Because I'm asking generally about any language, I'll put this in the English section. Hope nobody minds.
To my dismay, sometimes when I speak Hebrew, I find I have a stutter. I was doing a language exchange today. There was one point where I knew which word I wanted to say, but I paused, unable to get the sound out of my mouth. Other times I stutter. It's very frustrating.
My hypothesis is that because I haven't spoken these words enough before, the muscles in my mouth haven't formed the right patterns to be able to keep up with my thinking.
Does anyone else have, or has anyone else had this problem?
If you've managed to overcome it, how? Did you specifically do any speaking exercises to help or did you just kind of outgrow it?
Just a thought, Michaela... I wonder if it's because you don't know the 'fillers' to use when you're speaking your target language.
Very few of us can really speak 100% fluently, even in our own language. When you listen to a recording of native English speakers talking naturally, a large proportion of what we say is fillers and hedging devices..'you know', 'I mean' 'actually' 'in fact', and even the dreaded 'like'. These give the impression of fluency, and give us a moment to think between the content parts of our speech. If we didn't have these fillers, maybe we'd all stutter while we're thinking about the next word we're about to say?
It is absolutely normal for people trying to speak non native language. I also used to stutter when I came to Israel. But after a while fluency came to me. This is a matter of practice.
