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Faking It

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Fluency (the ability to express oneself at conversation speed and be accepted as an equal by native speakers) is the ultimate goal of most language learners. Adults gain the first only by concerted instruction and practice over a period of years. But the second is a little less straightforward; in this game, there are shortcuts that students can exploit to jack up their approval rating. Here are a few of my favourites, time-tested (by me) and proven effective.

Say it right

The last concern of most students, and the first thing that native speakers notice, is pronunciation. You don't have to eliminate your accent entirely (it's probably not possible anyway), but you do have to pronounce those sounds that don't exist in your own tongue. Phonetic substitution (the Frenchman who says "zat" instead of that, the Japanese person who says "ruck" instead of luck) grates on native ears. Foreigners who don't want to be seated with the children, socially speaking, must learn the French "r," the Japanese "f," the Russian "i," the Zulu clicks, or whatever exotic sounds exist in the language of instruction.

The best way to learn such sounds is to ask someone who knows. Most native speakers don't; they produce them unconsciously and have no idea how. You can, however, ask, "Where's your tongue when you say that?" Upon reflexion, they may give you a useful answer. But language teachers are more likely to understand the physiology required to make language-specific sounds.

Once you've learned where to place your teeth, tongue, and lips, it's simply a matter of repeating the action over and over until it becomes natural. Like juggling or riding a bike, exotic sounds require complicated muscular coordination and are hard to acquire, but entirely learnable. Cultivating them closes a serious chink in your fluency disguise.

Talk native

A professor of mine once handed out a stapled sheaf of pages densely covered with single-spaced French clichés and insisted we memorise all of them. We grumbled; North American students regard memorisation as an unreasonable demand. But it turned out to be one of the most useful exercises of my academic career. As the prof promised, using the clichés elicited effusive, undeserved compliments from native speakers, who insisted that my French was excellent. I had faked them out.

Idioms (expressions couched in nonstandard grammar, such as "I used to do it") and clichés (comparisons such as "a dog's life" or "slow as molasses") are the stuff of fluency, and largely absent from beginners' speech. Using them frequently (and correctly) gives listeners the impression that your skills are better than they may actually be. Slang has a similar effect, although it is harder to use correctly and subject to fashion. In any case, obscenities are best avoided; as one of the most precise sociolinguistic phenomena, dirty words are more likely to turn listeners off or provoke laughter than to earn the language learner any points. (However, familiarity with these and other sensitive expressions, such as racial epithets, is necessary for effective comprehension, to say nothing of self-preservation.)

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