Throughout the years people have asked me how I learned to talk. Many of them assume it was due to special services or being taught about speaking in special education classes. While those services were available to me at the time and they did help in some way shape or form, that's not how learning to talk started out for me.
In my early childhood I loved watching different forms of art media along with my dad and brothers. From movies to anime to video games, the family and I would enjoy watching a variety of different content. A short while after I said my first word I started rewatching certain things again and again and again in order to memorize certain quotes, lines and speeches in order to see if I can apply them to real life.
Think of it like the transformer Bumblebee from the Michael Bay film Transformers where he mainly communicated through quoting phrases from different media sources. This method worked really well for me when I was starting out, but of course it wasn't a perfect plan. There were moments where some people didn't understand either what I was saying, what I was quoting from or at times even both and as a result I would end up getting frustrated and upset.
Mind you I wasn't mainly frustrated with the other people, I was also frustrated at myself because I couldn't figure out why it didn't work or what else I could've said at the moment to articulate what I want to convey. This would eventually drive me to get exposed to other sources to learn how to have a more fluent conversation with other people such as books, podcasts and especially meeting other people. Just like with my first plan it wasn't always perfect, in fact it was a lot of trial and error over the course of my life.
However, through my successes as well as my numerous mistakes I was able to improve bit by bit to the point where nowadays I can hold conversations with other people more naturally without having to heavily rely on quotes from media sources. So my advice for other people in terms of learning how to talk is to look at different kinds of sources to learn from including visual or audio media books and even people, don't be afraid to make mistakes because they are going to happen whether we want them to or not, but most of all never stop trying, you're only going to get better if you keep practicing and never give up.
What was your experience with learning how to talk? Let me know!