Why Your Words Collapse Before You Even Speak
Series: Language Is Thinking "People rarely lose an argument because they don't know enough words. Much more often, they lose because they don't trust their own thinking." Many people believe that speaking begins the moment you open your mouth. It doesn't. Speaking begins much earlier. Before vocabulary. Before grammar. Before pronunciation. It begins with the way you organize your thoughts. This became especially clear to me after yet another conversation with a teacher. The situation itself was ordinary. A student questioned the teacher's competence. "You don't speak like a native speaker." The teacher asked me for advice. Again. And then again. The interesting part was not the student's remark. The interesting part was that we had already discussed exactly the same situation many times before. Eventually I asked a different question. "What advice are you expecting that I haven't already given?" Silence. Because the real probl...