Talking to Yourself in English: The Most Underrated Speaking Practice Available
Free. Private. Available anywhere. And more effective than most people realise.
There’s a form of English speaking practice that requires no partner, no booking, no app, no subscription, and no courage. You can do it in your kitchen, on a walk, in the shower, in your car. Nobody needs to know you’re doing it. Nobody is judging you. Nobody is waiting for you to finish your sentence.
You just talk. To yourself. In English.
It sounds odd. Maybe a little eccentric. But as a way to start building the bridge between understanding English and producing it, talking to yourself might be the most powerful tool nobody takes seriously.
Why it works
The gap that most learners struggle with is the gap between passive knowledge and active production. You know the words. You’ve read them, heard them, understood them in context hundreds of times. But when it’s time to produce them, to pull them out of storage and push them through your mouth in real time, something stalls. The word is there but it won’t come. The sentence forms in your head but falls apart before it reaches your lips.
This gap exists because comprehension and production use different pathways in the brain. Understanding a word when you read it is one skill. Retrieving that same word from memory, assembling it into a sentence, and physically producing it with your mouth is a different skill. And like any skill, it needs practice.
Talking to yourself is production practice in its purest form. Every sentence you say aloud in English, even to an empty room, is your brain walking the pathway from thought to speech. The retrieval is real. The sentence construction is real. The physical act of moving your mouth, tongue, and breath to produce English sounds is real. The practice counts, whether or not anyone is listening.
Why it’s perfect for learners who aren’t ready to speak to people
For many learners, the barrier to speaking isn’t ability. It’s anxiety. The thought of sitting across from another person and producing imperfect English, with pauses and mistakes and the other person watching, is enough to postpone speaking practice indefinitely.
Talking to yourself removes every element of that anxiety. There’s no audience. No judgment. No time pressure. No awkward silences. No fear of embarrassment. You can pause for ten seconds to find a word and nobody is waiting. You can say a sentence badly, try it again, say it differently, and nobody noticed the first attempt.
This makes it the perfect entry point for learners in the silent period or for anyone who feels they’re not ready for real conversation. You’re not replacing conversation. You’re warming up for it. Getting the mouth moving. Building the retrieval pathways. Developing a basic comfort with the physical act of producing English. So that when you do eventually sit down with a real person, it’s not the first time your mouth has done this work.
What to actually say
The most common question about talking to yourself is: what do I talk about? The answer is simpler than you’d expect.
Narrate what you’re doing. “I’m making coffee. I need to find the milk. The kettle is boiling. I think I’ll have toast too.” This sounds mundane. It is mundane. It’s also practising exactly the kind of everyday English that makes up most real conversation. The vocabulary of daily life, the present tense, the simple constructions that form the backbone of spoken English.
Describe what you see. On a walk: “There’s a dog over there. It looks like a labrador. The sky is getting cloudy. I think it might rain later.” On a bus: “The woman next to me is reading something on her phone. The bus is quite full today.” You’re practising observation vocabulary and present-tense description, which is more useful than it sounds.
Replay conversations. Think about a conversation you had today, in your native language, and replay it in English. What did your colleague say? How did you respond? What would you have said in English? This is particularly valuable because it connects English to your actual life rather than to abstract exercises.
Think through decisions. “Should I cook tonight or order something? I’ve got some chicken in the fridge. I could make a stir fry. But I’m quite tired. Maybe I’ll just order a pizza.” Internal debate in English practises reasoning vocabulary, conditionals, and the kind of thinking-aloud that real conversation is full of.
Express opinions. “I watched a documentary last night about ocean pollution. I thought it was well made. The part about plastic in the Pacific was really depressing. I think governments need to do more.” This is the kind of English you’d use in a real conversation with a friend or a conversation partner, and practising it alone means the words are warmer and more available when you need them with another person.
Tell stories. Describe something that happened to you today. Yesterday. Last week. Tell it in English, start to finish, as if you were telling a friend. Storytelling is one of the most complex and rewarding speaking skills, and doing it alone lets you practise the sequencing, the tense shifts, and the pacing without any performance pressure.
When and where
The beauty of talking to yourself is that it fits into time that already exists.
In the car. Possibly the best place for it. You’re alone. The engine covers the sound. Nobody can hear you. You can talk for the entire commute without anyone knowing. Some of my students tell me their car has become their private English classroom.
In the shower. Another naturally private moment. Describe your morning routine. Think through your day in English. Practise something you want to say later.
While cooking. Narrate the process. “I’m chopping the onions. Now I need to heat the oil. I’ll add the garlic in a minute.” Cooking is full of sequencing and timing vocabulary that translates directly to other contexts.
On a walk. Describe what you see. Think through something that’s on your mind. If you’re wearing headphones, nobody around you can tell whether you’re on a phone call or talking to yourself.
Before bed. Replay your day in English. “Today I went to work. I had a meeting in the morning that went quite well. At lunch I tried a new café.” A quiet, reflective review that doubles as speaking practice.
You don’t need to set aside dedicated time. You’re layering English production onto activities you’re already doing, the same way we talk about layering listening onto your commute or your morning routine.
How it builds toward real conversation
Talking to yourself does something specific that prepares you for conversation in a way that input alone doesn’t.
It builds retrieval speed. The more often you pull a word from memory and produce it aloud, the faster that retrieval becomes. Words that took three seconds to find become words that take one second, which becomes words that arrive without any conscious search at all. This is the same process that happens in real conversation, just without the pressure.
It builds sentence construction confidence. The more sentences you build aloud, the more comfortable the process feels. You develop a sense of how English sentences are assembled, not from a grammar rule but from the physical experience of producing them. The structures become familiar in your mouth, not just your ear.
It surfaces gaps. When you’re narrating your morning and you can’t find the English word for something, you’ve just discovered a gap. That gap is useful information. It tells you what to notice in your next reading or listening session. The gap primes your brain to pick up the word when it appears in input, which it will.
And it builds a baseline comfort with the act of speaking English. By the time you sit down with a real person for your first conversation session, your mouth has already been producing English for weeks or months. The mechanics are familiar. The retrieval pathways have been walked. The first conversation isn’t the first time you’ve spoken English. It’s just the first time someone else was there to hear it.
The transition to real conversation
At some point, talking to yourself will start to feel limited. You’ll want someone to respond. You’ll want the unpredictability of a real exchange. You’ll want to know whether what you’re producing actually makes sense to another person.
That’s the signal that you’re ready.
Glossika can bridge the gap further by adding structured sentence repetition to your private practice. You hear a real English sentence, you repeat it, and the patterns settle into your mouth through repetition. It adds a layer of guided production between talking to yourself and talking to a real person.
When you’re ready for the real thing, the transition tends to be smoother than expected. The first session might feel awkward for five minutes. By the end you’ll wonder why you waited so long. And if you’d like that first conversation to be with someone who understands the process, who won’t rush you, and who knows that the quiet months of private practice were building something real, you can find me on iTalki and book a session.
But start talking today. In your kitchen. In your car. On your walk. The words need to start moving through your mouth. They’re ready. They’ve been ready for a while.
Thanks for reading. I’m Richard, a New Zealand-based English fluency coach. I help learners find their voice, starting with the private one and building toward the public one.
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