How much speaker how much learner?

Hello again Today I want to make a suggestion about how we can make a decision on our language skills. People say “I am a learner of English,” “ I am learning French”, “I learn Italian” etc This means that we think of ourselves as “learners” , “students” “pupil” Then people may say: “I am a beginner of Chinese” “I speak some German” “I can get by in Russian” All the time we make these sorts of statements to other people, particularly native speakers, we make a judgement of our ability and class ourselves as a “learner”. I want to suggest that we think of ourselves as both learner AND speaker. This way we can make a judgement in a different way which I believe will help us improve and enjoy language. For example I would say that I am 80% speaker of French and 20% learner I would say that I am 60% speaker of German and 40% learner I would say that I am 10% speaker of Chinese and 90% learner I would say that I am 5% speaker of Spanish and 95% learner This rating changes as we feel we know more and are confident in speaking. Even as a native speaker of English I would also say that I am a learner I think I am maybe 98% speaker of English and 2% learner. This is because I learn new phrases and words in English as I learn new things about my language or as new words come into the language. For example I did not know the word “Podcast” two years ago, but now I use the word a lot. These figures need not be very accurate – they are just a way of judging our language skills. My idea is that we rate our speaking to learning depending on our own feelings and attitude to the language I believe the more we tell ourselves we can call ourselves a “speaker” – even if the percentage is quite low, the more we will feel proud, enjoy speaking as well as learning and make great progress. Bye for now Be good be happy

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How much speaker how much learner? is an episode from Alan Palmer's Language Chat podcasts.

This episode is 3:35 long.

This episode was published on Mar 21, 2009.

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