I got an email from a former student of mine, who wrote:
Hi James
I took a few of your classes. Ni hao.
I really need to improve my Mandarin especially in business situations. As you may recall I took the advanced level last fall and I liked it but did not feel super stretched. Since then I have been reading a lot but I realized never speak out loud. You once told me that language lives in the air. So I need to speak more but also would like to really be challenged.
Any suggestions??
Kind regards
Bregg
The following is what I wrote to him:
Hi Bregg,
Glad to receive your mail.
I have thought about it for a couple of days. Well, you know what, yours is really a tough question. 
It goes without saying you MUST speak it when you learn a language. But on the other hand, it is a universal problem for most foreign language learners that they don’t have people to speak to; they don’t have chances to speak.
What can I suggest then? Let’s consider the following:
1) Pick at one (or several, but at least one) of your friends who does speak Mandarin and talk to him. Always try to find chances to speak to him. Tell yourself that you will never speak English with him but Mandarin; pretend that he does not know English and when you are speaking with him pretend that you do not know English.
2) Find one or more talk-mates. Some of my students do this. They found talk-mates on www.craigslist.com. One of them has three talk-mates and meet them three times per week. The talk-mates are Mandarin native speakers living in Vancouver. Though those talkmates are not teachers and therefore do not talk in a way that a teacher does, it is a help to talk to them. I highly suggest this.
3) Speak to yourself. This sounds like a crazy suggestion. Yes, when you do speak to yourself, you do look crazy. But you speak to yourself alone in an empty room where no one will find you crazy. Relax and close your eyes if you wish. Imagine you have a guest in front of you and begin telling him about what you saw on your way home, about what you did last weekend, why you did not buy the printer you saw last week in Future Shop, etc. When you are not sure how to express yourself at some point, stop and look up a dictionary. This should make you realize it is after all an excellent way to practice speaking where you can keep your own pace and you have the time completely to yourself.
4) Read out loud. Take up something that is about the right level for you and read it out loud. Reading is different from speaking in that the latter is a process of active message production while the former is not essentially a message production. But it is still very helpful in training the speaker in articulation of messages. Try it and you will see how it can work for you. 5) Scribble. By this I mean writing “journals”. Just write anything that comes to your mind. Never mind whether what you write makes sense. You are happy so long as what you write is Mandarin. You may ask what has writing to do with speaking. Well,both writing and speaking are a matter of message production, one using a pen and the other using your mouth. The psychological processes are the same. When you cannot even write coherently it is not likely you can speak coherently. If you cannot write characters, just write pinyin.
Well, those are what I have at the moment. What do you think?
James
