Five Exercises to Strengthen Your Speaking Skills

“I understand, but I cannot speak.”

“I know what I want to say and how to say it, but I just get stuck.”

“When someone asks me a question in my target language, I am so slow.”

“As soon as I forget one word, I’m done.”

As a language teacher, I’ve heard those and similar sentences from my students time and time again. And as a language learner, I’ve experienced (and, to some extent, keep experiencing) similar difficulties, too.

Speaking a language is like an emergent property: slightly more than the sum of its parts. You learn the grammar, the words, the structures, but when it’s time to put it all together…well, it’s not easy.

When we say something in our mother tongue, we only think about the content. We don’t waste time choosing and picking every word, unless it’s a particularly complex or sensitive topic. We speak automatically, as if a rough draft were enough for our brains to craft a sensible sentence.

But in our second, third, or fourth language, it takes time to reach this kind of automatism.

Time and repetition.

Because the only way to really stop thinking about every single word is to practice so much we’ll eventually sound natural. You already know that, but most people dramatically underestimate how much repetition is really needed.

Here are five useful activities and exercises you can start doing right away to improve your speaking skills, no matter what your language level is.

If you practice consistently, doing these and/or other activities that get you to talk, you’ll overcome your difficulties. Not in a week. Not in a month. But if you repeat them hundreds of times, eventually you’ll see progress (I know, that’s not sexy, but it works).

The core of this activity is to answer questions about yourself. You can start with the basics (your name, where you live, your family and job, your hobbies…) and add more complex details over time, as your language level improves: the most important experience you’ve ever lived, your hopes and dreams, your deepest fears, the hardest obstacle you’ve ever overcome…You can come up with questions or use ChatGPT to generate more.

What’s important is that those questions have to be relevant to you. Learners often have trouble speaking, not (only) because of the language, but because they don’t know what to say. This particularly occurs with learners who are preparing for a language exam and need to craft monologues about renewable energies or the role of technology in modern life.

If you don’t care about that stuff, don’t talk about it (unless you have to take the exam). Try to interview yourself about things that matter to you. Talk in the mirror about your childhood best friend and why your friendship went south, or about that punk-rock band that changed your life. Talk in the mirror about the colleague you can’t stand or the family trauma you’re fighting with. Let it get personal.

And don’t just do it once. Just because you already answered a question doesn’t mean it’s done. If it matters to you, it won’t be hard to think about it again, two weeks or two months after. The more your proficiency increases, the more complex and detailed your answers will be.

This activity is useful not only because you’ll practice speaking, but because by talking extensively about your life, you’ll inevitably use words that are relevant to your experiences again and again. This way, when you finally get in a real conversation, you won’t have to stop and look for an important word to describe your job, house, or family. Because you’ve practiced before.

This is an activity I often use in my language classes. I’ll look up pictures online, using a keyword such as “supermarket”, “park”, “festival” or whatever the context I’m interested in, and ask my students to describe it.

This exercise can be done at any language level. If you’re a beginner, you can focus on describing things you know how to talk about: the characters in the picture, their look, their clothes, the weather (if it’s an outdoor picture), and so on. You can use action verbs to describe what they’re doing.

If you’re an intermediate or advanced learner, things get even more interesting. The picture can be a starting point to create a story. What’s the relationship between the characters? What do their facial expressions say? Maybe you’re looking at the pic of a family doing grocery shopping in a mall, but you can tell the older kid isn’t really happy to be there, while the parents look like they just had a fight…

Or you can put the picture in relation to your own experience. Do you often go for a run in the park like those guys? Maybe the picture elicits a particular memory, or you have strong opinions about what you see (children playing on their smartphones, overtourism…).

Any picture works, as long as it gets you talking. And when you think you’re done, don’t move on to the next one immediately. Some of the best ideas only come when you force yourself to look a bit longer and search for something to say.

Humans love stories. A big part of our conversations is made up of stories: “Do you know what happened yesterday in the office?” or “Hey, you really haven’t seen Stranger Things? Let me tell you all about it”.

No matter if real or fictional, stories are a great speaking practice tool. If you’re a beginner, you can start with simpler stories and only outline the plot and characters. But as your proficiency grows, you can add details: what you like or don’t like about the characters, what the big plot twist is, what you expected to happen but didn’t…

Once again, this activity works best if those stories are relevant to you. If you’re anything like most language learners, you, too, started keeping a journal in your target language at some point, and then stopped doing it because all you wrote was something along the lines of: “Got up. Went to work. Had lunch. Work again. Watched TV” and that made you feel awful not just about your language skills, but about your daily routine.

You don’t have to talk about your day when there are far more interesting stories to be told. Talk to yourself about your best friend’s recent drama or your favourite TV show, and don’t let the complexity of it scare you. Start with the basics, and in time, you’ll be able to spill the tea in at least two languages!

If you’ve read this far, you’re probably thinking: “Yeah, all good, but if I try to do those things, I’ll stumble onto words I don’t know, and I’ll get stuck.”

That’s what this activity is about.

Whenever you come across a word or whole sentence you don’t know how to formulate in your target language, don’t let it stop you. Rather, just say it in your mother tongue, note it down, and move forward. Even if half of what you say is in your mother language, keep going. You don’t want to break your flow.

But after you’re done talking, look down at your notes: here’s where you have some work to do.

First of all, split the words and sentences you couldn’t formulate in your target language into two columns.

On the left, all those that you are supposed to be able to say, but just forgot (the other day, I just forgot how to say “girlfriend” in German: hardly a new word).

On the right, all the words and sentences you actually don’t know how to say (if you’ve never said “corkscrew” or “unfamiliar” in French or Spanish before, it’s hard to just come up with it).

Let’s start with the words on the left. First of all, be patient: temporarily forgetting words you know is perfectly normal. Look the word up again, add it to your flashcard collection if you have one, and just have faith. Once you’ve looked it up enough times, it’ll stick.

Then, look up the words on the right (better to look up single words than whole sentences, and better to use a dictionary than AI) and note them down for the next time you’ll have to use them.

But it’s not over! Actually, here comes the most important part. Now go over the words in both the lists again, and try to replace them with a synonym or a simple expression you can use to express the same thing.

That’s a crucial competence when speaking a foreign language. No matter how good you are, it’s always possible that one or two words will slip. And when that happens in a real conversation, the best thing you can do is replace them. That doesn’t interrupt the flow of speech and allows you to get the message across. Language learners often feel they’ll “fail” at speaking if they don’t know all the words, and this makes them insecure.

When I blacked out on the German word for “girlfriend” last week, I just said: “The person I had a relationship with.” If you don’t know how to say “corkscrew,” try this: “The thing we use to open bottles.” And if “unfamiliar” is a difficult word, you can always say: “unknown” or “not known”, or even “new”.

The point is not to avoid looking up words (in fact, that’s the only way to discover and learn new ones!) but to be aware that you can overcome the obstacle if you forget one. This builds confidence and helps a lot in real-life contexts.

The last one is the most difficult, time-consuming, and heart-wrenching exercise, but unfortunately, it’s also the most effective, so much so that I’ve devoted an entire story to it.

The process is simple to break down: record yourself as you speak out loud. Listen to the recording. Find and correct your mistakes.

The catch: at first, you’ll have to overcome the natural embarrassment you’ll experience when listening to your own voice while you stutter and hesitate in a foreign language. However, if you stay consistent and do it over time, this will be even more satisfying as you start to notice obvious progress (and you will).

Another problem is that it takes a lot of time. You listen carefully, stop every time you’re not sure if something you said was right, check it online (I used ChatGPT, feeding it the whole sentence and asking to correct it), understand what was wrong and why…Argh.

Since it’s so time-consuming, I’d suggest not doing it all the time. For instance, if you answer five questions aloud or describe three pictures, only record one of them. Or even better, record all of them, but then only actually analyse the one you feel the most insecure about.

Why is it so powerful? Because you’re forced to notice your own mistakes and correct them. You’ll notice that you always get a certain grammar structure wrong, so you’ll go and review it. You’ll notice that the same thing is wrong sometimes, and right other times, and you’ll research why that happens. You’ll find out tens of surprising facts that you overlooked during your study. You’ll work on grammar in action, not textbook exercises.

You’ll develop the ability to think critically about how you use the language, not by obsessing over mistakes, but by learning how to correct them and stop making them.

These are only five among many possible activities. I’ve chosen these because they’re easy to perform even for those language learners who don’t live in a country where their target language is spoken, aren’t enrolled in language courses or taking individual language lessons, and don’t have other people to talk to in their target language.

If you have the time, money, and the chance, I’d say the most time-effective and useful practice you can do is to join a conversation group, so that you not only practice speaking with other learners of different levels, but also get precious feedback on your mistakes and difficulties without having to do the hard work of correcting yourself on your own.

If you’re already taking lessons or using the target language every day, however, these activities can still be a useful addition to your study routine.

I’d love to know if you’ll try them and what other instruments are helping you progress in your learning journey. Good luck!