How to Start Speaking English

Welcome to the Listening Time Podcast!

Hey everybody, this is Connor, and you're listening to episode 174 of the Listening Time Podcast. Thank you all for listening. I hope that you're doing great today. I hope that your English learning is going well, and I hope that some of you are actually starting to speak English and not just listen.

That's the topic of today's episode. I want to talk about how to start speaking English. I've talked about this a number of times in different episodes, but today I want to dedicate this whole episode to this topic.

Okay, so I just recently started speaking French consistently. Before that, I just listened and read in French. But recently, about a month and a half ago, I think, I started having regular French conversations—consistent French conversations. I'll use that as kind of a reference to talk about how you can start speaking English.

So, this will be an important episode, an important topic for all of you. Even if you've already started speaking English, I think this episode will give you some tips, maybe some advice, to make sure that you're really utilizing your time in the best way possible when you speak English.

Okay, so I think that you'll really enjoy this episode, and I hope that it's helpful for you. Remember that you can use my Advanced podcast episodes to start listening to real English spoken fast. In those episodes, I speak at normal speed. So if you want those, the link to sign up is down below in the episode description.

You can also sign up for my US Conversations podcast. In that podcast, I talk to people from all around the United States, and we talk about different topics such as their city or their state where they live. We compare different parts of the country, and it's a lot of fun.

Of course, I provide the transcript for each of those episodes, and those transcripts also have the definitions of key words and phrases that we use. So that's a really helpful tool that will allow you to practice listening to two people talking, practice listening to a conversation, and not just one person talking to you, right?

So the link to sign up is also down below, and of course, you have the transcript for this episode down below as well.

All right, let's get started! Are your ears ready? You know what time it is—it's listening time!

Okay, let's talk about starting to speak in English. How do you start speaking? First of all, I want to mention that I think it's important to start when you feel ready to start. I don't think that people should start speaking when they really don't want to, when they really don't feel like it.

Sometimes people don't want to, but it's because they're nervous or they haven't done it before. That's different. I think you should kind of push yourself to start, even if you don't want to because you feel nervous. But in reality, you already understand English really well, and you should start.

I'm talking about when you just don't have a good enough comprehension to feel like you can even have a conversation with someone. So if that's your case, then my advice is to not start before you feel like you can manage that situation.

It's really stressful if you start to have a conversation with someone and you can't understand them well. That is not a good situation to be in, especially if that teacher doesn't speak your language and they don't speak really slowly. That's not a good situation.

So my advice would be to start speaking when you feel like you can understand enough English that you can manage a conversation with someone speaking to you in English, even if your speaking level is low. If you can understand a good amount of English and you feel like you're ready to try to have a conversation, then you should.

At that point, you should push yourself to start speaking, but don't force it and try to do it too early before you're ready. I think that can have some negative effects, right? So push yourself, but don't be too eager that you're just starting to speak even though you can't understand English.

So that would be my advice, but other people disagree with me, and that's okay. This is just my personal opinion.

Okay, when you do feel like you want to start speaking, how do you do this? I assume most of you aren't just surrounded by people that you can practice English with, right? So how do you do this?

Well, I always recommend using a website like italki, for example. There are other similar websites as well, but the one that I'm familiar with is italki. I always recommend using this website to find native speakers who are teachers or tutors, and you can have conversations with them.

For example, right now, I am a student on italki learning French, and I take conversation classes with three different teachers at this time. So I've found three different italki French tutors who I have conversations with, and this is something I would recommend to you.

I think it's great to find two or three different teachers so that you can hear different styles of speaking. You can talk about different topics depending on what those teachers are interested in and what you're interested in. We usually have different conversations with different people, so I like to have that variety.

For me, for French, for example, we have different genders in French—we have masculine and feminine. So for me, it's important to practice talking to men and women in French. I have one female French tutor and two male French tutors because this forces me to use the feminine version of adjectives and things like that.

So that's good practice for me. For English, that's not the case because we don't have those different genders when it comes to the language. But I think it could still be good to have male and female tutors if you want, but it's not that big of a deal—not like when you're learning French, for example.

If you've listened to any of my US Conversations episodes, you've seen that I have conversations with different English teachers on italki. Some of them are men, some of them are women. So if you're looking for teachers and you don't know where to start, maybe you can contact some of those teachers that I talk to on my US Conversations podcast.

Maybe you liked a certain conversation that I had with a certain teacher on that podcast, and you go and start taking classes with that person because they sound like a good teacher and someone that you'd be interested in talking to.

So that could be a great starting point. Maybe you can start with some of those teachers that I talk to on that podcast. So that's just an idea.

I would recommend testing these teachers out, and this might take a little while. You might need to take a few classes with them. That's okay. You're getting a lot of practice while you're doing that.

Maybe after a few classes, you decide whether or not you like having conversations with them, and you decide whether or not they're a good teacher. If you like them, you can continue on with them.

It takes a little while to find your two or three teachers. It took me a while. For French, it took me almost a month, I think—probably like three weeks—taking classes with different teachers. But now I have my teachers, so that's great.

So what are the criteria? What criteria should you use when choosing a teacher? I talked about this in my episode about English teachers, but I'll just quickly mention these different criteria that I use.

Number one, the teacher should be able to manage the conversation well. If the teacher is not doing that well and you feel like you have to manage the class, that's usually not a good sign. That's a lot of work for you, right?

The teacher should be the one really managing the conversation, making you feel like the conversation is flowing very naturally. The class should just feel easy in that sense—maybe not the English part of it, but the conversation itself should feel easy and natural.

You shouldn't feel like you have to make a ton of effort to manage the conversation and ask them a ton of questions because they're not asking you questions. You don't want that. You want the class to feel easy, and you want the conversation to flow naturally.

So that's really important. That's probably the most important thing for me. I want the class to feel easy and fun. I want the conversation to feel natural so I can just focus on speaking and listening and not having to manage the class.

Okay, so that's important. I think the teacher should give an acceptable amount of correction. You should tell them how much correction you want and whether you want them to just write it down or whatever you want, right? You can experiment with that.

I kind of like when the teacher writes down my mistakes—not all of them, of course, because I make tons of mistakes—but maybe the most important ones that the teacher wants me to know about. I like when they write them down, not necessarily when they interrupt me, but maybe they just write them down in our chat.

So I like that, but you might be different. I would say that you can experiment with this and see what you like. Just make sure you like the teacher. Make sure that they have a personality that you like.

You probably shouldn't talk to someone that is really the complete opposite of you and doesn't like anything that you like. That's probably not the best, right? So make sure you have some common interests, you like them, etc.

I think if you're just starting out, it's really helpful when you use a teacher who can speak your language to a certain degree—your native language. They don't need to be fluent in your language, but maybe they can speak enough to just help you in those moments where you guys are really having trouble understanding each other or whatever.

If the teacher speaks your language, it's great if you can just say a word in your native language to kind of make things easier, and then the teacher can say, "Oh, okay, that's this word," right? That really helps. You don't need that, but when you're first starting out, I found that that's very helpful.

Okay, all right. How about in terms of how many classes we should be taking? How often? For me, what I'm currently doing—and this is something that I like—I like taking about three classes a week, sometimes two. So two to three—maybe three is even better, of course.

Each class that I take is just 30 minutes. I honestly think that the best perfect amount of time that I've experienced is 45 minutes. However, not everyone offers a 45-minute class, and sometimes it's just better to do 30 minutes. It's easier to fit in your schedule, and it's cheaper.

So I've been doing 30 minutes, but if you can take 45-minute classes, I think that's a really good length. One hour can sometimes seem a little long; it's harder to fit into your schedule.

So either 30 minutes or 45 minutes is good for me. You might be different, but I think you can try this out and see what you think. Take two to three classes a week. Right now, I'm trying to take three 30-minute classes a week, and that's one class per week with each teacher because I have three French tutors, and I take one class per week with each one.

Something really important is that I use these teachers for conversation. I don't use them to give me a grammar lesson for those 30 minutes, okay? I'm specifically using these teachers so that I can practice speaking, so that we can have a conversation.

This is something I really believe in, and I think is really important—that you should use teachers for the things that you can't do by yourself. You can learn grammar by yourself. There are some really good English grammar teachers on YouTube that are completely free. You can do this on your own, no problem.

However, you can't really have conversations by yourself, or at least it's not easy to do that, okay? So use teachers for conversations. That's what they're perfect for.

Okay, so this is what I do, and I always recommend that you should talk about things that are interesting for you. Have conversations that you would normally have with people in your language. Talk about topics that are interesting for you and that you want to talk about.

This will also help you just feel motivated to take classes because it will be like talking to a friend sometimes. I've made friends with some of my teachers and some of my students. There are students I've had, for example, who have invited me to come stay with them in their house in their country.

I've never done this, but maybe in the future, I'll have the chance to meet up with a student of mine in another country—who knows, right? But you can really just feel like you're talking to a friend sometimes when you're having conversations with teachers on italki, and that's great.

It will help you with your speaking practice, and it will help you feel more motivated to actually take consistent conversation classes. So talk about things that are interesting for you.

One thing that I just recently started doing—and you can do this for some of your classes too if you want—is prepare your topic in advance. I don't think you always need to do this. I think maybe it's good to do this for some of your classes, and then maybe other classes you just allow the conversation to start naturally without some topic.

But I think it's also really helpful to have some conversations that you've kind of prepared in advance. Maybe you watched a video in English about a certain topic, and you want to talk about that topic from that video in your conversation.

I just recently did this with one of my French tutors. I watched a video, I sent it to him, and then I talked to him about that video in our class. What I found was that I was using the vocabulary that I heard in that video. Because I knew that I was going to talk about this video in my next class, I think I was able to pay more attention to the video and to the new vocabulary in that video.

I kind of prepared some of the vocabulary and phrases in my mind before the conversation, and I was able to use phrases that I probably wouldn't normally be able to use just because I heard them in that video. Now I'm talking about that video, and so I use those phrases that I heard the person say in the video.

So that has kind of helped me learn vocabulary and learn phrases more effectively. I'm paying more attention to them, and I'm preparing those phrases in my mind before the class, and then I'm using them. That kind of reinforces those phrases, those words.

So that's something you can try as well. A couple of other tips: I think it's good to have a translator open on your computer when you're having these classes, so you can look up words, and you won't take a really long time to open up a translator and search for it.

You can just have your translator open on your screen as you're talking, and you just quickly type in words if you need to translate words. If the teacher speaks your native language, I think you can say things in your own language if you need to. I'm not against that. I do that all the time.

I don't think it's bad to do this, and it just kind of speeds things up. In other words, it makes things go faster when you can just say the word in your language, and then the teacher translates that immediately. You probably save time.

So you don't have to always go and look up the word and see if it's the right translation and say it to your teacher, right? It's sometimes easier to just say the word in your language, and then they'll help you say it in English.

One other thing is with corrections. Like I mentioned before, I like when teachers write corrections down in written form. What I've been doing is I review the corrections at the end of the class or when the class is over. I go back and look at the corrections they've written down.

I don't just end the class and go do something else. I actually review the corrections, and I remember what I was saying when I made each of these mistakes. Then before the next class with that same teacher, I review those corrections again, like five minutes before the class.

This has really helped me, actually, because some of these corrections are things that I will probably say in multiple classes. So I review these corrections, I see what I need to say differently, and then in the next class, I can actually say it the right way.

In the past, when I took classes, I didn't do this. I didn't even look at my corrections after the class, and now that I'm doing this, I can see that it makes a big difference. So I highly recommend that you do that. You should review your corrections after the class is over and before your next class with that teacher.

So those are some things that can help you out. Not everyone would agree with me on all of these things, but these are things that I like to do when I take classes.

Don't worry about mistakes. Don't worry about needing to say things in your language. Don't worry about the things that make the conversation less natural or that you have to switch to your language. Don't worry about those things, especially if you're just starting.

The key is to just start and to understand the other person, to start to build a connection with them, and have fun while speaking. Just start to correct some of your mistakes, and you're going to develop muscle memory as you continue to speak.

This means that as you continue to speak, you're going to develop that memory over time of how to say certain phrases, how to say different things. That will develop over time. You just have to start and speak consistently and speak frequently, right?

It's going to feel really good in the future when you start to have better conversations, more fluent conversations. But you have to start somewhere. So if you're ready, you should start today.

Use these tips that I just gave you, and maybe use some of the teachers that I talk to in my US Conversations podcast. If you haven't signed up for that podcast, I highly recommend that you do that so you can practice understanding a conversation between native speakers.

You have the added benefit of hearing these teachers talk, and maybe you want to take a class with one of them. The link to sign up for that is down below. You can also just use my Advanced episodes if you feel like that's your next step.

So the link to sign up for those Advanced episodes is down below as well. I hope that all of these tips were helpful for you. I hope that you feel motivated to start speaking English if you're ready.

If you're not ready, then just keep these things in mind, and in the future, when you are ready, you can come back and listen to this episode again. Maybe check out those US Conversations episodes and check out some of those teachers' profiles when you're ready, and then you can start then.

So no rush, but I'm sure a lot of you are ready to start, and you're just procrastinating. Hopefully, this kind of gives you the motivation to start speaking.

Okay, all right. Thank you so much for listening to this episode, and I'll talk to you on the next episode of Listening Time!