Fluent in 3 Months: How Anyone at Any Age Can Learn to Speak Any Language from Anywhere in the World

The Jack Sparrow Method
Another issue you will deal with as a beginning learner is the amount of
time you will likely spend hesitating during those first conversations in a
new language. You might feel incredibly stupid if you’re forced to pause,
offering nothing but an “umm . . .” or “eehhh . . .” to the conversation.
This can make you feel uncomfortable, but it can also make the other
person feel uncomfortable. It is one of the major reasons a conversation
partner switches to your mother tongue with you; he or she does it out of
kindness to “spare” you this discomfort.
If possible, such hesitations should be reduced or avoided. But this is
much easier said than done! I remember someone writing a comment on
YouTube about one of my videos—my first-ever attempt to use a language
—telling me to “stop hesitating,” as if it’s as easy as that.
Hesitations are going to happen. We need this time to gather our
thoughts, translate what we are thinking, remember a mnemonic or the
word we want to say that’s on the tip of our tongues, etc. Beginners are
slower to speak, and that’s just a fact of life; they will hesitate between
saying the words they know. No one can just stop hesitating in this early
stage.
But this doesn’t mean that the awkwardness associated with the
hesitation has to remain there. I have found that by hesitating in a different
manner, I can remove some of the tension and awkwardness of the moment

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and make sure the person I’m speaking to feels comfortable, so our
conversation can progress sufficiently.
A trick that has worked well, at least for my personality, is to add a little
drama to these otherwise dull initial conversations. I remember the first
time I saw the movie Pirates of the Caribbean and how Captain Jack
Sparrow had an effective way of being dramatic through body language
without saying a single word. It’s an interesting concept; you maintain a
person’s attention by doing this. For instance, let’s say you want to say a
simple sentence like “I want to go to the supermarket,” and you say “I want
to go . . .” and the translation of “supermarket” just isn’t coming to you in
that instant. You need to think for a moment to remember what it is. What
you could do then is hold up your index finger, look the person you’re
speaking to in the eye, to grab his or her attention, and then point off into
the distance and stare there with a pensive look on your face. You will then
have the undivided attention of that person, because you could be saying
you want to go to . . . the airport, the desert, the dark side of the moon, the
depths of the ocean, because you look like you are ready to go on a quest.
With a bit of practice, you can get these dramatic pauses down to an art and
do them automatically, while your mind races to think of what you would
have otherwise been thinking—such as the elusive word for “supermarket.”
You don’t even have to be dramatic about it. Many orators make special
use of pauses as they speak, which can actually make their speeches much
more interesting. You don’t have to produce a constant stream of words to
hold a person’s attention, but remember that by appearing nervous you may
actually make the other person feel nervous. It’s far better to try to enjoy
yourself, or at least look like you’re enjoying yourself, and then there will
be no awkward pauses.