What did you do? Best practice is to give yourself a few seconds to come up with it. Think back to a time when you were in the middle of a sentence and all of a sudden you came to a word you couldn’t remember how to say. Thinking pauses are helpful for your learning, so go easy on yourself! While filler words are an easy way to smooth out your conversations, remember that it’s also okay to have some silence during a conversation. At some point, they become muscle memory – and you may even find they slip into your native language (which is a fun feeling!). A fun way to make those “thinking pauses” feel more natural is to use filler words in the target language! Filler words are expressions like ‘um, okay, well, so, hmmm, yeah, like, sure, oh, you know – you know?’ We use them all the time in our native languages, and they can serve to help you not only sound more like a local but also to fill the silence while your brain is hard at work constructing your next sentence. It takes time to find the right word and construct sentences on the fly! Still, it can sometimes feel awkward or uncomfortable when the native speaker is staring back at you expectantly, waiting for you to continue your sentence. You’re in the process of learning the language, so it’s inevitable that you’ll experience long thinking pauses when trying to speak.
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