Speak English: verbs speak, tell, say, talk. My tongue is my enemy

In the English language, there are pairs, triplets, and sometimes entire groups of words that can be combined into one semantic family. They have similar meanings, but still have limitations in use. In this article we will talk about verbs, the meaning of which in one way or another is “to speak, to say.”

There are four English verbs that can be translated as “to speak, to say”:

He said that he would come back in June. - He said he would return in June.(to say)

Can you tell me what should I do? -Can you tell me what to do?(to tell)

You need to talk. - You should talk.(to talk)

Can you speak louder? -Can you speak louder?(to speak)

These four words are not interchangeable shades of the same Russian “to speak”. There are not only differences in meaning, but also grammatical restrictions.

Verb to Say in English

The verb is translated into Russian as speak, tell, say out loud, report.
In English it is associated with the transfer of some information, so the verb is often to say can be found in indirect speech:

Oliver says that he likes to dance. - Oliver says he loves to dance.

But indirect speech is by no means a prerequisite for using this verb in an English sentence. We repeat that to say has the meaning say something. We can use it to express our thoughts:

Kate Moss didn't say that at all. - Kate Moss didn’t say anything like that at all.

What is Lessy trying to say? -What is Lassie trying to say?

Verb to Tell in English

Verb to tell very close in value to the previous one. In the dictionary you can find its meaning - tell, talk, report:

Tell me what do you really think about him. - Tell me what you really think about him.

A distinctive characteristic of this verb in the meaning of “tell” is the obligatory indication of the person to whom this information is transmitted, that is, “tell anyone”:

Phoeby told me that she would not come to the party. - Phoebe told me that she won't come to the party.(told me)

I will tell you the details later. “I’ll tell you all the details later.”(tell you)

English verb to tell often used in orders or urgent requests, meaning “to order something to be done, to ask something to be done.” In this case, it requires after itself a semantic verb in the initial form with a particle to:

Tell him to get out of here. - Tell him to get out of here.

I'll tell him to help Johnny. - I'll ask him to help Johnny.

There are some exceptions that exempt the verb to tell from obligatory addition (say anyone). They are fixed expressions that need to be remembered. Here are some of them:

tell a lie - to lie, to tell a lie
tell the truth - tell the truth
tell the time - say what time it is
tell the future - predict the future

The verb to speak in English

Verb to speak can be translated into Russian as expressing oneself, speaking. This word implies the physical and mental ability of a person to perform speech acts:

Mary doesn't speak yet. She's only one. - Mary doesn't speak yet. She is only one year old.

Speak! It’s the only opportunity to change the game. - Speak up! This is the only opportunity to replay everything.

There are a number of circumstances in which the use of this English verb will be preferable, and sometimes mandatory:

speak a foreign language

In this kind of sentences, only the verb to speak is used:

Does your wife speak French? - Does your wife speak French?

public performance

You probably know the noun speech- speech. It is closely related to precisely this meaning of the English verb “to speak”:

My grandmamma loves to speak in public. - My grandma loves speaking in front of an audience.

when talking to someone about something

In this case, we are already faced with prepositions of control, each of which will give the verb to speak specific shade:

I’ll speak to him about his behavior. - I'll talk to him about his behavior.(speak to... about...)

The facts speak for themselves. - The facts speak for themselves.(speak for)

The verb to talk in English

This English verb means “to chat,” “to talk,” “to discuss something.” This verb has a more informal connotation compared to to speak and is practically synonymous with it. To talk can often be found in colloquial speech:

Mary doesn't talk yet. She's one year old. = Mary doesn’t speak yet. She's only one. - Mary isn't talking yet. She is only one year old.

Also verb to talk preferably used to mean “discuss something”:

Please, don’t talk shop at the party. Let's have some fun. - Please don't start talking about work at the party. Let's have fun.

There are a couple of great English idioms with the verb talk that will be useful to you in communication:

to talk nineteen to the dozen - talk excitedly, without stopping

to talk nonesense - talk nonsense

So, you have learned about the four main ways to “speak” in English. Let's summarize: speak = talk with a hint of greater informality, tell is always used with someone to whom we are saying something, say is the best way to convey your message without “additional requirements”.

We wish you to speak English a lot and correctly and always with pleasure!

Victoria Tetkina

Imagine the situation: you are speaking at some seminar with a report in your native language. You are pronouncing the next sentence of your stunning speech, when suddenly a corrosive listener asks a question:

– Tell me, why did you use the participial phrase now?

- I'm sorry, what?

- Participial turnover. You just said, “I learned important things from studying this study.” Why did you use the adverbial phrase?

– Did I make some mistake?

- Nooooo, that's right. Just explain your choice of this speech structure?

WTF! What design? What are you talking about, mister? I’m just saying as I’m used to, as I can, as I learned in childhood/school/university. It’s like a centipede thinking about the correctness of its movements - it simply won’t be able to walk.

The same skill of correctly constructing sentences, phrases and choosing the right words should develop when learning a foreign language.

You don’t need to clearly remember all the rules - you need to develop an intuitive ability to speak correctly (like the ability to ride a bicycle).

By the way, sports are a great comparison. Learning a language is not about absorbing knowledge, but rather about sports training. Especially in English, where the order of words is unchanged, there is almost no inflection - that is, everything is strict and clear. Repeat the correct order and choice of words 1000 times - the skill will remain forever (once you learn how to pedal, you will never unlearn it).

Learning to “turn the pedals”

Do you remember how you learned to speak your native language in early childhood? You were just repeating after the adults! Sometimes they corrected you, and you remembered where the mistake was. The main principle was imitation and reproduction of the correct patterns.

This principle - “imitate-apply-repeat” is the basis, which teaches you to subconsciously use this or that rule depending on the context. There are 40 rules in total, which covers all basic English grammar.

The simulator asks you to assemble phrases from the given words in a strict order. Thousands of “live” examples are never repeated, so that you remember not specific examples, but the principle itself (straight into the subconscious!). As a result of constant training, you will intuitively use the correct structures.

“Living” means not invented by teachers and methodologists (such examples are very good for the first acquaintance with the rules and structures, but give in to living speech). Examples for the simulator are selected from modern scientific publications, works of art and videos. In this way, linguistic intuition and free spontaneous speech develop.

We learned, sat down and went

By the way, let's return to our fictional conference. We use gerunds when we want to describe an additional action to the main one. It must be performed by the same subject as the main one, otherwise there will be a grammatical error (classic example: walking past the house, my hat flew off). But why all these theoretical difficulties if we simply speak, write and think correctly in our native language.

So why don't you still speak English? Because knowing the rules does not give practical skill. Maybe it's time to develop it?

English is studied in our schools for 6, and sometimes even 10 years. But for some reason, “asking for coffee” still doesn’t work out coherently. In an effort to teach their children foreign languages, parents try at any cost to place their children in “English” schools, gymnasiums, lyceums and other “advanced” educational institutions. This, of course, produces results. The number of myopic, scoliotic and other inadequately educated children is growing rapidly. But the resulting level of language proficiency is still not able to justify such sacrifices. In a word, things are still there...

Why is everything so gloomy? Are foreign languages, and English in particular, really that difficult to master? Or is it something else? Let's try to figure it out.

There is such a country - Switzerland. It is famous not only for Swiss watches and banks, but also for the number of official languages. There are four of them there. Moreover, English is not one of them. Accordingly, at least one of the state languages (from those that the student does not speak) plus English is studied in schools. So, in some way incomprehensible to Russian pedagogical science, students of ordinary (not “advanced”, etc.) schools manage to successfully learn two (or even three) languages and speak them quite normally. Things are not much worse in other European countries. The inability to speak English after six years of study is perplexing to most Europeans. If you tell them the number of teaching hours allocated to a foreign language in our schools, bewilderment usually turns into confusion and doubts about the correct understanding of the interlocutor.

According to Timofey Glukhenky, general director of the Alkor translation agency, the main reason for the difficulties with learning English in Russia is not the complexity of this language as such, nor the inability of Russians (Ukrainians, Tatars, Chuvash, etc.) to foreign languages . The reason lies in the “peculiarities of national teaching”, which not only do not ensure the acquisition of oral speech skills in an acceptable time, but also harm the psyche of students. “It seems to me that if you study your native language using the same methods as a foreign language, this will almost certainly lead to mass stuttering,” writes Timofey on his website www.alcor-center.ru.

1) The task of “giving a speech” is often simply not set in Russian schools. If it were otherwise, our schoolchildren would spend most of their time practicing speaking, rather than translating with a dictionary. In general, judging by the number of useful skills our graduates have, it seems that the main task of the school is to provide work for a certain part of the population.

2) Inadequately theorized English grammar course. Textbooks and teaching in general are oversaturated with specific terminology and logical constructs. As a result, students develop any skills other than speaking and writing. The latter is well known to people involved in the translation business. Almost all domestic translation agencies have the same problem - the problem of finding people who can perform a normal written translation, at least from English into Russian. This applies to both technical translation and the translation of legal, medical and literary texts. What is needed here is skill, not knowledge of the rules, and that is precisely what is missing. Almost any engineer is capable of performing technical translation of acceptable quality in the countries of Western Europe, Japan and even China, unlike in the territory of the Union of Troubled States. The situation is even worse with consecutive translation; here there is absolutely no need for foreign languages, again in contrast to backward Europe with its poor education.

3) Repressive teaching methods in general. The favorite pastime of domestic English teachers is pulling students back after every mistake, nitpicking about pronunciation and other similar excesses. I still remember the translation department of the university in one of the regional centers of the Volga region. This faculty, which was considered prestigious, enrolled people who already spoke English quite fluently, who mastered it with tutors, who came from schools with in-depth study of a foreign language, etc. After studying for two years, even such students began to complain about “stumbling” due to constant corrections and criticism from teachers. What difference does it make with what pronunciation a person pronounces “the table” if he is not able to speak normally at all!

4) Removal of psychomotor processes related to oral speech into areas of the psyche that do not correspond to them. “First, let’s remember the rules, then we’ll remember the words, then we’ll arrange the words in accordance with the rules...” This is the real scourge of our school graduates. What is normally done by one single speech center is “smeared” throughout the head, and the mentioned center here plays only a secondary role. With such a cunning thought process around every sentence, only an extremely exceptional person would be able to speak English. In addition, there is another problem that arises from our “educational technologies” - the fear of oral speech as such. But in children, for example, a direct development of a speech reflex occurs, without the involvement of rational thinking. Adults with a normal psyche, by the way, in this regard are not much different from children, but such adults in Russia are a species that is disappearing for obvious reasons.

How to learn English without health consequences? The ideal option is to keep teachers who work using Soviet methods away from you. Use normal textbooks, preferably foreign authors. This is due to the fact that in the West they simply will not buy a textbook that is abstruse and incomprehensible to students, especially since they cannot oblige parents to do so. You will not believe that many grammar textbooks and explanatory dictionaries published in England are written with a limit on the number of words used in order to eliminate the need to translate them with a dictionary and the occurrence of problems with reading comprehension. Compare this approach with “infinitive-predicative phrases”, “long tenses” and other horrors of Russian linguistics. And also - in order to learn to speak, you need to speak, and speak often. Remember the books about Vladimir Ilyich’s childhood! After all, everything new is a well-forgotten old.

Now I want to discuss with you the topic of why many of you, knowing English, cannot speak it.
Indeed, you studied English first at school and then at college. You have a good knowledge of English grammar and understand sentence structure. In addition, you have a rich vocabulary of English words. But you cannot speak English. Why does it happen that you freely read an article in a magazine in English with a full understanding of what is written there, you understand quite well what your interlocutor is talking about in English, but it is quite difficult for you to answer him.

And for this you need to understand such concepts as “active vocabulary” and “passive vocabulary”.
Passive vocabulary in the English language is when you, with a deep knowledge of grammar, without any difficulties, translate speech you hear or texts you read, but cannot speak. And this happens because you did not have the opportunity to use your knowledge in practice. You just don't have speaking skills, You had no one to talk to. Knowledge and vocabulary accumulate in you, like in a piggy bank, but you have not had the opportunity to use them in practice.
An active vocabulary of the English language is when your knowledge is freely used in the conversation. You speak without fear, without any difficulty.
So why is it that most people who have a large vocabulary of English words still cannot speak? How to learn to take the acquired knowledge from your own piggy bank and use it in practice?
To do this, you need to try to somehow imitate some situations. Go to the mirror and try to talk to your own reflection. Set up a one-man show.

Imagine that you are sitting in a restaurant, a waiter comes up to you and brings you a menu. Try ordering something. And then imagine that the waiter asked you a clarifying question. Try to answer it. Or, for example, you came to the store and are trying to buy this or that thing. For example, you need gloves. Try to explain which ones exactly. The seller always
will ask about size, color, material. And here you, anticipating these questions, try yourself to describe in detail what you want to purchase.
But I want to tell you, that live communication will not replace a single mirror image. The best thing that can happen at this stage is qualified English teacher, who will point out to you all the errors in your pronunciation, correct or help you correctly construct the structure of any sentence. The English language is an English language with many nuances in the construction of sentences. The English teacher will act as a grateful listener, and then enter into a conversation and you will be able to conduct a dialogue unnoticed.

Surely this situation has happened to you: feeling nervous when communicating with your interlocutor, you were unable to say what you wanted. Then, being in a calm environment, you scolded yourself, because your incompetence was by no means the result of poor preparation or ignorance. What was it? A common fear of speaking English. Let's see why it occurs and how to get rid of it.

Stop being silent! It's time to overcome your fear of speaking English. So-called " Dog syndrome“- a psychological barrier that arises in a person when communicating in a foreign language, when he understands everything, but at the same time cannot say anything.

It’s not so easy to get rid of this “I understand, but I don’t say.” Let's try to figure out what prevents us from communicating freely in English?

Awkward silence or game of silence

To cope with the problem, it is important to know why some English language learners cannot speak English. There are several main reasons for this isolation:

During classes with a teacher, you are given time to think about the answer to a question. In real life, this time does not exist or is very short. And then the screeching voice of panic" I do not know anything” begins to drown out the reasonable voice of reason.
Fear of making a mistake sometimes it becomes the cause of all troubles. Students are such perfectionists that the mere thought of making a mistake and seemingly making themselves look stupid seems unacceptable. But it’s from mistakes that we learn! To foreigners, your very ability to speak their language seems amazing, because it is not your native language. They will always make allowances for the fact that you are studying, because they cannot even imagine what it is like to learn Russian!
Despite the fact that the student often encounters the English language in class and in everyday life, fear can still appear. In this case, the problem is not the number of mistakes the speaker makes. Some difficulties are associated with the inability express your thoughts concisely in English as if you were speaking your native language. Accordingly, a person chooses awkward silence as the most comfortable way out of the situation. There is a good expression:
Never be afraid to fail. Failure is only a stepping stone to improvement.
Never be afraid to fail. Failure is just another step on the path to improvement.
A language learner cannot feel comfortable in a conversation in English if he has not made an effort to pronounce at least a few phrases. At the very beginning, everyone tries on the role of a “dog”.
Conveying the meaning of your words to your interlocutor can be both an excellent motivation and a stumbling block. It should be noted here that the correct strategy is perseverance. Silence must be seen as an undesirable result that must be avoided.

Don't despair, use the right approach and you will succeed! However, do not underestimate the “silent dogs”. After all, such students are distinguished by excellent mastery of the material and may ultimately surprise themselves: the role of a passive observer in language learning has its own effectiveness.

The most important questions: how to find a suitable learning model, ignore your awkwardness, get away from self-esteem and enjoy the process of communicating in English? This cannot be done without the help of experts.

Some people associate learning English through the experience of a school or university program. We all remember illogical grammar, preparing for tests, cramming, performing technical exercises, reading texts that dull the perception of the Soviet legacy. This is in no way a criticism. Soviet philology is still considered one of the best, even if it lacked a communicative approach. But as a result, the “dog syndrome” rears its head just at the moment when it is necessary in a real life situation. In the article "" we gave 15 working techniques that will help you get rid of the difficulties of communicating in English.

How to overcome the fear of speaking English

How to overcome the fear of speaking English? The answer is simple: practice communicative technique, for example with .

In conducting classes, it is assumed that successful language learning is achieved through immersion in real life situations. The student is involved in a conversation where his personal interest is present, rather than abstract topics being discussed. In this way, the speaker uses the natural techniques necessary to acquire speaking skills that actually help in using the language.

During the lesson, interactive exercises are designed to recreate as accurately as possible the life situation in which the student may find himself. The level of knowledge is taken into account. If we are talking about an average level of English proficiency, you can talk to native speaker teacher to overcome fear.

Regular personal lessons with our teachers will allow you to always be on top! As a result, you will have direct immersion in the language environment. The emphasis is on training direct speaking skills, gaining self-confidence, and using authentic materials to improve speaking competence and increase vocabulary. The latter presupposes the possession of a certain vocabulary necessary for adequate interaction, so that situations do not arise when you are thinking about translating a particular word, thereby losing the thread of the story. This lexical threshold could be 1600-1700 word families (care, careful, careless, carefree, uncaring, carer), which would be approximately 6000 frequently used words.

Not a bad “challenge”? Are you ready to overcome your fear of speaking English? Then join us! Good luck!

You can overcome your fear and finally start speaking English in ours - one lesson costs 300 rubles.