Casual Chat vs. Focused Conversation in a Language Exchange

by Ash Henson

Casual chat and focused conversation are two types of strategies you can use when interacting with your language exchange partner. First, we'll talk about what these are and how they work, and then discuss how to fit them into your language exchange sessions.

Casual Chat and When to Use It

What is a casual chat? What are its characteristics? A casual chat is basically social interaction. There is not really a purpose to the conversation other than social interaction. The language used in such interactions tends to be less formal, and include more slang. The better you are at such interactions, the more comfortable the person you're talking to will feel.

How well you do will also send clues to the person you're talking to as to how much you understand their culture or group. For instance, I was a skydiver for several years, and the casual chats in skydiving have a special vocabulary. People unfamiliar with the sport could be spotted immediately by their vocabulary. Using the words “parachute” or “chute” mark you as an outsider, while saying “canopy” shows you to be an insider. No one asks, “How many dives do you have?” Rather, people say, “How many jumps do you have?”

If you're the kind of language learner that I am, i.e., one that wants to be able to fit in with the target language group and have smooth interactions with them, then you need to master casual conversation. And, saying the right word at the right time will really get you some “street cred.” Think of the difference in saying, “It's hot out today.” vs. “You could fry an egg on the sidewalk!”

How do you learn casual chat? Good question. A lot of slang books provide some phrases that are useful for that purpose. Normal language teaching books tend to shy away from casual speech. As I often say, the only real way to learn a foreign language is to copy native speakers. In that spirit, you can pick it up from tv shows or movies, depending on how realistic they are. Obviously, if you have access to native speakers then use that resource. If not, you could try one of the many apps or websites that connect learners to native speakers. Another way is to watch unscripted talk shows, though they may be too formal depending on the culture. When in doubt, ask a native speaker for guidance.

Think of how you'd feel if a foreigner walked up and said in a questionable accent, “How do you do?” It'd be hard to escape the awkwardness. And, if you've had this happen as many times as I have, maybe a little dread at what is about to happen next. But, if they walked up and said, “Hey man, wassup?” with a decent accent, it'd probably put you more at ease, unless you're just terrified of personal interaction.

You want to speak your target language in a way that puts listeners at ease. I was sitting outside with a Taiwanese friend one night, and a foreigner (i.e., non-Taiwanese) walked up to us and said, “Nimen zai zuo shenme?” No, I didn't forget the tone marks. There were no tones! Even though I wasn't looking at my friend directly, I could see very clearly how uncomfortable this made her. She tensed up and held her breath for what seemed like a long time.

Note that the lesson here isn't to wait until you're perfect before trying to speak! Rather, it's the fact that the more you sound (and act) like a native speaker, the more relaxed that will make people when you talk to them.

When do you want to use causal conversations? In roughly the same situations that you would at home. Chatting with people is a great way to build relationships. In Taiwan, I would often ask the clerk at 7-11 how they were doing. Most of the time, the person would be shocked, but their faces would light up. Starting up conversations with the people in your environment helps too. I'm always amazed at the opportunities that arise from meeting a single, solitary new person.

How does this fit into your language mastery? You can't really say you've mastered a language if you aren't able to comfortably walk into a room of native speakers and navigate the situation at least roughly as well as you do in your own language!

Keep in mind too, that you probably won't get everything from books, even good ones. Going into situations where you have to interact with native speakers, trying and failing, and then trying and failing again. Failure is a temporary waystation on the path to mastery. The key is to learn from your failures. Also, you don't have to correct everything at once. Isolate a single mistake, practice saying things correctly enough times to burn it into your mind, then take on another one.

Another type of casual chat important to language learning is basically unrehearsed conversations where you don't prepare in advance. Well, you do, but the preparation is simply your normal language learning. This type of conversation is useful in many ways. Not only is it basically the goal of language learning itself (being able to speak to people without rehearsing in advance), but it's a good way to test your current level.

Keep in mind that your current level is not your output when you're on your game, paying attention to everything you say, and how you say it. Your current level is how you react when you aren't prepared. It's like with basketball. Getting the ball in the net over and over when you're by yourself on the court doesn't show your true level. How many shots you make while in the heat of the game, with all of the pressure that brings, is where your level really is.

Use this type of casual chat if you're having trouble getting the words out in your target language. If you're having problems getting the words out, what do you do? Practice getting them out! Something else you can do is memorize useful, common phrases. “The weather is nice today.” “How's it going?” “Nice to meet you.” “How do you know Frank?” Practice them until you can say them smoothly without thinking. Then, in real conversations, you can use these phrases to buy you some time to think, like a swan moving gracefully across the pond, but paddling like heck underneath!

How to implement casual chat into your language exchanges

For social interaction oriented casual chat, write up several social situations that you want to be able to interact in, and have your language exchange partner work with you on getting the dialog correct.  Of course, if you want to be able to interact with golfers, you'll probably need to consult a golfer, but for more general situations, like introducing yourself to someone at a party, most language partners will be able to help you. They'll be good at filling in the details of what types of small talk are normal in what types of situations. Once you have the dialog down for a given situation, then practice role playing with your partner, making sure to switch roles from time to time.

As to the unrehearsed conversation type of casual chat, you really just have to go for it, open your mouth, and talk. In the beginning, you can have your partner help you out by supplying a word here and there. Of course, you'll want to wean yourself off of that eventually. Be sure your partner knows that the goal is to speak, so that they'll give you ample chance to do so.

Focused Conversation in a Language Exchange

If that's casual chat, then what is a focused conversation?

Focused conversation is when you have a specific purpose in mind. You want to master certain vocabulary words, grammar structures, phrases, etc. Perhaps you need them to impress a girl (or guy), to write a paper for school, to gain the trust of your clients, or to convince your language partner to move to Colorado (if you can pull that off, you're doing pretty well!).

Focused conversation is excellent for learning. I've noticed in my own learning that when I use the language to obtain some real world goal, it seems to stick better than when I simply practicing. For instance, when I learned classical Chinese using Mandarin, my Mandarin really improved. With that in mind, if you're trying out some new vocab, it might be best to use it toward some end. 

There's a book that is screaming to be mentioned here: How to improve your foreign language IMMEDIATELY: Foreign Language Communicative Tools, by Boris Shekhtman. It's a really short book, but contains a lot of good ideas for focused conversations. The goal of this book is to show the learner how to make the best use of their current language skills, but also to help them grow.

For instance, he puts for the concept of building Islands. As we say in Texas, “Do what?” Build an island? Yeah, but here, an island refers to the language skill required for a certain topic of conversation. Building an island entails learning the vocabulary, grammar structures, common phrases, etc. that allow you to be good at discussing that topic. The idea is that you don't just sit back and let conversations happen to you. Native speakers obviously have a huge range of topics they can talk about, but you don't. So, to solve this problem, you build islands then during conversations, you steer the conversation to your island. 

Say your first island is movies. You learn how to say “actor,” “plot,” “set,” “drama,” etc. Once you have that down, you can expand on it by learning to talk about certain movies. Then, if someone walks up to you and says, “I can't believe the Senate killed that bill!” instead of looking like a deer in headlights because you don't have an island for politics yet, you could springboard of their statement and take them to your movie island. “Yeah, that reminds of the plot to one of my favorite movies.” Then you go on to talk about that movie and hope that the person you're talking to comes along. Once you've got movies down, then start building another island like food, politics, or music. Keep building them until you have five or six (with at least two or three of them being popular topics of conversation). With six islands, you'll be the life of the party. Of course, building islands belongs in the “building your language skills” section of Boris' book.

One recommendation he gives that will help you now is to strut your stuff. What he really means is, when someone asks you a question, give a longish answer. If you just grunt out a few words, it's going to make the person think you don't want to talk. Imagine being in this conversation:

You'd probably think Bob isn't much of a talker. Conversations are hard to carry by oneself. Conversely, if you give a longer answer, your conversation partner will think you're into it. When having focused conversations, you obviously want to give decent answers. And, you should know how to do that since you ought to be steering the conversation to areas that you know or are learning how to talk about.

Focused conversations don't just have to be about islands. For instance, if you're going to give a paper at a conference, or a presentation at work, you could have focused conversations about the topic of the paper or the presentation. Ask your native speaker if you're using the right vocabulary, if you're leaving anything out, if your level of politeness is appropriate, etc. You could even use your slides as the object of conversation. The main point being to prepare ahead of time, and use the vocab/structures/phrases in your conversation in order to imprint them in your brain.

Fitting focused conversation into your language exchanges

How you fit a focused conversation into a language exchange really depends on your current ability to steer conversations. If you aren't very good at it, then let your partner know what you want to discuss ahead of time, and maybe even provide them with a list of words, grammar structures, phrases, etc. that you want to use, so that they help police your session. Once you start to get the hang of purposefully steering conversations to areas that you're good at discussing, it is better to not let your partner in on it, and see how well you keep them on topic, using strategies like Shekhtman's, “Oh, that reminds me of {area you want to talk about}.”

Wrap-up

That's casual vs. focused conversations in a nutshell. Use casual conversations to get the words coming out of your mouth. Practice some commonly used small talk phrases and questions that you can throw out in order to buy yourself time to think. Use focused conversation to build your language skills and accomplish specific tasks, like giving a presentation or building an island. I highly recommend checking out the Shekhtman book. It's short and sweet (less than 100 pages), but contains a lot of really good information on how to communicate in a foreign language.