Take the initiative to talk to other people. That's honestly the best way to improve. You just have to work out of that zone. Go to your local library or go to your local college/university that has an ESL (English as a second language) option. Ask for help finding a group to practice English with. They'll often have free or inexpensive ways to speak English with others. The discomfort you feel when speaking a second language is because you don't feel confident speaking. Building that confidence usually requires speaking with others. If you are in an environment where others in the group are learning as well, it should be easier to get over that initial discomfort.
Yeah, this is something that I'd love to see research on, though I imagine it might be difficult to find enough people to act as subjects.
That first dream in a target language is always so weird! It's one of those things people say happens when a language first "clicks" for you, but it always feels momentous, even if it happens earlier than expected.
This makes sense. I have fairly good L2 German production, but I go from conversant to barely coherent when fatigued. My L1 English production diminishes, but not nearly as much. Likewise, my friends who speak English as an L2, even those who have spoken it with a strong command for over a decade, will struggle when very tired. Though we usually speak in English (her English is way better than my German), I've had a German friend ask me to switch a few times when she was very stressed or tired. She speaks at least five languages, with English being her most fluent after German.
That said, I'm most interested in the follow-up research mentioned at the end of the article.
> They also plan to study people who learned one language from infancy but moved to the United States at a very young age and began speaking English as their dominant language, while becoming less proficient in their native language, to help disentangle the effects of proficiency versus age of acquisition on brain responses.
Hey friend. He's not saying they're stupid. He's saying they're irrational. And he's right. Humans aren't rational beings and our expectations differ from simple mathematical probabilities. When making Civilization 3 in the years leading up to 2001, his team had to make changes to the game so that it felt better to the players. They improved game design as you say that they should have, but made it an internal change so that the presented numbers "felt" right. They learned from this experience and he's presenting this learning in a lighthearted presentation to an audience containing some of the very players he's talking about. They got the humor in the situation fifteen years ago and thanks to that, you, me, and other people making and playing games today expect better presentation in our games.
I assume you're asking if the orthography is a completely accurate representation of the phonetic utterances? If so, then no language is 100% "phonetic". Spoken languages inherently adopt phonemes - which represent single perceived "sounds", which are actually represented in speech by several different sounds. The specific sounds will be different allophones of a single phoneme. These will vary for each speaker depending upon language, dialect, and other factors. A language might possibly have an orthography that is 100% accurate to the phonemic inventory, but only for a single dialect. As soon as the dialect changes or another dialect emerges, the orthography will have to change to be 100% accurate.
For example, when I say "butter" with my North American English accent, I typically say the -tt- part with an voiced alveolar tap. It's represented by "ɾ" in IPA. This sounds close to a "d" sound, but faster. However, if you ask me to slow down and repeat "butter", I'll likely respond with a full on [voiceless alveolar plosive], represented by a "t" in IPA. (Look familiar?) Both [ɾ] and [t] are allophones of the /t/ morpheme in NA English. They're specific sounds that are perceived of as a "t".
Now, I am not an expert on Hindi at all, so I cannot make any specific claims myself regarding particular sounds, but if Wikipedia is reliable here, an example of similar allophony is [w] and [v].
* Side note, I'm condensing a bunch of things in here, so it leaves out some complexity, but it should hopefully express the point that no language will have all of its sounds represented perfectly in orthography.
*Edited - I was using pointlessly long sentences.