Stop Looking for a Speaking Partner! Do This Instead

You're learning English because you want to improve your English speaking skill. At the end of the day, you want to speak fluently. Isn't that your goal? So to do that, you need to speak more often, which means you need to find a speaking partner, right? And this is one of the top comments I receive on my YouTube channel. How to find a speaking partner. But I want to challenge you a little bit. Do you really need a speaking partner from day one? Or another question. Is having a speaking partner the best way to improve your speaking? In this video, I want to challenge that and change your mindset. You do not need a speaking partner to start improving your speaking skill. Don't get me wrong. I am not saying that you do not need to talk to other people. In fact, you do, but not from day one. So what should I do from day one? If you want to be more fluent, there are three things you need to do. Number one is to speak a lot more. Number two is to get feedback on your mistakes. And number three is to work on real conversations with real people. Let's start with the first one. What is the secret to speaking fluently? There is no secret. You need to speak more often. One of the academics in the English language training field that I admire a lot is Jack C. Richards, a full professor in the field of English learning. He has written a series of great books on English speaking, one of which is Speak Now from 1 to 4. On the back cover of Speak Now, there's a quote by Jack C. Richards himself. Here's the quote. Time spent on speaking tasks is the single most important factor in developing confident and fluent speaking. In other words, what he is trying to say is if you want to speak better, you need to speak more. And it really makes sense. I mean, you can apply this to everything. If you want to swim better, you need to swim more. If you want to play the guitar better, you need to play the guitar more often, right? And it's the same thing with speaking. Now, here's the confusion. When you want to speak a lot, the first thing people start looking for is a speaking partner. Hey, Jack, will you be my speaking partner? Yo, Jesse, can I speak English with you? Where do I find a speaking partner? It's so difficult finding a speaking partner. I can't find one, so I'm not going to improve my speaking. No, you do not need a speaking partner for the first step. In fact, having a speaking partner makes it worse. Let me tell you what to do. You do not need anyone. It's just you and technology. The first thing I want you to do is to talk about your day out loud. Just try to narrate your daily life, what you're doing or what you're going to do next or what you did before. Talk to yourself out loud. Ah, this armchair is so comfortable. Oh, my God. Oh, look at that. Nice. That's a beautiful picture. I probably should add another photo here. Yeah. The next thing I want you to do is shadowing. And this is a fantastic technique to get you started. Find a video of someone you really like. Then play the video or the audio file. Listen carefully. Pause. Repeat. Play. Listen. Pause. Repeat. Let me show you. Three years ago, in our state of Wisconsin, back in the United States, a man went into a Sikh temple. And this is a fantastic activity because not only does this warm up your speaking muscles and engage your speaking muscles, it also trains your ear with different accents and improves your pronunciation. Shadowing is a fantastic technique. The next one was one of my favorite things to do when I was growing up and trying to improve my English fluency and accent. And that is you pick a topic and then you take your phone and you start recording yourself talking about that topic for two minutes. It doesn't matter if you make mistakes. It doesn't matter if you hesitate a lot. It doesn't matter if you say a lot. That's fine because you are going to listen to that audio file. So pick a topic. For example, your favorite food or your last holiday. Then on your phone, click record and start talking. Yes, my favorite food is a traditional Italian food from the south of Italy, which is called... I don't even know what that is called. But that's fine. Even if you forget what you're saying, even if you hesitate, even if you make mistakes or even if you don't find the right words, that's fine. Record for two minutes, play, listen to yourself and take notes on what you need to improve. Number four is fantastic. You need to have a conversation with yourself and you are going to cover both parts of the conversation. Hey, it's nice to meet you. My name is Matty. Oh, hey, Matty. I'm Jack. Nice to meet you. Where are you from? I'm from Milan, Italy. And you? I'm from Boston. Actually, I'm a student. How about you? I'm a mechanical engineer. Now, remember the first thing you needed to do to speak a lot more? These four methods, these four techniques, they cost you nothing. Zero, absolutely zero. You don't need a speaking partner. You basically don't need anything apart from your phone. But they give you a lot of speaking opportunities and speaking time. So that solves the first problem. You need to speak a lot without needing a speaking partner. But what's the second one? Getting feedback on your mistakes. If you only talk to yourself, if you do shadowing, if you listen to your own audio, or if you have an imaginary conversation with yourself, nobody's going to fix your mistakes. So you're going to need what? A teacher or a speaking partner? None. You can use AI. The thing is, AI is even better than a human partner in this case. Why? Because if you're talking to your friend or to someone who's a stranger, they might not be willing to fix your mistakes. They may be very nice to you, or they may be very shy, or they may not have the perfect knowledge to help you. So if you're talking to AI, AI doesn't care. And AI is very accurate when it comes to grammar and language in general. So working with AI for your mistakes is even better because it's also available 24-7, right? You just need to turn on your laptop, your computer, or your phone, open Gemini or ChatGPT or Cloud, and start talking or start asking for your mistakes. It can even be your speaking partner. Hi, help me improve my English speaking. Of course, I'd be happy to help. What kind of practice are you looking for? Like conversational flow, pronunciation, grammar, or maybe something else? And there are many different tools. You can use ChatGPT, you can use Gemini, you can use Cloud, or you can use PyAI, which is an emotionally intelligent speaking partner. It's very cool. Check their website. But apart from all these tools, we at POC English have built a specific particular AI tool that helps you improve your speaking skill. And it's specifically designed for English students. This is something we have built for the members of the POC English Academy. The way it works is you just click Start, click Allow so it has access to your microphone, and then push the button and say, Hello, I want to improve my English. Hi, nice to meet you. What do you do in the morning? In the morning, I wake up and have a cup of coffee. Nice. Do you eat breakfast? Yes, usually jam and peanut butter sandwich. Yum. Do you like tea too? Or just coffee? What it does is it speaks with you. And at the end of the conversation, it gives you full feedback on all the mistakes you made and how to improve them. So if you want to try it, you need to become a member of the POC English Academy by clicking on the link above this video or scanning this QR code. Okay, so the first step was to speak more. And the second was to get feedback on your mistakes. Now you are ready for the third, probably one of the most important steps, talking to real people. And this is when you need other people to join you. You need to have a speaking partner. You need to have a couple of people, a community of people to talk to and to have conversations. So you see, this came as the third step, not the first step. Why? Because now is the time to actually connect with people because you have built the confidence speaking to yourself or with AI. You have improved your English by asking AI for feedback on your mistakes. And now it is time to work on something else. What? Real conversations. And pay attention to this. Speaking and conversation. These are two different things. You can speak and you can practice speaking when you're alone. You can speak with AI. But if you want to have a conversation with a real person, it is not just English. Emotions are involved. Feelings are involved. You need to read other people's reactions, facial expressions. You may get interrupted. Or because you're nervous, your heart may start beating faster. It may start racing. You may need to take a deep breath. You may start sweating. See, when you're talking to real people, when you're having real conversations, things are different. Your brain is not just focusing on the language part of words, grammar, collocations, phrases. It is also dealing with the social part of reading in between the lines, understanding sarcasm, reading reactions, facial expressions, dealing with the nerves. And so now that you have worked on the language part, it is time to combine it with the social skills part. Okay, now we get to your question. How can I find a speaking partner? First of all, find a speaking partner when you've reached the third stage, when you've done the solo study part, when you've done the feedback from AI part. Now it is time to find people. And there are a couple of ways you can do that. You can join a language school in your neighborhood or in your area. Though the problem is, when you go to a physical school in your neighborhood, you will see people from your neighborhood, right? Not very international people. All of you will share the same language. You can join online English classes, which are better, in my opinion, because you can find people from different parts of the world. And one of the things you can do is joining the POC English Academy, where we have built a fabulous, fantastic English-speaking community of more than 1,000 students who are all improving their English together. And you can be a member of this community, where students talk to each other daily. They go to meeting rooms. They have Zoom live speaking sessions with our teachers. You can join them. And again, if you want to do that, QR code or the link. I hope you've enjoyed this lesson. Now, I have a question. Of the three stages we discussed, solo practice, AI feedback, or having real conversations, where exactly are you? Are you at the first step and you need to practice more? Are you at the second step and you need to improve your grammar and accuracy? Or are you at the third step? You've already covered everything and you just need to speak with real people. Let me know in the comments and see you soon. Bye.