Conversation practice is time spent talking with someone in the language you’re learning, in a real back-and-forth where you don’t know what they’ll say next and have to answer anyway. It’s the part no textbook can do for you, and the part most learners get least of.
Reading a dialogue aloud with a partner or repeating after an audio course both help, but neither asks you to understand something you didn’t expect and reply on the spot, which is the skill you’re after.
What makes it work
Practice that moves you forward tends to have four things going for it. The first is that nobody wrote it in advance. You ask for the train station and get told about roadworks, and the only way to get used to that is to practice where it can happen.
There also has to be a reason to talk. People listen harder and say more when they want something out of the conversation, whether that’s directions, a better price or the end of a story. “Tell me about your hobbies” runs dry in a few minutes because nothing depends on the answer.
Third, the other person adapts to you. A good partner speaks a little above your level and slows down when you lose the thread. When a sentence doesn’t land they say it a different way, which helps far more than repeating it louder.
Last, mistakes don’t turn into a scene. A lot of useful feedback in speech comes as a recast, where the other person says back what you meant, correctly, and carries on. Roy Lyster and Leila Ranta found in a 1997 study of French immersion classrooms that recasts were the correction teachers used most, though students responded to them less often than to other kinds. They aren’t perfect, but they keep you talking. When every error stops the conversation, people start avoiding the sentences they’re unsure of, which are the ones they most need.
The usual options
A tutor
A good tutor adapts to you better than anything else on this list. They hear your accent, remember the mistake you make every week and can explain why it’s wrong. The downsides are practical. Speaking every day at an hourly rate gets expensive, lessons have to be scheduled, and plenty of people freeze as soon as someone is listening, even someone kind. More on that in practicing between tutor lessons.
A language exchange
You trade time with someone who speaks the language you want and is learning yours. It’s free, you hear how people really talk, and sometimes you make a friend. It also takes work. Finding a partner whose level, schedule and time zone fit yours can take weeks, half of every session is in your own language by design, and by the fourth call it’s easy to run out of things to say. Our language exchange page covers a way around the scheduling.
Conversation clubs and meetups
A club is cheap or free, you hear several accents, and it gets you out of the house. In a group of eight, though, you might speak for a few minutes all evening while the most fluent people do the talking, and what’s on offer depends on where you live, although online clubs help there.
AI chat apps
A chatbot is always there and is very good at explaining grammar and correcting your writing. As a speaking partner it tends to talk at its own level, it can’t see when you’re lost, it either corrects everything or nothing, and a chat window gives you no reason to keep talking. There’s more, with prompts that help, in can ChatGPT be your speaking partner?
Talking to yourself
Narrating what you’re doing while you cook, or rehearsing tomorrow’s phone call out loud, costs nothing and shows you quickly which words you’re missing. Nobody surprises or corrects you, though, so you mostly practice what you can already say.
The gap a lot of learners hit
Options that adapt to you and feel like real conversation cost money or need a calendar. The free, always-available ones either have nobody on the other end or somebody who doesn’t need anything from you.
Nerves cut across all of it. Elaine Horwitz, Michael Horwitz and Joann Cope described foreign language anxiety in 1986, and speaking in front of other people sits near the center of what they described. Many learners end up with one hour a week with a person, nothing in between, and a chatbot they stopped opening after two weeks.
Conversation practice inside a game
One more option is a game built for conversation. On mossyrune there are 3D games in the browser where you walk around and talk to characters in the language you’re learning, by voice or by typing, and what you say decides what happens. In the dungeon you need an old prisoner, a nervous merchant, a dramatic ghost and a bored guard to help you escape, either by bribing the guard or by working out a three-number combination. In the bomb game you have until the timer runs out to act on the commander’s briefing, an informant’s tip and a professor’s disarm code. The reason to talk comes built in, since the door stays shut until someone understands you.
A few tools line up with the conditions above.
- Recasts. On beginner, when you say something clumsily, the character says it back correctly and carries on. There’s no list of corrections or grammar score, and the game judges what you meant rather than your exact wording.
- Pace control. You can slow any line to 0.5× or speed it up to 2×, and replay any turn as often as you like.
- Hints you control. You can play with no help at all or turn on word translations on tap, keyword hints, full-sentence translations, or an interpreter with grammar notes and reply suggestions. Hint tokens ask a character to say it again more simply.
- Crosstalk. You can answer in a language you already know and the character replies in the one you’re learning. It’s on by default on beginner and intermediate and off by default on advanced, where you can switch it on.
- Notes. Save any word or sentence mid-scene. Every playthrough also goes to your notes automatically, with the conversation, the translations you peeked at and the hints you used.
The characters also gesture, hold up what they’re talking about and change expression, so the scene carries some of the meaning. We call this approach comprehensible gaming.
The limits are real. The characters are AI, not people. They won’t become your friend, they can’t tell you what people actually say at a party, and they won’t plan lessons around your goals over months the way a tutor does. Use the game for volume and first attempts, and keep a person for the rest.
A simple weekly routine
A week that mixes the options might look like this.
- Two or three short sessions on your own terms. Play a game, or talk yourself through a task out loud. This is where the stumbling goes.
- One session with a person. A tutor lesson, an exchange call or a club night, whichever you can keep up.
- Prepare before that session. Look through your notes and write down what you wanted to say and couldn’t, then bring the list. “How do I say this?” is a better use of a tutor’s hour than warming up.
- Ask a chatbot afterwards. It’s a patient place to ask why a correction was a correction.
- Turn one support down each week. Switch off crosstalk for a game, or play a step up in difficulty, once the current setting feels easy.
If you’re learning Spanish, there’s a page on Spanish conversation practice in the games. The games run in any modern browser, including on a phone. You need a free account, and new accounts get 20 free credits, which is enough for one full game. After that you can take a monthly plan or a credit pack that doesn’t expire, and every game, language and difficulty is open on every plan.