ds that she is there for the purpose of helping you learn the language. I'll have more to say about these activities below. Once you gain a degree of fluency through such structured activities you will be increasingly comfortable with unstructured social visiting as a means of getting conversational practice on a grand scale. You can use your formal language sessions as a means of preparing for your general social visiting. For example, when you learn to discuss some topic in your language sessions, you can then make a point of discussing that same topic during informal social visits. You can even tell your friends, “This is what I have been learning to talk about with so-and-so”, and then go on to talk about the topic with your friends.
To sum up, Principle II is another way of saying that you learn to talk by talking. You might say that you learn how to talk by being exposed to massive comprehensible input, but ultimately you only learn to talk if you talk.
Given what we have said about Principle I, and Principle II, we might consider the following formula to come close to the truth:
Assuming you have a strategy for getting comprehensible input, and for getting conversational practice, the path to powerful language learning could hardly be more simple.
Now you may be thinking that I'm ignoring your main concern. You feel that no matter how you struggle, you are unable to get the grammar right. If you have been learning the language through a formal language course, mastering the grammar may seem to be the central challenge. Perhaps you even got low marks because of all your errors of grammar. Well, I have good news for you. Errors are great! From here on in, you get high marks for errors, at least in my book, and hopefully, in your own book, too. If you're not making errors, you're not breaking new ground. The pathway to accurate speech is through error-filled speech. I therefore suggest that you move your concern for grammatical accuracy away from center stage. Concentrate on getting comprehensible input and conversation practice, and watch your grammatical accuracy improve without your even focusing on it. I will later suggest ways that you can focus on grammar, as well, but that will be more with a view to mopping up persistent problem areas.
When I was in High School, a language learning method came into vogue which was based on the belief that from the very outset students should speak the language perfectly. My high school French teacher responded to a student's complaint with the comment “I didn't write the textbook, but if I had I'd be a millionairess.” Such was the enthusiasm of many teachers for the new method. That enthusiasm was followed by disappointment, when it turned out that few students developed much ability to use the language extemporaneously for real communication.
Have you ever observed a real person learning English as his or her second language? If you have observed such a person over an extended period, you will have noticed that s/he began by speaking English very poorly, and gradually improved until, hopefully, s/he came to speak English well. It always works like that in real life. Granted some people do better than others both during the early weeks, and in terms of their overall rate of progress, and ultimate attainment, but nobody starts out speaking perfectly. Developing good speaking ability is always a gradual process. I can't understand why my high school French teacher and others like her hadn't noticed that.
When you are first learning a new language, your personal version of the language is very different from the version used by the native speakers. Let's suppose you are learning Chukchee, and your native language is English. The new “language” that you speak, say, after a couple of months, is sure not English. But is it Chukchee? It doesn't appear to be Chukchee in the strictest sense. However, it is obviously derived from Chukchee, and not from English. Six months later you will be speaking another “language”, which is much more like Chukchee in the strictest sense than the “la