most people will try to start speaking the language from the beginning, and this is likely to reward them with only an approximation of the language. You would be wise to wait until you have absorbed many hours of exposure to the language and really built up a solid foundation of comprehension that will allow you to participate in almost any situation in the language with complete confidence that you will understand and be understood. After all, even if you study and memorize lots of phrases and words in the language (as opposed to letting them become part of you through repeated exposure), your conversation will end abruptly and uncomfortably when you can't understand what the person you are talking to says in response. This is not REALLY speaking the language; it is regurgitating memorized phrases and bits. These two things are very different. Really being able to speak a language means that you can improvise and create in the language on the fly, the same way a native speaker does. This kind of creative ability comes only with massive exposure to the natural patterns of the language. The more exposure you get, the more neural networks your brain will build, and the more of a "feel" for the language you will develop.

I highly encourage you to find a native or very skilled speaker of Japanese and begin doing crosstalk exchanges with him or her, in person or via Zoom, Meet, etc., no matter what your current level of Japanese is. Even if you’re still near the beginning level when it comes to speaking, there are many non-verbal strategies that allow you to have an actual conversation, such as facial expressions, gestures, and above all, drawing. Using drawing along with words, you can communicate almost anything. You can draw food, your family, your friends, your pets, the house you grew up in, and explain any story.

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse