I think all foreign language courses should devote a significant amount of time to teaching and practising these. I mean the sort of relatively meaningless, idiomatic things you say when someone else is doing most of the talking and you want to indicate that you're still listening and still interested, or to express agreement, surprise, sympathy, etc. Examples in English include:

• Right
• Oh, I know
• You're kidding!
• No way!
• Don't they just?
• Totally
• Gosh
• Really?
• I know what you mean

I speak French to roughly A-level and German to roughly GCSE level, but I just don't know how to say these things in either language. (I mean, I could translate most of the above list literally into both languages, but they almost certainly wouldn't be idiomatic. I want to know what speakers of those languages actually say in those situations.)

As well as needing to know what expressions are idiomatic at all, you need to know what connotations they each have and what dialects they're associated with. A non-native English speaker couldn't know that Totally can make you sound like a valley girl and Oh, I know can make you sound like Sybil Fawlty.

So if I'm talking to a French speaker, and they're doing most of the talking (which is likely, since they, you know, know more French than I do) I don't know what to say, and feel awkward and inarticulate, and just nod and/or say Oui.

(I actually know one such expression in German. A friend who spent a year actually living in Germany used to say Echt? when German speakers talked to him. I think echt means "genuine", so it's the equivalent of English Really? but obviously I couldn't have come up with it from first principles.)

An anecdote: an acquaintance, L, who speaks Spanish to perhaps GCSE level, asked a friend, P, who speaks it very fluently, if he could practise speaking Spanish with him. P obliged, and L went on to tell him about his favourite subjects and how many siblings he has and so on. P, the fluent speaker, was reduced to nodding and going "Mm". It looked to me as though he kept starting to say "Really" or something, and then stopping, and realising that no Spanish equivalent came quickly to hand.

These things need to be taught. An awful lot of real-life conversation consists of one person telling something that happened to them recently or giving their opinion on something, and the other person listening and interjecting occasionally. This isn't a model of conversation that happens in the language classroom. Either the whole class listens while the teacher talks (in which case you're not supposed to interrupt) or you have an equal, two-sided conversation with a classmate about how to get to the station or whatever. Language learners need to do exercises in which one talks and the other listens and interjects; or, failing that, the teacher talks and you interject.

Tags: language