Being able to speak a language fluently is much easier than you may think. First of all, let’s talk about what fluent means. Speaking fluently to me means that I can speak automatically, effortlessly and easily and converse about normal topics with it seeming totally normal just like I would in my own native language.
The first trick to being able to speak a foreign language fluently is to speak early, often and always. You should take every opportunity that you can find to speak out loud in a foreign language if possible with a native speaker. If that’s not possible, go ahead and speak to yourself, explain things, look around if you’re driving in your car, if you’re riding in the subway or a tram, look around you, try to explain maybe silently to yourself what’s going on but at every opportunity you should try to speak out loud. That’s going to help your pronunciation, that’s going to build your vocabulary and it’ll also build your confidence with the foreign language.
Another trick is to imagine being fluent, that is to imagine that it’s easy to speak a foreign language. Just notice how easy it is to speak your own language and then imagine that the words were coming out in a foreign language but you still have that same feeling of ease and relaxation while you’re speaking the foreign language.
And the third trick of course is to get yourself a foreign language partner. In this day and age of the Internet, it is very easy even if you don’t live in a large city to find someone to speak a foreign language with. Of course, if you do live in a larger city where there’s a university then you should be able to go down to the university and post and ask for a language exchange. Sometimes you can even contact people who are offering lessons and give them a reason to talk to you. Maybe you’ll find out what their hobbies are or what their main interest is and you find out that you have something to offer there where you can teach them something about that specific topic in exchange for them talking to you in a foreign language.
