Do I NEED to speak from day one?

I agree 100% with your evaluation. You definitely do not need to speak from day 1. When I say that, I presume that someone's absolute priority is to speak and that they need to do it quickly (such as someone with an upcoming immersion experience).

When you NEED to speak, (not just "want" to) then you do NEED to speak from day 1 :) Simple as that!

However, reading and absorbing content in other ways can work wonders if you have other goals, or if speaking is not AS big of a priority. Your long term approach and reading Harry Potter etc. has obviously paid off!

Keep up the good work!

Great stuff David, thank you for all! As I've said at the beginning my goal was only understanding... but eventually I changed my mind and now I want to speak :) I just love speaking English, even if I'm not pretty good yet. Now I'm sure that no one will put me in a jail if I do some mistakes or I'll tell something which is not understandable.

I definitely agree with Benny on this one. In my opinion you will never learn to speak completely 100% confidently and naturally just from learning grammar, by listening, by watching tv. The sooner you start speaking in a new language, the easier it is to progress and the more natural it becomes to communicate in that language.
For example, I have recently completed my degree in Spanish, where I have had grammar drilled into me from day one, and consequently I can translate written Spanish almost perfectly but can barely say a complete sentence without some serious thought going into it. My Polish on the other hand, which I have learnt just from living with a native speaker for 18months, is far better than my Spanish and I find it a lot easier to have a conversation with someone in Polish than in Spanish, although my grammar is not anywhere near as good.

Hello David,

Good post, I will try to answer your questions:
“Do you NEED to speak from day one?” To answer this question it is really important to know where is the person from and what is his/her mother tongue in relation to the language he/she is learning, because the closest is the language less will be the shyness to overcome this “linguistic first moment barrier”, for instance if you speak Portuguese, Spanish will be very similar and people usually tend to “try” to speak from day one with reasonable success, the same is true for pairs like German and Dutch, Italian and French and so on. I really agree that people sometimes are feared about committing mistakes and they tend to maintain themselves in a silent period for quite a long time, and this can be a big problem to overcome later, because the only way to learn a language is by speaking it. Maybe taking the middle way is really more appropriate, that is neither “from day one”, nor after months of studying.

“Or are there other paths to successful language learning?” I am a language teacher and for this reason day after day I realize that even having a quite effective method, there is no perfection or effortless method, you really have to study, and as you said in your ebook: “the only way to fail learning a foreign language is by giving up”, but I would go further, “you will never learn a language if you believe in miracles”, there is no shortcuts or magic pills, the keys are still things like dedication and time.

“What do you prefer?” As I have an authentic passion for languages, I usually say that they are my perfect hobby-job, so I virtually spend my whole time learning (and teaching) them, thus hard work in learning languages is not a problem for me, but for sure I try to make it pleasant by reading books, listening to podcasts and watching films.

Best wishes,
Jimmy Mello

Perhaps I don't NEED to speak from day one, but I WANT to speak from day one.
As a child we do not learn from books, movies, music as much as we learn from personal interaction. Speaking a language (even just a few words) has you thinking in that language. Learning Japanese, my vocabulary and reading skills took off after I learned how to politely ask while pointing like a child, "How do you say that in Japanese/", "How do you read that in Japanese?" and "Would you write that in Japanese?".
Now I'm using the same questions in Spanish and proceeding smoothly.
Next: Mandarin, Arabic.......

Charles

I spent two years in Russia and taught a course at a pedogoical university. These were master's level students who were studying to become English teachers. They could quote Shakespeare and read Moby Dick without a problem. They could write essays and explain fine nuances of English grammar better than I could. However, when I asked them to give me directions to a shop on the other side of town or to give me their opinion on the newest movie or song, they reverted to a low intermediate level ability for practical language usage. I would think that a balanced approach to language learning is necessary in order to develop all of the skills for effective communication, but it depends on what your short and long term goals are.
Love the blog.

I agree when we WANT speaking, we should simply do it :-)

But before speaking we have to have a "pattern of speaking".

Even child almost one year before producing any understandable sound get enormous amount of input - every day, almost 12h a day, from parents and other people. They're just listening and later when they try to reproduce sentences are always correct by others.

But in adult life we have to get a different approach.

Firstly, we have a great ability - known how to read and can read. So we can get easily input and "pattern of speaking" from written content, we don't have to absorb other people, we can do it ourselves.

Secondly, when we produce a sentences natives don't correct it almost ever unless they understand a gist. They think that it's impolite and we have to make a special request for this. So we have to correct ourselves (based on my experience) with correct input (natives speaking or written and audio content).

So I agree that speaking is important but early start without "good pattern" can damage our correctness. That I why agree with Antimoon method and David approach.

This one's been done to death but that was still a very good overview that I pretty much agree with. You don't need to speak from day one, but it certainly doesn't hurt as some claim and definitely does help to some degree (though you could argue that, especially early on, input would help just as much if not a bit more).

One of the reasons I think speaking immediately helps you is that it really cements whatever language you're using when you speak into your brain, that is any vocabulary or grammar that you use in your target language while speaking will be much, much better memorized due to you having used them while speaking than they would have been from anything else done in the same amount of time (e.g. 10 minutes speaking and using the vocabulary you want to memorize while doing so will do far more for you than 10 minutes of Anki with the same vocab).

Let me ask you, I'm curious: when you first started speaking with native speakers after, what, around a year of input-only learning, how well did you do initially? Also, how long did it take you to get up to speed so that you were fairly proficient at speaking? What I could see happening is someone learning a language via input-only and having excellent comprehension skills but never having spoken the language, then starting to speak to native speakers and starting off very herky-jerky with lots 'bumps in the road' so to speak but then very quickly getting up to speed and being fluent within a week or two--what do you think?

Cheers,
Andrew

I really enjoyed the discussion here as well as your guest post. It's great to see your site get recognition on Benny's site.

My experience in language learning is this:
-2 years learning Armenian: came to the country not knowing anything and had to speak from day one while doing intensive learning
-almost 1 year learning Polish: self study (that's a nice way of saying not intense) and almost no speaking

What is the result? I am very comfortable in Armenian and can say and understand a lot. I am very uncomfortable in Polish and can barely say or understand anything.

HOWEVER, I do agree with you. I didn't focus on speaking in Polish from day 1 because there was no need to do so! Rather, I wanted to avoid the painful experience of moving to a country having no vocabulary or knowledge of the grammar. Soon I'll head to Poland and I expect a serious ramp up in my speaking/understanding ability because now I know some basic vocab and rules. Time will tell.

In my experience (for mandarin Chinese) you should speak from day one. If you just know how to say "hello" then say hello to whomever you meet. Once you know how to ask for a price, ask for the price of whatever you see. And then keep doing this. Repetition is the key to learning a language as abstract as mandarin and there is no way you can repeat a word often enough in class to actually remember any significant percentage of them - you need to repeat them, again and again.
Benny did very well with his speaking approach, reviewed on http://www.livethelanguage.cn/blog

[...] For example, you could use conversations with native speakers as your content, ask for explanations in order to understand it (even if the explanations are hand gestures or drawings on a napkin), and talking as much as possible as your system of repetition. If you like, you can even speak from day one. [...]