3.4.1. Biting the bullet, or taking the plunge, whichever you prefer

So far you've been minimizing your trauma, mainly learning to comprehend the language by means of fun and games in the nest. Trying to speak too much too soon is believed to raise the stress level and slow the learning process for many people. How would you like a medium-stress experience? You've got all those bricks and mortar in your brain. For your baptism of fire, you can conduct a session in which you bar yourself and your LRP from using any English (or any other language besides the one you are learning from the LRP) for a whole hour!

During that hour, there will be numerous times when you will have something you want to say and fail miserably in your effort to say it. Likewise your LRP will have things she wants to say to you, and despite her best efforts, and the desperate production of sketches, gestures and pantomime, she does not manage to get her point across. But you never break into English (or whatever) at those times. Rather, when you are unable to communicate what you intend, you jot down the idea you were unable to communicate in your notebook. Your LRP does likewise when, due to your limited comprehension ability, she fails to get her point across to you. That is, she makes a note in her notebook as to what she wanted to tell you that you were unable to understand. At the end of the hour you'll have a long list of things that you were unable to say, and she'll have a long list of things you were unable to understand.

I'll come back to those jottings in a minute. First, I want us to think about the experience of that hour. If you were really daring, you came to that hour without any preparation. Your goal is to learn to speak in an unplanned, unpredictable context. If you were nervous, you may have had a list of topics, such as “Life in my country,” “What my childhood was like,” “The summer of '59”, etc. However, you did not spend any time reflecting on how you would discuss these topics. That is because you want to have to cope with your communication needs on the spot, as they arise. If you found you weren't getting anywhere, you may have jumped up and ran and grabbed a photo album, but it will be a photo album that you have never gone through with your LRP before. If you didn't have such a photo album, you may have grabbed a National Geographic or something. Having lots of pictures to scaffold your efforts at speaking and comprehending will make communication quite a bit easier. You may fall back on just doing a lot of language learning using the pictures and power tool expressions (“What is this woman doing? Why is she doing it? What will she do next?”).

Now, back to those jottings. You have just come up with a list, rather two lists, of things you need to learn. Wasn't that useful? Those will feed into your next language session. First, you will want to go over those jottings. You'll find it fun to find out what it was that your LRP was trying to say that you were unable to figure out. She'll find it fun to learn what in the world you were trying to say at those times when she was unable to make heads or tails out of your speech.

You may find the idea of a whole hour of communication in the new language a bit frightening, especially if this is the first time you have seriously spoken this language. You may prefer to spend a half hour, broken by a ten minute recess when you can discuss the jottings you made, followed by a second half hour. Let the daring among us start with a whole hour, non-stop. The rest, including me, can break it into two halves with a ten minute recess midway.