Cat got your tongue or your brain?
So, there I was in a job interview a couple of days ago. The job itself is not important, but the lesson is. Basically, I got caught with my language pants down. How?
Well, the job deals with being a subject matter expert and also knowing a foreign language. I won't give away the language but it is one I have studied a long time, but have not used in about a year. In the middle of the interview, one of the interviewers -a native speaker of the language - asks if he can take a moment and speak to me in front of everybody, in the target language. I didn't totally bomb, per se, but I could have done much, much better in our 5-minute conver-terrogation.
The problem was I simply hadn't prepared my mind and mouth. Usually when I take a spoken language test, I will talk to myself like a re-tard (think Hangover, the movie) that day and switch my brain over. Needless to say I was caught off guard and I felt somewhat foolish that I couldn't wow them with my lyrical Jesse James skills.
Here's a couple of bad scenarios for language tests:
- Anything over the phone, that sucks pond water
- The room is big and bright
- The tester is far away
- You have not imbibed any alcoholic beverages
- It is front of multiple people, whom you do not know
- They are using a tape recorder (I had that right in my face for an FBI job interview and all I had to do was speak English. Luckily it went well).
So, take this next piece of advice very seriously!
You should, no, no... you MUST not only know how to talk about your life story in the target language by heart, but you MUST also be able to talk about WHY you learned the language and every major detail about your learning process with it i.e. why you started studying, what books you read, what movies you have seen, what music you have listed to, grammar problems etc. And I don't mean just know the vocab and wing it, I mean you need to memorize and recite the stuff like it's going out of style.
Now, some may think that knowing how to ask for a train and be able to say "I have nothing to declare" is important, fine. But you won't be tested on it. In almost all conversational cases, the other person will be curious about why and how you learned their language and THIS will be the topic of conversation. Plop yourself in front of your computer (like you are now) and type the stuff out, and memorize it.
Once you have established that you can speak the language well it is much easier to feel relaxed for the rest of the conversation and your mind and mouth will be attuned. Amen.
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